What Are The Hallmarks Of Successful SEO?

Whatever your line of business, getting the best possible return on your investment, whether you’re looking at how your marketing activities drive customers to your business or how you can maximise profit on goods that you buy to sell, is crucial to your success.

As we’ve mentioned marketing, that’s where we’ll turn our attention. Specifically, we’re going to look at digital marketing and at the hallmarks of a successful SEO strategy.

SEO as a Marketing Tool

At its basic level as a marketing tool, SEO has one huge advantage over ‘traditional’ forms of marketing, notably that with SEO you are working to put your business in front of people who are actually looking for you.

This automatically means that SEO is worth it, value-wise, in comparison to other forms of marketing. Think about it: you take out an advert in a newspaper or magazine, and although you have an idea of the target audience of such a publication, you don’t know if the people reading it really give two hoots about what your business is and what you do.

That sums up the value of SEO. What are the hallmarks you should be looking for?

A Clear Strategy

If you try to “do” SEO without a plan, then you might as well not do it at all. You need to know what is going to be done, when it is going to happen, and how you are subsequently going to measure the impact (hopefully the success) of a certain action.

If you’re unsure about how to create an SEO strategy then you should find an SEO company to work with who can help you with this.

A Social Media Presence

While we’re talking about SEO, the reality of today is that every aspect of digital marketing comes together to create one bigger entity. You can’t have an SEO strategy without a social media presence in the modern world. Your social media presence doesn’t need to be something all consuming.

Even the biggest businesses rarely have people who spend their whole day logged into social media. Maintaining a simple presence in the way Brett Lankester does actually makes it easier for your business to grow a following itself. Get social with your business for SEO success.

Content Creation

Anyone who has looked into or researched the SEO industry recently will have undoubtedly heard the phrase ‘content is king.’ It is impossible to understate how true this is. At the same time, you shouldn’t believe everything you hear in terms of only needing to blog once a week.

Yes, if you update your blog once a week, you can make a difference to your SEO, but you need to be far more focused on putting out high quality content rather than posting on a semi-regular basis. Quality and quantity is the message here, but the former is by far the most important.

Depending on your industry, you can look to create informal articles or aim for a more professional approach like you’d find on business news websites.

Follow these basic hallmarks of SEO, and you’ll soon be on your way to digital marketing success.

Guest Post: Karen Griffin is an SEO consultant who works primarily with niche businesses in order to help them understand how they can make a difference to their online presence. She lives in Manchester, England, and is married.