what is seo in digital marketing?
Unlocking Growth: A Complete Guide to SEO in Digital Marketing
Imagine opening a shop on a busy high street but boarding up the windows and locking the door. You might have the best products in the world inside, but if nobody knows you are there, your business will struggle to survive. In the digital landscape, a website without Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that boarded-up shop. It exists, but it is effectively invisible to the people looking for what you offer.
SEO is often misunderstood as a dark art involving secret algorithms and technical trickery. In reality, it is far more logical. It is the process of improving your website to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search engines. The better visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.
However, SEO is not just about search engines; it is about people. It involves understanding what people are searching for online, the answers they are seeking, the words they are using, and the type of content they wish to consume. Knowing the answers to these questions will allow you to connect to the people who are searching online for the solutions you offer. If you can help search engines understand your content and help users find your site, you have cracked the code. This guide will walk you through the essential pillars of SEO and how they fit into a modern digital marketing strategy.
Table of Contents
How search engines actually work
To master SEO, you first need to understand the platform you are trying to impress. Search engines like Google are essentially answer machines. They exist to discover, understand, and organize the internet’s content to offer the most relevant results to the questions searchers are asking. To do this, they rely on three fundamental processes: crawling, indexing, and serving.
Crawling: The discovery phase
The web is not a central filing system; it is a sprawling network of pages connected by links. Google uses automated programmed called crawlers (often referred to as spiders or bots) to explore the web constantly, looking for pages to add to its index. The most famous of these is Googlebot.
Crawlers start by fetching a few web pages, and then follow the links on those pages to find new URLs. By hopping along this path of links, the crawler is able to find new content and add it to their massive database of discovered URLs. This is why internal linking within your own site is so crucial—it creates pathways for these bots to travel.
Indexing: The filing system
Once a page is discovered, the search engine tries to understand what the page is about. This process is called indexing. It analyses the text, images, and video files on the page, cataloguing them much like a librarian would a new book. This information is stored in the Google Index, a massive database stored on thousands of computers.
However, indexing is not guaranteed. If a page provides little value, is a duplicate of another page, or is blocked by technical directives on your site, it may not be indexed at all. Your goal is to make your content as easy as possible for the search engine to read and categorise.
Serving: The ranking stage
When a user performs a search, the search engine scours its index for matching pages and returns the results it believes are the most relevant to the user. This is ‘serving’ results. Relevancy is determined by hundreds of factors, which can include the user’s location, language, device, and the specific query they typed.
It is important to note that you cannot pay Google to crawl your site more frequently or rank it higher in organic search results. The only way to climb the ladder is by optimising your content to be the best possible answer for the user’s query.
The art and science of keyword research
If SEO is about answering questions, keyword research is about finding out what those questions are. It provides the blueprint for your content strategy. By understanding the terminology your potential customers use, you can tailor your content to match their intent.
Why keywords matter
Keywords are the bridge between what people are searching for and the content you are providing to fill that need. A business owner might describe their product as a “compact productivity device,” but their customers are searching for a “cheap laptop for students”. If you optimize for the former, you might miss the audience searching for the latter.
Anticipating these differences in search behavior is vital. Google’s language matching systems are sophisticated and can understand synonyms, but explicitly using the terms your audience uses remains a powerful signal of relevance.
Tools of the trade
You do not need to guess what people are searching for; there are tools designed to tell you. The Google Keyword Planner, primarily a tool for Google Ads, is invaluable for SEO as well. It allows you to discover new keywords related to your business and see estimates of the monthly search volume they receive.
When using these tools, look for a balance. High-volume keywords (often called “head terms”) are popular but extremely competitive. Phrases that are more specific and often longer (known as “long-tail keywords”) might have lower search volume, but they usually indicate a higher intent to purchase or engage. For example, a user searching for “shoes” is browsing; a user searching for “size 10 red running shoes for men” is ready to buy.
On-page optimisation: speaking the language of search
On-page SEO refers to the practice of optimizing individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic. This involves aligning specific page-level elements with your keywords and user intent.
Crafting compelling content
Content is the core of SEO. Google’s systems are designed to reward content that is helpful, reliable, and people-first. This means creating unique content that demonstrates expertise and provides genuine value, rather than just rehashing what everyone else has published.
Your text should be easy to read and well-organised. Breaking up long content into digestible paragraphs and using descriptive headings helps users navigate your page. If users find your content compelling, they stay longer, which signals to search engines that your page is a good result.
The technical elements
Beyond the body text, specific HTML elements help search engines understand your page context:
- Title Links: This is the headline part of the search result. A good title is unique to the page, clear, and accurately describes the content. It is one of the primary ways users decide which result to click.
