SEO, or search engine optimization, is a set of techniques used in digital marketing. To fully understand how SEO works and why it's important, it’s first necessary to take a closer look at the broader field of digital marketing. Digital marketing materials encompass everything that a company could use to raise brand awareness and drive sales.
For example, a company’s websites, pay-per-click (PPC) ads, social media posts, white papers, eBooks, landing pages and blogs (just to name a few mediums) can all be used to further that company’s digital marketing goals. Digital marketing copy (text that is written with a sales purpose) can be clever and funny — designed to capture attention and attract a loyal audience. It can be informative or thought-provoking, intended to make the target audience think or to provide value to the audience.
There are many different copywriting techniques that digital marketers can use to make a digital marketing campaign a success. But one thing that all types of digital copy have in common is the goal of increasing sales for the company, and this is where SEO comes into play. In order to increase sales, a brand needs to drive as much web traffic as possible to its website, and then convert that traffic into sales.
When a person types a search query into a search engine such as Google, the search engine generates a list of search engine results pages (SERPs). The person can then choose to click on one or more links from the list of results. Although a search engine may return millions or even billions of results for any given search query, very few of those results will get any clicks.
Search engine optimization is the set of techniques that digital marketers can use to improve the chances of getting a website to rank high in SERPs. SEO is ever-changing, due in large part to Google’s frequent changes to its search algorithms. It’s believed that Google updates its search algorithms about 500 to 600 times per year (although the vast majority of these changes are not monumental).1 This means that SEO specialists must continually stay informed of the latest Google changes so that they can do their jobs more effectively.