Integrating SEO with other Disciplines
In this blog, we’re going to cover how SEO impacts all the other marketing channels.
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to:
- Explain why user experience is at the core of great SEO
- Describe how SEO is related to social media, PPC, and conversions optimization
- Describe how SEO and content marketing are intertwined
- Explain why analytics is key for success in SEO
Integrating marketing channels
Digital marketing channels are interdependent on one another.
This is true for every channel in digital marketing.
None of the channels are silos.
They can’t be done without overlapping with the others and it’s a common mistake to make.
When you have one idea, one thing to focus on and you have one person in charge of it, unfortunately, they don’t do enough to work with other people who are in other channels.
This is a big mistake, especially in larger companies because people tend to be focused on their job and not learn from each other.
SEO can be very powerful but is more powerful when it interacts and is used wisely with other marketing channels.
I’ll cover some examples in this.
User experience Across the channel
SEO can work as a vertical but it’s better when it’s a foundation.
It, at its core really goes into the design, user intent, user experience, how computers interact with your content, and how humans can work with your content.
SEO starts with a strong foundation of understanding keywords and intent.
This benefits social media marketing as they need to know the keywords and the needs of the audience.
In addition, SEO can provide the search data, search trends, and accompanying questions that people search with,
thereby informing the social media program of the questions that prospects and customers have, the words they should use, and when the trends are the strongest.
The same information informs paid search and other paid media such as display ads or targeted advertising.
Understanding how people engage with your current content can help develop clear landing pages and campaign that answers people’s questions.
For paid search, there’s a direct correlation between keywords and performance and many of these metrics are the same.
An SEO should be focused on the conversion rate and the steps to improve it.
This enables you to leaarn buying signals, user experience, and design principles that increase conversions.
The more you work in this area, the more you can assist other campaigns in their analysis.
Content marketing and SEO
Content marketing has increased in prominance.
It has always been important but with the increasing value of good content and search engines, making that content visible and available to people has branched out into other channels and skills.
SEO is cornerstone of content marketing.
By bringing keywords, intent, search trend, and data on the questions people ask when they search, SEO can inform the essentials of content development.
In addition, SEO is needed to optimized the pages of blog, websites, and the content used to drive people from search and other channels.
Then the usage of those same keywords is needed for socials promotion, email engagemenrt, marketing materials to make sure that the message is aligned.
Analytics and SEO
Analytics is essential for measuring the success and attribution of diffrent content and channels used to distribute it.
For SEO, analytics is the primary data sourse you’ll have to tie together your optimized content and page performance.
You’ll have to develop measurement that are specific to your business goals.
through analytics, you see who enters your website from search engines, what page they enter, and how far they go into your website.
Developing content engagement metrics will be crucial to determining the success of meeting people’s queries.
Mobile and SEO
Sometimes I get the question of how do SEO and mobile interact and I love this question because now in today’s world it’s exactly the same thing.
Not only are there signals that are speciffically SEO signals that have entirely an exclusively to do with mobile but the experience is all the same.
The major search engines are mobile-frist with their search results.
The biggest change is the ability for the search engine to serve local results, mobile-specific ads, and applications.
SEO for WordPress
Using SEO on content management systems like WordPress is very easy.
Ot-of-the-box, WordPress is good for SEO but it still needs some basic adjustments to make SEO work better.
There are also plugins available to help manage your wordpress site and assist you with SEO.
Permalinks
Now, the first step is understanding permalinks.
In the wordpress setting menu, you’ll find a link for permalinks.
This helps you manage your URLs and the strcture of the URL and you can implement keywords in your stracture and filenames.
As you can see, you have a number of options but I recommend using a strcture that keeps your file system clear and simple such as a subdirectory name and a post or page name.
Avoid using dates or a numeric approach as they don’t provide keyword relevance.
Words provide context for both users and search engines.
Other settings
Other default setting are not user or search friendly.
For example, in thedefault settings, the archive links are all date-based and not content or keyword-based.
You can change that.
SEO plugin
The yoast SEO plugin is the most popular WordPress plugin for SEO.
It manages nearly every aspect of your SEO provides guidance and feedback and helps you as you create new page and posts with the relevance measurement.
It is regularly updated, it will automatically generate an XML sitemap with the click of a button, and offer upgraded services as well.
Some of the functions are a bit redundeant with other WordPress features but there are other settings that are extremely helpful, like blocking duplicate directories from search engines to avoid duplicate content issues.
Key takeaways
- Search engines strive to avoid sending users to web pages that have poor user experience. User experience is deeply connected to SEO best practices.
- Content that is well-optimized for SEO (that is, for both humans and crawlers) tends to be well-optimized for social media, PPC, and content marketing.
- Great content attracts users, but well-optimized great content is more likely to rank higher in search engines.
- Analysis is paramount to SEO success as it provides the tools and framework for measuring the effectiveness of SEO efforts.