Having a business school qualification doesn't necessarily prepare you for online marketing 2.0. To succeed in the digital age, you must evolve at the same lightning-quick pace that internet marketing does, a difficult achievement if you're new to the field.
What Does SEO Stand For?
SEO stands for search engine optimization: optimizing your content so that search engines list it at the top of search results. The number one spot in a Google search receives 33% of search traffic, which explains why a top-three-rank is the holy grail of content marketing. Producing the kind of content even Hemingway would praise isn’t enough. Nor is having a website expensive enough to obliterate your annual marketing budget. If you're wondering, "What does SEO stand for?" you'll probably need an online marketing team to manage the basics of your campaign.
How Do I Get Google’s Attention?
The most successful sites on the web, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Baidu, have aesthetics that are barely worth writing home about. If your site is more stylistically appealing, you’re probably frustrated that you’re not achieving better traffic.
Unfortunately, Google bots can't pick up stylistic features so having a website is only the first step of an online campaign. A well-sculpted site can certainly gain you some rank initially, but if you don’t update and market it regularly, it will fall to the bottom of the Google pile within weeks. The next steps to SEO are:
- Keyword research: assess long-tail keywords relevant to your sector by rank, lead generation, and traffic.
- Add keywords to your on-page SEO on a regular schedule.
- Begin a daily or weekly content marketing campaign through blog entries, webinars, white papers, and other media.
- Improve your social shares on relevant networks.
Where Will I Find the Time?
Every aspect of your campaign needs to be handled by a specialist. No marketing manager has the time or skills to execute every aspect of SEO single-handedly, especially if they're unsure about basics like "what does SEO stand for." Seth Godin says, “you need editors, not brand managers,” and to an extent, he’s right. Your text-based content needs to attract the attention of real people before Google will even consider focusing on it. However, the other aspects of your campaign need different skill sets.
1. SEO: Google introduces new algorithm updates at a pace that only a specialist can keep up with. Online marketing pundits generally also have a wealth of talent at their fingertips, so they will often hire your social media and content marketing team on your behalf.
2. Those who execute your inbound and outbound campaign range from web developers and writers to designers. Developers and coders manage the back end of your site and are sometimes gifted designers, too. Your marketer and web host usually handle domain management.
3. Hosting services take care of the nuts and bolts of achieving constant uptime.
Online marketing fundamentals change every time Google releases another update, so specialists are best at overcoming the unique challenges of their fields.
Casey founded Gravity Digital in 2000 after serving as the Internet Services Director for a Nashville-based Ad Agency. He's a rare breed that operates both left and right brain, so along with oversight of the company he's active in the creative process for our clients.
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