Search engine marketing seems to be all the rage in 21st-century advertising, often compared to (and combined) with the ever-present paid ads used on social media platforms. If you’ve never taken any big steps in that direction, or simply weren’t satisfied with your previous results, you may very well ask: how does SEO work in digital marketing? Is it worth hiring a local agency such as func.media to improve your presence?
In this article, you will learn more about the basics of search engine marketing, how it works, and of course, how it can benefit your business!
What is SEO? How does it work in digital marketing?
SEO works as one of the best long-term strategies in digital marketing. It stands for Search Engine Optimization and is often one of the most sought services provided by advertising agencies.
Essentially, it is a process that focuses on getting your business online traffic from organic, free, editorial, and natural search results in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, or even DuckDuckGo. Good SEO achieves this by improving the ranking of your website (and its relevant subpages) in search engine results.
But how exactly does SEO work in digital marketing? Search engines like Google rely on complex algorithms to help them find web pages and decide which site should rank for a given keyword.
SEO works in 3 main steps:
- Crawling
Search engines send out so-called “web-crawlers” (also known simply as robots) to do some recon work. They look for new web pages and also check up on previously discovered web pages to see if any changes have been made.
- Indexing
This is where a search engine decides if it’s going to use the content the robots have discovered. If a specific website is deemed “worthy”, it will be added to the index of the search engine (stored in a database).
- Ranking
The key step that decides where your website will rank in search engine results when a related search query is entered. Ranking depends on a huge number of factors that all depend on the state of your on-page, off-page, and technical SEO.
How much work does SEO need? Is it a worthwhile digital marketing strategy?
In order to understand how SEO works in digital marketing, you also have to know in advance that search engine optimization is a long-term strategy. While paid advertising relies on money to get you almost immediate results, SEO requires you to put in the work, and you may only see notable results after 6-12 months. The main benefit is that after you put enough resources and time into optimizing your website, the traffic and leads you get from that work are “free”.
This makes SEO one of the best long-term strategies in digital marketing that works in favour of the survival and success of your business. Especially since no matter how much money your competitors spend on paid advertising, they cannot replicate what you have created through SEO.
Naturally, paid and organic advertising are not mutually exclusive. SEO agencies who focus on digital marketing usually recommend a combination of the two methods to get the best possible results, as they both require extensive keyword research and the creation of landing pages. Not to mention they share a common goal of generating as much traffic as possible based on user intent.
Why should I work with a digital marketing agency to improve my SEO efforts in Budapest, Hungary?
There are many reasons why the services of companies in Budapest like Dog and Pony SEO agency are sought after. For one thing, apart from their expertise in digital marketing, they are also much more up to date with the trends of the Hungarian market. This is why many companies from abroad choose to outsource their SEO activities and rely on the services of digital marketing agencies in Budapest.
SEO is a long-term investment, and to get a nice return on that investment, you also need the right agency for the job.
First off, in-house digital marketing can be much more costly than outsourcing. Not to mention that by outsourcing your SEO activities to an agency in Budapest, you can be sure that your business will be in good hands. SEO agencies employ a varied team of experts in order to cover all 3 pillars of SEO and focus on the steps that will make search engines rank your website higher. Simultaneously, they will also help you provide relevant content for your target audience.
The 3 pillars of SEO (on-site, off-site, technical) cover a wide range of activities needed for your website to be deemed worthy of the attention of web-crawlers, including:
- Keyword research
- Quality, optimized content creation
- Lightning-fast loading speed
- Relevant backlinks from other websites
- Measuring and analyzing your results to continuously optimize your SEO strategy