- Meta Descriptions: This is the short snippet of text that appears below the title in search results. While it does not directly impact rankings, a persuasive description acts as ad copy, improving your Click-Through Rate (CTR).
- Headings (H1, H2, H3): Using headings in a logical order helps structure your content. While Google’s started that semantic order isn’t a strict ranking factor, a clear hierarchy makes content accessible for screen readers and easier for bots to parse.
Image optimization
Images are often overlooked, but they play a dual role: they enhance user experience and provide another route for discovery via Google Images. Search engines cannot “see” images in the same way humans can, so they rely on descriptive filenames and “alt text” (alternative text) to understand the visual content. Writing descriptive alt text explains the relationship between the image and your content, making your site more accessible and SEO-friendly.
Off-page optimization: building authority
While on-page SEO happens within your website, off-page optimization refers to actions taken outside of your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs). This is largely about building authority and trust.
The power of backlinks
Links from other websites to yours (backlinks) are essentially votes of confidence. If many reputable sites link to your page, search engines infer that your content is valuable and trustworthy.
However, quality trumps quantity. A single link from a high-authority news site or an industry leader is worth far more than dozens of links from low-quality, irrelevant directories. Be wary of “link schemes” or buying links; these are violations of Google’s spam policies and can lead to penalties. The most sustainable way to build links is to create content so useful that people want to link to it naturally.
Promotion beyond the link
Off-page SEO also encompasses your broader digital footprint. Effectively promoting your content via social media, email newsletters, and community engagement can lead to faster discovery. While social media shares are not a direct ranking factor, they increase visibility, which increases the likelihood of earning natural backlinks.
Offline promotion matters too. Listing your website on business cards or engaging in local community events helps build brand recognition, which indirectly supports your search presence.
Technical SEO: the foundation of success
Technical SEO ensures that a website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines with the goal of improved organic rankings. It is the foundation upon which your content sits.
Core Web Vitals and page experience
Google wants to rank pages that offer a great user experience. To measure this, they use a set of metrics called Core Web Vitals. These metrics look at loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading performance.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures visual stability (does the page jump around as it loads?).
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) assesses responsiveness. Replacing the older First Input Delay (FID) metric in March 2024, INP observes the latency of all interactions a user has made with the page, ensuring the site responds quickly to clicks and taps.
Site structure and security
A logical site structure helps bots crawl your site efficiently. Grouping topically similar pages in directories (e.g., /products/shoes/) helps Google understand the relationship between pages.
Furthermore, security is a prerequisite. Serving your pages over HTTPS is a standard requirement. If your site is not secure, browsers may warn users before they enter, killing your traffic numbers and damaging trust.
Measuring your success
SEO is not a “set it and forget it” task. It requires constant monitoring and adjustment. To know if your efforts are working, you need to track the right data.
Key metrics to track
Google Search Console is the most critical tool for this. It provides a “Performance” report that offers granular data on how your site is performing in search:
- Impressions: How many times a user saw a link to your site in search results.
- Clicks: The count of clicks that landed the user on your property.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click.
- Position: The average ranking of your URL for specific queries.
By analyzing these metrics, you can identify which pages are performing well and which need improvement. For instance, a page with high impressions but low clicks might need a more compelling title tag or meta description.
The future of SEO
The landscape of search is constantly shifting. As technology evolves, so do the strategies required to remain visible.
AI and the changing landscape
Artificial Intelligence is reshaping how search engines understand and serve content. We are seeing the rise of features where AI generates summaries or answers directly in the search results. While this might change how users interact with results—potentially reducing clicks for simple queries—it reinforces the need for deep, expert content that an AI summary cannot easily replicate.
The rise of E-E-A-T
As content becomes easier to generate (thanks to AI tools), Google is placing increasing emphasis on E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. While not a direct ranking factor, it is a component of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Search engines want to ensure they are surfacing content written by humans with actual experience and expertise, especially for topics that can impact a person’s health, wealth, or safety. Demonstrating clear authorship and sourcing is becoming more critical than ever.
Conclusion
SEO in digital marketing is the strategic process of making your business findable, relevant, and trustworthy in the eyes of both algorithms and humans. It is a discipline that combines the technical (site speed, structure) with the creative (content, design).
While the tactics may shift—from keywords to concepts, from desktop to mobile, from text to voice—the core mission remains the same: connecting a user’s problem with your solution. By focusing on building a technically sound website filled with high-quality, user-focused content, you are not just optimizing for search engines; you are optimizing for the success of your business in the digital age.
