Search Engine Optimization is quickly becoming a key component of all marketing budgets. However, many SEO strategies are poorly executed due to businesses being unaware of the intricacies involved in creating successful campaigns. Marketing professionals need to understand the key components of building a proper strategy before investing in online marketing.

Know Your Target Market

Before doing any type of marketing, it’s essential to develop a profile of your target audience: this will be applied to understand the searching behaviours of your potential clientele. This is an essential step in avoiding the optimization of keywords that will not bring targeted traffic to your website. For example, simply optimizing for the term ‘contractor’ for a commercial contractor in Montreal is problematic because that keyword is simply too ambiguous and far too competitive to ever see results.

There’s more to SEO than Inserting Keywords in Meta Tags

Contrary to popular belief, inserting keywords in the meta tags on your website isn’t the only work to be done for a successful SEO campaign. While the initial work is essential, many marketing professionals have been led astray in believing that tinkering on their websites for 30 minutes will move their website up on search engines by 100 positions in one week.

Content Marketing is Essential for SEO

Google is placing more importance on fresh and original content when determining a website’s relevancy to keywords. In fact, a recent Google update affected roughly 35% of searches; giving users more up-to-date results based on freshness. As a result, generating fresh keyword rich content on a consistent basis is a requirement for achieving excellent results. Creating a consistent stream of fresh keyword rich content is truly a science: inserting too many keywords can result in ranking penalties, whereas not putting enough keywords will result in the content not being picked up by search engines.

Importance of Online Marketing for your Business

Ranking high on search engines is becoming increasingly important for companies to drive in leads and generate sales. A properly executed campaign will pay dividends in the long-run and increase your company’s brand awareness online. Unfortunately, a misaligned Search Engine Optimization strategy can potentially cost your business thousands of dollars if you do not understand the key mechanisms of a successful campaign. Generating the desired ROI can be attained with proper strategic planning combined with the help of proven professionals with the expertise in the Internet marketing industry.