Jeff Cassman

Without SEO, publishing content online is like sending a rocket to space without a destination.

If you don’t tell that rocket which direction to head (the moon or Mars?), you’re stuck crossing your fingers and hoping things work out. That’s not good marketing. Good marketing comes with predictability, data, and then some crossed fingers.

And that’s the perfect way to describe search engine optimization, SEO, in 2022. 

SEO is part of the search engine algorithm: 

Input = Keywords

Output = Content

For every keyword, there are thousands of pages of search results and plenty of content to choose from (outputs). But, page 1,000 isn’t nearly as useful as page 1. Even page 2 of search results can feel like no man’s land. 

That’s why marketers care about SEO. Because all search engine pages are not equal. The power of ranking top 3 on page 1 of a search engine beats out ranking first on page 2 by 100x (honestly, maybe even 1,000x). 

How do you land a coveted spot on page 1 of the search results?

By picking the right SEO keywords through these three steps.

3 Steps SEO Experts Use to Pick Keywords

SEO has been around long enough that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. A new, innovative, never-before-seen SEO strategy that takes you months to implement and even longer to see results is the opposite of what SEO experts are doing.

The SEO experts writing high-quality content, landing on page 1 for relevant searches, and seeing results from their content are the ones following this tried-and-true SEO strategy.

#1: Ideate Keywords

There are two types of advertising: interruption-based and intent-based. Interruption-based advertising is an ad on your social media newsfeed. It’s the ads between paragraphs on the news article you’re trying to read. It’s a search engine ad strategically placed before the organic results. This isn’t your focus in organic SEO marketing, but this IS your focus in paid SEO advertising.

In SEO marketing, you’re focused on intent-based advertising. When somebody chooses to search for an answer to their question—that’s intent-based advertising. A search for “olive green cotton blanket” is an example of intent-based advertising. 

And the search engine results are a mix of interruption (paid ads) and intent-based advertising (organic results).

When you’re ideating keywords for your products and brand, you’re looking at intent-based words. These are the words somebody needs to use to find your products or brand. For DigitalMarketer, these are words like:

• Digital marketing training
• Digital marketing help
• Content marketing training
• Copywriting training

These keywords correlate directly to our products. They teach people how to be great digital marketers, either for their own company, their full-time marketing role, marketing consultancy, or their agency clients.

Your customer avatar asks specific questions and uses certain words to describe to search engines what content they want output. Use these questions to make a list of 20+ keywords you could rank for:

1. What questions do your customers ask surrounding your products or brand?
2. What…

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of digital marketing.

SEO helps with brand discoverability. When done right, SEO can create the most consistent and by far the highest-quality traffic source which doesn’t require on-going maintenance.

Yet, SEO is usually the most isolated part of the marketing. Whether it is an in-house team or a third-party service that’s delivering your SEO campaigns, it usually exists on its own without really communicating goals, progress, or results to the whole company.

This creates silos that can lead to poor results and even reputation crises.

How does SEO work in digital marketing and how can a business make it work better?

What is SEO?

SEO is a collection of tactics (content, technical, link building, even website security and usability) that ensures that your website is easy to understand for search engines.

Basically, it ensures a machine knows that your page will be easy to find to a human being who is looking to solve a related problem.

Search engine traffic is one of the highest-quality traffic for many reasons:

• Unlike PPC (paid) traffic, it doesn’t require an ongoing investment to keep coming
• Unlike social media traffic,  it doesn’t require an ongoing work to keep coming
• Unlike social media traffic, you are not interrupting people’s browsing. Instead you give them what they were actually searching for.

In other words, it is consistent and it converts well. No other digital marketing tactic beats that.

Apart from driving direct traffic, search engine optimization helps build brand awareness by increasing your brand’s organic findability.

Keep Your Whole Team Aware of Why SEO is Important

The great thing about today is that everyone understands the value of ranking high on Google! Sadly, however, many folks only know that they “need SEO” without having really understood what that means. 

SEO these days is too hard for a digital marketer to do alone. Many SEOs find themselves in situations where an executive will simply come down and go “Why are we not ranking well for ‘dingwobble’?” 

Keep working hard with teams for them to understand how they contribute to the SEO process:

• Product Marketers who are responsible for the business, personas and messaging understand that SEO is critical to driving the bottom line revenue numbers they are looking at. Part of the persona developing process should be the development of the “digital persona” – what websites and search terms are these people looking for? This helps the product marketer when it comes time to develop messaging, as that is going to be critical for developing the content, so the right search terms better be there!
• Field Marketers responsible for the campaigns need to know how SEO fits within their campaign, how it in fact is core to our demand generation, and how to make sure to keep the campaigns integrated.
• Marketing Communications is creating the content, so SEO should…

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SEO is vital for any business, but how exactly can businesses use it to drive growth?

Search traffic is historically the best web traffic you can hope for.

Google has been the single most powerful traffic driver for ages, and while its power has been slowly declining of the years, no other traffic channel has come close to organic traffic:

Here’s how SEO can help your business in 2022:

Understand Your Customers Better

One of the immediate benefits of starting an SEO strategy is an ability to better understand (and relate to) people’s journeys around the web.

What is your target audience struggling with? What kind of questions are they asking? What drives their purchasing decisions?

A well-defined keyword research strategy can answer all those questions and enlighten your whole team.

Ahrefs is one of my favorite tools to perform keyword research because it offers so much useful data including, common modifiers, popular questions, SERP features and more:

You can also run your (or your competitor’s) domain through the tool to see your current positions in Google.

This can give you a more holistic understanding of your keyword rankings, and tell you how people are finding your business (or your competitor’s business) across multiple platforms.

Build More Detailed Buyers’ Personas

Customer personas (also referred to as customer avatar) are people you make up to describe your ideal customers.

Personas make digital marketing more streamlines and understandable by making your buyers easier to relate to. 

When creating a persona, you assign some human traits and features, like gender, income, occupation, etc.

Personas also help you create a customer-centric business model, the only business model that will make your business successful in 2022 and beyond.

To build a persona, you need some kind of data, and that’s where SEO-driven web analytics somes very much in handy. Google Analytics comes with detailed demographics data that will turn very useful for persona creation:

As a business owner, you are, of course, prioritizing your customers. Thus, their feedback is important for you to improve your product or service. In order to learn from your visitors, install Google Analytics tool that collects feedback so that you can analyze it and listen to your customers in order to make your website better. 

No matter how many professionals work on your website, visitors’ feedback is the most qualitative measure of your success. Using conversational forms on your site will help you collect even more data for your SEO campaigns and create more detailed personas.

Take Control of Your Buyers’ Journeys

Buying journeys have become more complicated over the years. Equipped with diverse devices and tools, a consumer may start their journey on one device and continue on a different one. 

They are likely to turn to Google multiple times throughout that fragmented journey, and if your business shows…

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