Currently, thanks to the advancement of information and communication technologies (ICT), companies use digital and web tools to enhance their marketing strategies. Search engines are part of these tools and for this reason, they have acquired great prominence in recent decades. Companies have understood the impact that the Internet has had today and, consequently, they recognize the importance of appearing among the main search results.
What is SEO?
In this sense, Search Engine Optimization or what we better know as SEO, is a series of techniques that together have as their main objective, to provide organic positioning to companies in search engines. HubSpot defines it as “the process of improving a website. so that it attracts more visitors from search engines.” In this way, it is about achieving various strategies that achieve this result for free, without the need to go to SEM (paid search engine ads) to stand out on the web.
In fact, digital marketing advisor Neil Patel, collecting data from HubSpot and Search Engine Journal, pointed out that in 2017, “Between 70-80% of users ignore paid ads, focusing on organic results”, that is, in the results that were positioned through SEO.
It should also be noted that SEO is economical for companies (it does not require large resources), because everything is found in the quality of the content that you want to publish, This determines how far or close a website is from appearing in the top 10 organic results. At the same time, this will also depend on how much people want to visit, watch, read, or listen to a particular content.
The more attractive content is to internet users, the easier it will be for people to share it. Therefore, The goal is to obtain constant traffic to continue standing out among the first results. Why so much importance in it? According to Maran, the first 5 results on Google pages get 75% of user clicks. In this way, appearing among the main results becomes something important for companies today.
Types of SEO
There are different ways to achieve positioning for free. We can classify SEO into two large groups:
On-page SEO
All positioning strategies that are carried out within the same company page are considered “on page”. The objective is to adapt the content you want to publish to the basic principles of SEO. Therefore, generate valuable content, provide tools to share content, improve the speed and performance of the website, create a version for mobile devices, give strength to your keywords and in general, improve the technical aspects of the website so that they can be easily indexed by search engines, is part of the strategies that you can apply to achieve positioning through on-page SEO.
Off-page SEO
“Off-page” refers to all the techniques that can be carried out to increase traffic to a web page, outside of it. For example, put links from other pages that connect with your content and any link-building technique that will allow you to increase the number of links to your site. If you develop strategic alliances with web pages that already have a large number of visits, you will be able to direct those readers to your content more easily. There are various web portals, where it is advisable to publish the content you write on your blog, in this way, you will be providing more visibility to your publications and at the same time, you are building more links to your page.
How do searchSEO inbound marketing engines work?
Search engines work through three types of processes: crawling, indexing and ranking or positioning. The first refers to the use of crawlers or web spiders (computer robots) by search engines, who are responsible for tracking and browsing millions of web pages that are hosted on the Internet every day. However, how do these robots create efficient search results for the millions of queries that users send? By indexing keywords and types of content, these spiders classify their journey.
Indexing, on the other hand, is the process in which these search engines – thanks to the work of crawls – classify and store all the information in their results index. Thus creating a kind of virtual warehouses or warehouses that are ordered according to the keywords, which were previously classified. This order allows people to quickly and accurately find the content they are looking for when searching.
Finally, Once the information has been indexed, the search engines are responsible for evaluating the elements that accompany these contents in order to position ourselves, such as: publication date, number and duration of visits, number of external links (off-page SEO), quality of content, page loading speed, keyword density, good use of URLs, image tagging, tagging of content, among many others. All of this with the aim of grouping in the first search results those pages that have a high level of participation by Internet users, that is, those that are best written and with very comprehensive information in relation to the searches you perform. people.
The importance of SEO in inbound marketing
SEO is an essential part of the first stage of the inbound methodology by properly optimizing the positioning of a website, it facilitates the process of attracting unknown people from search engines and converting them into visitors to a website. The inbound methodology includes 4 stages: attract, convert, close and delight. So SEO is an important tool to go from the first to the second stage.
The purpose of this methodology is to complete a purchasing process, thanks to the voluntary attraction of customers. Among the most used techniques to achieve this are: creating attractive content, adding keywords, educating people, knowing exactly what you want to read, among others. Providing valuable content should be your maximum strategy when spontaneously attracting your customers.
According to Hubspot, Google receives more than 3 million searches every day from people who have questions and problems they want solved. Thus, the engines need to provide the most relevant, useful and reliable responses. That is why SEO as an element within inbound marketing plays a fundamental role, since it acts as a strategy to position valuable content that attracts various sales opportunities.
In conclusion, building a good SEO strategy for your website will allow consumers to find you when they need you. In addition, it works as a natural attraction mechanism that begins the inbound methodology and, consequently, all its stages for successful customer loyalty. Remember that it is not necessary to go only to an SEM process (paid ads) to increase visibility and impact. Work under an inbound system (non-invasive) and constantly evaluate the effectiveness of your content within the profiles of your buyers, or also known in inbound marketing, as buyer personas.
