Mumbai: Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving your site’s data to increase its traction when people are looking for products or services that are related to your business in search engines such as Google, Firefox, Bing. Yahoo, etc. This is facilitated by the result pages that pop up when a person types a particular keyword in relation to their search. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.
How does it work?
Major search engines such as Google and Yahoo use virtual bots to crawl through different web pages, collecting and analysing data that is then refined into an index. This index acts as a bank of information that possesses data collated from web pages. The algorithms within this index then categorise the collected data by filtering the information that is requested by the user. The final results page is a result of hundreds of ranking factors or signals, determining the order of the pages that should appear in the search results for a given query. This intensive process is carried out in helping the user find an exact match to their keyword search. The success of your SEO depends on how user/keyword-friendly your website data is.
How important it is from a marketing perspective
SEO plays a critical role within digital marketing because people search for a trillion things in a day, often with a commercial interest in a certain product/service. ‘Search’ is a primary way of generating digital traffic towards your website, making it an essential part of your digital marketing strategy. Greater visibility and higher search rankings than your potential competitor can have a material impact on your ultimate goal. To summarise, SEO lays the foundation of a holistic marketing ecosystem.
Changing Trends
Since the internet culture is so dynamic, its tools and practices are constantly evolving. SEO is no exception as the concept is subject to so many technological advancements on a daily basis. The algorithms change frequently, keeping the businesses and digital marketers on their toes. This is why being aware of what’s coming down the pipeline is extremely important. It can help a business plan prevent possible penalties or a massive drop in its site’s ranking.
Mobile SEO: With an uncontrollable smartphone penetration, more and more people are getting their hands on a smarter cellular device. The one that allows them to do more than just calling, texting people. Billions of people conduct searches via their phones, making it a key target area for digital marketers. It has now proven to become one of the more influential SEO areas than a desktop. If you’re doing SEO for desktops and not for mobile, it might have a better impact on your desktop rankings however, your mobile rankings could be abysmal. Moving forward, marketers will have to focus on both desktop and mobile SEO to maintain their positions in the search pages.
Voice Search: With virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa getting smarter by the day, voice-search interaction is definitely going to be the next big thing within the SEO market. It is going to revolutionise the way you interact with search engines. Virtual assistants and AI are on their way to making the search process more user-efficient by providing answers to questions prior to users asking them. This path-breaking technology is expected to transpose the SEO landscape for many businesses.
Intentional Content: This SEO trend/technique is evergreen. It creates the basis of your search results ranking. Unless you have content that is meaningful and relevant to the consumer, no level of optimisation could help you attract traffic to your website. A digital marketer needs to curate best-in-class intent content by keeping the user in mind. This can only be achieved after a comprehensive study of current keyword trends, followed by rigorous competitor analysis.
Video Content: YouTube has been increasingly impacting the SEO rankings of many businesses. This makes one realise the importance of effective video content within a digital marketing strategy. Analysts and marketers highly suggest that these videos should promote the target keywords and be optimized for search. Embedding a video on your landing page that targets the same keyword could also prove beneficial in this regard.
(Anoushka Adya is founder of Di-mention Studios, a digital marketing agency. The views expressed in the column are personal and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.)
