Not everyone who runs a business knows the basics of digital marketing and SEO. But in our increasingly digitized world, just about every business needs some amount of digital marketing to excel. The good news is, you don’t need to become a marketing guru overnight. You can always work with a digital marketing agency–like GreenHaven Interactive–to have some or all of your marketing taken care of.
Still, you may want an understanding of digital marketing so you can do at least some of it yourself, particularly if you want to give your business’s marketing efforts a personal flair. Even if you contract it all out, you might want enough familiarity with the lingo to know what you’re getting and assess whether it’s working.
That’s why we’re compiling a digital marketing dictionary. Here in part one, we’ll explore one of the biggest elements of digital marketing: SEO. So let’s dive into some SEO terminology!
Contents
Understanding SEO in Digital Marketing
If you aren’t already familiar with SEO, it stands for search engine optimization. This optimization refers to the efforts you can make to get your website seen on search engines like Google. It’s undeniably a key pillar of digital marketing.
In decades past, perhaps customers would find your business primarily by word of mouth, fliers, or newspaper ads. But for some time now, Google has been the place to find everything about anything. That’s why it’s crucial for your business to show up on Google in a positive way–that’s how your customers find you.
A Dictionary of SEO Terms
SEO involves both technicality and creativity. Some aspects of it are simple, others are a little complex. For this first part of our digital marketing dictionary, we’ll focus solely on words you might run into under the umbrella of SEO, so you can understand these terms and what they mean for your business.
Traffic
Not the frustrating traffic of your daily commute. In the SEO world, traffic is a good thing. It refers to people visiting and interacting with your site. Every time someone gets on your website, that’s traffic, and traffic means potential customers.
In SEO, we typically talk about organic traffic specifically. If someone clicks on an ad and arrives at your site, that’s paid traffic. But if they type something into Google and click on your site as one of the search results, that’s organic traffic.
SERPs and Rankings
SERP stands for Search Engine Result Page, which is what a user gets when they type a query into Google. When we talk about your website ranking on Google, we’re referring to it showing up on the SERPs, ideally the first page!
Search Intent
If you type “best digital marketing agency tacoma” into Google, what are you looking for? You’re looking for a digital marketing agency in Tacoma, specifically one that’s well-reviewed and has positive attributes (and we happen to know where you can find just the place!).
That’s your search intent. Google wants to provide relevant results to searchers, so it evaluates search intent to suggest results. Consequently, you need to understand search intent to match your content to the people who are looking for it.
Keyword Research
You’ll hear all about keywords in SEO. Phrases like keyword research, keyword targeting, and keyword stuffing. For starters, keywords are the words and phrases people type into Google. So anything can be a keyword, the point is to find the right keywords for your business. For a pet store, you might have keywords like “dog food” and “cat litter.”
Keyword research is the combo of finding the right keywords, understanding their search intent, and using them strategically to get found on Google. We consider things like search volume (how many people are searching the phrase) and keyword difficulty (how saturated is the search, and how hard will it be to compete in search results?).
Ideally, we want to find keywords that have decent search volume but aren’t too hard to rank for. Effective keyword targeting is the difference between a pet store ranking for “cats” and “cat litter near me.” The word “cats” may have an extremely high search volume, but it’s also nearly impossible to rank for. Not to mention, it’s not the right search intent for a pet store. Alternatively, “cat litter near me” has a reasonable search volume with low keyword difficulty, and it’s much more likely to attract searchers who are looking for a pet store like yours.
Crawling
Search engines “crawl” the web to find content. Crawling is performed by automated bots, also called crawlers. If you have a crawl error, those bots can’t find your content properly, which means they can’t put it on SERPs. That’s why one step of SEO is making sure your pages are getting crawled.
Website Indexing
After crawling comes indexing. Google’s massive database of web pages that it can put in search results is called an index. So for your website to be in that index and therefore available for search engine results, it needs to be indexed. The goal is for your pages to get crawled and indexed so they can then rank on SERPs.
Link Building
If you hear your marketing team talking about link building a lot, it’s because it’s essential to SEO. Internal links in your content help Google’s crawlers find and index your pages. That means they’re more likely to rank on SERPs. Links also help your site visitors navigate through your website, while external links build credibility.
So, we use link building a lot in SEO, which just means we strategically add internal and external links to your content. We also try to get other websites to link to your content.
Meta Tags
These are little bits of HTML code that help Google index your content and help it get displayed properly on search results. You may hear about meta titles and meta descriptions, which are the page titles and excerpts that show up in a Google search result for a web page.
Get All Your SEO Taken Care of at GreenHaven!
This is by no means an exhaustive list of SEO terms. As we said earlier, search engine optimization can get pretty complicated! There are a lot of technical details involved. If your business needs help with the technical, creative, or full scope of SEO, we’ve got you covered. Reach out today to learn more about our SEO services and get a personalized solution for your business.
