Digital Marketing Empire: All Roads Lead to SEO

Savvy companies continually report SEO as the most important tool in their digital arsenal and in 2012 have put their budgets where there mouths are. In fact, 49% of B2C marketers say SEO is their top lead-generation source — far ahead of paid search and social media marketing.

Our own experiences at Sherpa Web Studios, which specializes in search engine marketing, matches that stat. SEO is our clients' #1 traffic source, often driving upwards of 80% of website traffic.

That’s an astonishing majority since SEO isn’t a one-time event with immediate gratification. It’s a set of best practices, optimized according to goals and tweaked based on performance, focusing on short-term objectives within the scope of a long-range goals. This isn’t, however, a new concept to us— we wrote about how SEO is like a long-term investment in real estate over four years ago.

SEO strategy blends understanding of micro tactics with macro market forces, requires commitment and patience, and is the origin and benchmark for all online initiatives. It’s the alpha and omega of success in the digital B2C space.

Four Cornerstones of SEO

The strongest SEO foundation has four cornerstones:

An amazing website on the surface but especially below the hood

Ultimately, there are hundreds of levers and buttons one needs to push in order to gain the most visibility and top ranking in the search engines. An experienced web design and development firm specializing in SEO like Sherpa! Web Studios understands which ones are necessary to deploy an SEO-friendly website.

These SEO techniques include coding expertise for structure and style, hyphenating URLs with key search terms, using but not abusing keywords in content and meta data, crafting a sitemap with selectively chosen links, and optimizing critical components that assist search engine  spiders in crawling your site when indexing.

SEO methodology changes as often as searches engines change their algorithm, which is weekly. Keeping abreast of changes in search marketing — both paid search and organic search — is often a full-time effort.

Intelligent link building via quality content

Link building is a multi-pronged approach, including content marketing, public relations, social outreach, and strategic partnerships, among others. These should establish links from trusted directories and industry authorities to key site pages.

What’s more, how you link to your own web site internally sends an important signal to search engines as to what you discern is important within your website.

Consumer knowledge and data

When researching your target consumer base, keep in mind: you are not your audience. Web analytics and expert scrutiny are key to capturing consumer intent, revealing needs and behavior based on a range of filterable criteria, from device to age and location to income and device.

While your own website should include web analytics to monitor what’s working and what’s not, you also need to rely on data outside of your website.

Keyword research that drills into consumer thinking and behavior

That data is especially crucial in determining and reevaluating keywords.  The most popular search terms may not always be the most likely to generate a lead through your site’s calls to action. Owning rare or more narrowly defined phrases more likely to convert is as important, if not more so, for ensuring your site’s ranking.

A Sherpa for Your SEO Journey

Consulting SEO pros on these methods and techniques proves instrumental. 21% of companies are highly satisfied with an agency’s SEO plan performance versus 11% who say the same for in-house management. In the meantime, follow these SEO tips:

1. Craft unique page titles, descriptions, and tags. Each is as important as the visible content. Each page’s should be unique in order to avoid penalties by search engines, resulting in lower rankings.

2. Start a blog hosted in your domain. Create unique, compelling content that’s studded with keywords. Write for easy human readability and search engine bots will follow. They fresh content and highly-structured data. Distribute via social networks.

3. Launch a PPC campaign. Paid search provides instant visibility and generates search volume.

4. Conduct keyword research using AdWords Keyword Tool,  WordTracker, or Keyword Discovery. Remember: relative volume from one keyword to another is most important.

5. Distribute valuable press releases online for quick, relevant link building.

6. Use local search opportunities to your advantage. Attract local traffic by displaying your address and contact info. If service-oriented, submit your site to local social directories (e.g., Yelp) and free local service directories, encouraging customers to write reviews.

7. Utilize search engines tools available to you. Sign up for Google Webmaster Central, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo Site Explorer to better understand how search engines see your site in myriad ways such as the number of inbound links.