How Digital Marketing and SEO Can Create Synergistic Results

Investing in SEO (search engine optimization) is a great way to develop a competitive edge in your business. However, it’s often seen as a content-focused activity. And there’s no doubt that keywords, backlinks, and other aspects of SEO revolve around your online content.

But it’s important to remember that there are many other ways that you can marry your digital marketing activities with your SEO efforts. Here are a few of the best ways to bring the two together to provide synergistic results.

1. SEO and Your Website

Chances are, your website is your primary center for SEO activity. A company blog can house your keyword-rich text. Alt text on images can help them show up in SERPs (search engine results pages) more easily. Well-crafted headers and quality external and internal links can boost the authority of your web pages.

Even if you’ve optimized your site for SEO, you may have found that it still isn’t yielding the results you’re looking for. If that’s the case, you may have overlooked one critical factor: your visitors. 

Digital marketing agency Hennessey Digital highlights the top two benefits of digital marketing as:

• Building a professional, user-friendly website.
• Creating engaging content for your website and blog.

While both of these activities can involve SEO optimization, they focus on the user, not search engines. This underlines a very important point. Content marketing should always focus on the user first and the search engines second. This isn’t just a question of ethical marketing. Even the search algorithms themselves are becoming savvy enough to detect content that panders to SEO while disregarding users.

If you’ve perfected your site’s SEO and it isn’t yielding results, take a step back and consider if your site is truly meeting the needs of your audience. Review areas like your site’s menus, navigation, layout, and accessibility. 

Also, take a look at your content and make sure it is putting the reader first and the search engines second. Quality content should always resonate with readers and address their pain points — even if it’s answering your SEO needs at the same time.

2. SEO and Your Email Marketing

SEO and email are often seen as mutually exclusive aspects of online marketing. One focuses on the world wide web and the other takes place in private inboxes. 

But there are many areas where the two can cross over. For example, Search Engine Journal outlines multiple ways that you can use your email to boost your SEO efforts, such as:

• Driving quality traffic to your site: This qualified traffic arriving on your SEO-optimized pages will boost their viability and value in the eyes of Google’s search algorithm.
• Increasing your site’s dwell time: Your email subscribers are more likely to park on your site and engage with the content for longer periods of time. This, once again, is great for your SEO and Google rankings.
• Test driving content: You can use your email to gauge interest and engagement with various content topics and ideas. This can help you identify what content you should invest in on your SEO-optimized blog.

Email is a targeted digital marketing tool. It can provide valuable insights and keep you connected with an audience that can play a critical part in boosting your SEO content.

3. SEO and Your Social Media

If you’ve spent any time studying SEO, you may have come across the little factoid that social media activity doesn’t directly impact your SEO. This makes it tempting to compartmentalize your SEO marketing and social media marketing as two different activities. 

Like email, though, there are many areas where the two can complement each other. According to the search engine marketing gurus at Semrush, social media can impact SEO in several different ways by:

• Driving traffic to your content through shares and backlinks;
• Increasing brand awareness and reputation;
• Boosting local SEO;
• Increasing the lifespan of your optimized content;
• Helping your content reach a larger audience.

When it comes to social media, there are more options available than a single email channel. That said, you want to choose social media platforms that will help with your particular SEO needs.

For instance, LinkedIn is a great platform to generate leads and drum up B2B SEO activity. Medium can help you build your brand’s persona, boost awareness, and resonate with a growing audience. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest attract huge numbers of users and make it easy to share and search for links to your site’s content.

Social media may not impact SEO via things like Google’s search algorithm. However, it can have a major impact on the effectiveness of your other SEO content by helping to proliferate it to a much larger audience.

4. SEO and Your Digital Marketing Strategy

SEO can be powerful, but if it’s used as a magic bullet, it can also be a waste of time. If you’re investing in SEO because it’s “the thing to do,” there’s a good chance your efforts are going to fall flat.

Instead, make sure that you have a clear strategy that integrates SEO with your other digital marketing efforts. Remember that the primary goal should always be to create a high-quality user experience for your target demographic. You want to reach them with content that resonates with their problems and offers solutions.

This is why you want a well-defined plan that helps you combine your SEO, email, social media, content, and other digital marketing activity into one, coherent strategy. One way to do this is by utilizing Dr. Dave Chaffey’s RACE marketing plan framework. 

Chaffey describes the purpose of RACE as a model that provides “a simple structure for companies to develop a digital marketing or omnichannel communications plan.” This is done with the goal of “reaching and engaging online audiences to prompt conversion to online or offline sales.” The acronym stands for:

• Reach: Building awareness and visibility;
• Act: Interacting with potential customers;
• Convert: Converting at the point of sale;
• Engage: Engaging in a long-term customer relationship.

By honing your digital marketing efforts around the RACE model, you can ensure that everything is working toward the same goal. This makes it easier to organically weave elements like email and social media right into your SEO efforts.

From websites to social posts, emails to strategies, there are many ways that you can complement your SEO efforts. If you can invest a little creative energy in syncing up these different factors, you can create synergy that can take your digital marketing to the next level.

OR, let a tried and tested SEO tool help you out. We’ve researched the market and found the best one for you:

Semrush – The Best SEO Tool for Businesses of All Sizes

Semrush has been around since 2008 and has helped more than 10 million businesses optimize their websites for search engines and get the maximum traffic.

One of our favorite Semrush features is the Domain Analyser. Before you get started on your SEO journey, it’s important to understand where you stand. 

Since your domain authority plays a significant role in your overall SERP ranking, Semrush will help you know your authority and ways to increase it. You can also use it to check your competitors’ domain authority to find ways to outrank them. 

An important part of building your domain authority is through creating quality backlinks — Semrush comes with an inbuilt tool to analyze and audit them. 

You can use this tool to get the complete backlink history of your competitor’s site and check which publishers are willing to leave a backlink to quality content, and contact them for a link back to your own site.

If there are any other underlying technical issues that could be harming your website’s SEO, run a quick full site audit with Semrush. 

Under this, you’ll find the list of all technical issues, such as slow page loading speed, duplicate content, SSL errors, crawl errors, and more. Anything that could be limiting your SERP ranking will be highlighted in this audit.

Pricing

At $99.95/month, there are little to no SEO tools that’ll give you the extent of features that Semrush does.

With the Pro plan, you can track 500 keywords, get your website’s audit done by professionals, conduct thorough competitor analysis, and more. 

Unlock 1,000+ keyword tracking, historical data, free migration from third-party tools, and more with Semrush’s premium plans — Guru and Business. 

Don’t take us at our word. Try Semrush for yourself. You have a 7-day free trial and a 7-day money-back guarantee that’ll ensure you don’t lose any money if the tool isn’t your cup of tea.