SEO – A Strategic Priority for Entrepreneurs

Let us talk about digital marketing & SEO! 

The Search Engine Optimization, popularly known as SEO, is a very important aspect in digital marketing. For startups, your products or services getting listed in the first page of Google search results means a big deal.  It will have a direct positive impact by generating more leads. Along with that, your business can build a high level of trust among potential customers. When the marketing was done through physical medium, the bigger players had advantage due to financial muscle by purchasing ad space, say in newspapers. With digital marketing taking a larger chunk of marketing activities,  SEO has truly made marketing into a level playing field. 

I have had  a long and interesting journey with SEO as we went on to build our Emertxe website to rank  well on Google search. Having said that, SEO is an evolving field where things change quickly. In order to adapt and achieve results, a cross-functional teamwork along with a committed leadership is required  to make it a  success. Over the years I have closely worked with digital marketers, graphic designers, content writers and web developers which has given me  immense learning opportunities. I continue to learn this trade even today. The idea of this post is to share my top-3 learnings.

Learning-1: SEO a strategic priority

In my opinion, SEO should be a strategic priority for the leadership. It should not be seen as an activity which can be outsourced to an external marketing agency.  Only the business owners know their product or service positioning. For example, there is a big difference in SEO when I say machine learning course vs machine learning course with placements. Having a clear positioning plays an important role to derive a set of keywords. Extending the same course example, you can derive further keywords like:

• Machine Learning Institute
• Online Machine Learning Course
• Best Machine Learning Training Institute
• Placement oriented Machine Learning Institute

There are tools like Google keyword planner, Ubersuggest, BuzzSumo that  helps to arrive at the keywords in a much easier way. Here, the digital marketer, who has  a horizontal role or is the glue that binds the whole team together, can get involved with the leadership team and ensure right set of keywords are derived. 

Learning-2: Content is King

After arriving at the keywords based on the business positioning, the critical piece comes in the form of the content. Typically, contents are written by content writers who are a vertical specialists. They are excellent in articulation, with a  love for words. I have seen many in my entrepreneurial circle confuse this with the digital marketer’s role. In my opinion, content writer and digital marketer are distinctly different roles. However, the content writers should ensure the keywords are weaved in casually and  with smooth flow. Pairing the content writer with a graphic designer is a great idea as they can create relevant pictures, infographics, animations or videos which makes the content attractive and easy for the reader. The above-mentioned approach works well in case of a blog post. Alternately, if you are creating a new web page, it has to be designed and developed before fitting in the contents. Here, the web developer also has a role to play in developing the page.

In summary, the vertical specialists like content writers, graphic designers and web developers need to perform specific roles by working closely with horizontal digital marketers. As mentioned initially, this is what I mean by a cross-functional teamwork, which requires continuous communication and teamwork.

Learning-3: Choose the right CMS

The third and last aspect comes in the form of web technologies and tools. Before fitting the content into the web page, the page should be up and running by taking care of UI and backend coding. These days, it’s done using popular content management systems like WordPress. here are other CMS like Joomla and Drupal that are identical to WordPress Every CMS has its own pros and cons, which needs to be carefully considered in the beginning. These CMS have got their own set of tools when it comes to SEO. For example, WordPress has a plugin ecosystem,that is equipped with  tools like Yoast SEO plugin, which really helps to optimize the contents while publishing. The digital marketer should move the contents to the WordPress page and tune it as per the suggestion provided by Yoast SEO, this includes: 

• Number of keywords occurrence
• Images with appropriate ALT tags
• In HTML tags (H1 and H2 tags) and final URL the keywords are weaved in evenly
• Giving enough internal and external page links 
• Permalink URL in sync with the keyword
• And many more

After tuning, the Yoast gives rating in terms of SEO score. The digital marketer need to ensure it is in green or orange for the page to rank well in search results. As you can see, digital marketer is a generalist role and is someone who is involved from the beginning to end, while,  specific responsibilities are done by leadership team, content writer, graphic designers, web developer and come in the necessary order  in the process. The overall diagram is mentioned below.

Personally, I consider, organically ranking the site or page higher is way more important than running paid campaigns like AdWords. While I am not discounting the advantage AdWords or any campaign ecosystem brings in, it is always better to have the merit for the site or page by considering all the aspects mentioned above.  Google search definitely rewards you if you do things in a consistent and regular manner, sometimes even at situations where you least expect. For example, we launched our online free internship program on Embedded systems sometime back. We didn’t see  enough results in terms of leads. However, in the last month or so we have seen significant traction. Sometimes it is also seasonal, where students are looking for internships, and they search more during a particular month. As long as you do your basic work correctly, I have no doubt about your page ranking well in Google. 

Last, but not the least. SEO is an evolving field, it’s also important for the whole team to have a continuous learning mindset. Regularly watching experts like Neil Patel or Moz SEO can help you get to know what is happening in the SEO world and adapt them for your website. They have an amazing set of resources like white board lectures, which will help you to scale your SEO. Coming from a totally different background, learning about digital marketing, especially SEO, has been super exciting for me. 

I still continue to be a student of SEO University 🙂