What is SEO Marketing?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization – search engine optimization.

Online marketers who engage in this form of marketing try to maximize organic traffic from search engines such as Google by achieving high positions on key search terms.

To get this done, start optimizing your website and create a relevant search experience for users of search engines like Google.

There are basically 3 ‘big’ players in the Netherlands when it comes to search engines. Most of them are well known:

Google has a market share of about 93% in the Netherlands.

Bing, from Microsoft, has to make do with no more than 5%.

Yahoo, and some other smaller search engines, have about 2% market share.

Google is by far the best known, and the largest. Certainly on mobile devices, Google is by far the most frequently searched: no less than 95% (source: Statcounter).

Meaning of Search Engine Optimization (SEO Optimization)

The abbreviations SEO, SEA and SEM are often confused.

Logical, because they go hand in hand and have many similarities.

Yet there are clear differences:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Optimize your website for search engines. This only concerns the organic (or free) search results.

Search Engine Advertising (SEA) – Search engine advertising. This concerns the optimization of the campaigns that are displayed as ‘sponsored search results’. You can then advertise via Google Ads and Bing Ads.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) – This is the umbrella activity of both SEO and SEA.

In short: you can do 2 things. Advertise through SEA, or get started optimizing the free, organic search results through SEO.

Benefits of SEO

Costs no advertising budget

At the same time you improve the user experience on your website

With the right strategy, you can benefit from your efforts for years to come

Disadvantages of SEO compared to SEA

It takes relatively much effort

It takes longer to see results

How does a search engine work?

A search engine is actually an answer machine.

You ask a question, and the machine returns the most relevant answer.

Such a search engine must therefore map out all possible answers in advance.

Search engines therefore manage to collect all public content on the internet.

For this they use so-called crawlers. A crawler is a bot that comes to your website and indexes (stores) your pages. This way he “reads” what your page is about.

Based on hundreds of ranking factors, the algorithm ultimately determines which results are most relevant to the query.

When are you on top?

At the top of Google. It’s a spot that many marketers are vying for.

First of all: why would you want to be at the top?

Enter the mind of someone who is looking for something on the internet.

This could, for example, be a solution to a problem, or a specific product that he is looking for.

Today we are so accustomed to the convenience of the internet that we could define ourselves as:

We’re lazy: we’re going to make absolutely no effort to find our information in a place that’s more than one click away.

We are stupid: everything has to be presented to us, because all information is readily available anyway.

We have little attention: we only focus on one thing at a time.

In other words: if you are going to start optimizing for your target group, keep these three characteristics in mind.

This is Google’s mission statement:

We want to collect the world’s information for everyone, and make it accessible to everyone with just one click. In doing so, we offer the user a qualitative experience, with a relevant answer.

Perhaps an open door, but you have to be relevant.

You become relevant if you offer unique content and offer the user a qualitative experience.

Moreover, search engines nowadays go much further than just content in the form of text. Search engines return many more results.

Think of:

Pictures

Videos

Local search results

Google Maps

Shopping

News

You can therefore optimize content yourself for this type of search, in order to ultimately achieve more traffic, and hopefully more conversions.

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Practical examples of SEO marketing

With SEO you are able to realize more organic visitors.

Ultimately, you want to achieve your most important goals with SEO. Usually those goals are increasing brand awareness, generating leads or actual transactions.

In a moment you will see two examples of successful cases. Then it is good to first understand when exactly you are successful with SEO.

What are your goals?

Success factors of SEO optimization

When are you successful with SEO? Sometimes that is difficult to gauge.

You usually measure the following KPIs:

seo