Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is now more important than ever – especially as so many businesses struggle due to the economy and continuously rising media costs. However, for SEO professionals, having skills in just one area is not recommended indeed. SEO often serves as a bridge between the various domains of an online business, and familiarity with various fundamental concepts of digital marketing can play an important role for their career, as well as for the clients and businesses they serve.
Understanding How Online Marketing and Businesses Work
Online businesses have changed the definition of business and how they operate. Digital products and value-based informative content are now at the forefront of online businesses. Understanding what is specific to online businesses and how online marketing and businesses work is a fundamental concept that all SEOs should understand.
This helps align their efforts with the overall objectives of the business. It helps SEOs understand how their business is expected to serve potential and existing customers and what is expected from a business. This could influence how SEOs prioritize certain areas of the site, for example, an informative guide for the top of the funnel vs. a commercial landing page.
Customer Online Journeys
This can be understood as a natural extension of what we discussed in the previous point. We know that online businesses often don’t just sell their products or services. Instead, many of them also produce informative content for the top of the funnel, which often serves as the starting point of the customer journey.
Understanding all these different stages and routes that a customer takes in their journey can play a crucial role for SEOs. For example, it can help answer some of the following questions:
- What is the most suitable customer journey for a particular type of online business?
- How does SEO support all the different stages of the buyer’s journey?
- Does SEO optimize content for the top of the funnel (TOF), middle of the funnel (MOF), and bottom of the funnel (BOF) according to the business requirements?
How Competitor Analysis Influences the Online Landscape
One of the first things SEO professionals should do is conduct a very thorough and comprehensive analysis of competitors. Not only can it uncover valuable opportunities and keyword ideas, but it can also identify areas that could be significant business drivers. Competitor analysis, however, is not just about entering a few direct competitor sites into SEO audit tools and creating a list of keywords. Understanding how competitors can affect the online landscape for your business is more subtle than that.
Today, you’re not just competing with direct competitors in your industry or niche. You’re also competing with other means and types of businesses: media publications, social media influencers, YouTube channels, Netflix, video games. Anything that can grab your audience’s attention is a competitor. Even search results have become increasingly diverse, with map packs, videos, and tweets. All of these matter and should be considered during competitor analysis.
Ultimately, competitor analysis is also important for SEOs to understand what needs to be done and how to stand out. You can’t do that by replicating what everyone else is doing. This is especially important for SEOs who also help shape a content strategy, which brings us to our next point.
The Critical Role of Content
SEO and high-quality content go hand in hand. You can’t succeed in search engine optimization if you have poor quality content. Therefore, it’s not uncommon to build a complete content team under the wings of an SEO professional. This may include bringing in writers, editors, animators, graphic designers, web designers, photographers, etc. While you can assemble your team, the most important part is how you tie them all together. Content should not be driven solely by creativity but also by empirical data, keyword research, business and marketing objectives, and emerging trends.
How Paid Media Campaigns Impact SEO
Just as content and SEO almost always go hand in hand, paid media and SEO are often perceived as two parallel lines. Paid media campaigns (such as search engine marketing campaigns on Google) and search engine optimization efforts sometimes seem contradictory. For example, if you rank number one for your brand name, should you bid on branded keywords? How will this affect traffic and revenue brought by the SEO department?
Understanding how paid media (or SEM, in this case) works can provide you with the clarity you need to anticipate, understand, and respond to such questions. As a result, you can make better, more informed decisions that help you achieve your SEO goals as well as the overall business objectives.
How Data and Analytics Influence SEO and Online Businesses
We’ve talked about this before, but it’s so important that it deserves a separate mention. While there’s always room for instinctive feelings in business, online businesses are more methodical and data-driven in comparison. With tools like Google Analytics available for free to business owners, they can dive into analytics and see how they attract traffic, how visitors engage with the website, how many people convert and on which pages, and much more. SEOs should know how to obtain all these relevant data points, how to analyze the data and analytics, and how to use this data to improve performance.
Overall Impact of UI/UX and Web Design
Web design and SEO now have a much closer relationship, now more than ever. Poor website design can directly impact SEO – from lower rankings in search engines to penalties even from search engines. As an SEO professional, it is your responsibility to guide website designers in terms of the type of website you want.
From deciding whether or not to use interstitial ads to customizing the website structure, SEOs are an important stakeholder. However, you can only share your valuable contribution and make your presence felt if you understand the creative choices, alternative options, and constraints that designers have.
We recommend gaining a thorough understanding of how web design and user experience can affect a website and the SEO performance of a website. Beyond this, try to learn about the various tips, tricks, options, and hacks that designers use to avoid common pitfalls.
Earned media costs continue to rise. Plus, as other businesses become more technologically savvy and begin to use different means of online marketing, competition becomes fiercer. Therefore, SEOs have become more important than ever. However, they cannot be limited to just optimizing for search engines. Modern SEO must also serve as a bridge between data, marketing strategy, content, performance marketing, and web designers.
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