As a digital media specialist, I’m often asked about SEO.
What it is, how it works and why it’s important. In this digital age, SEO is an essential piece of the media strategy puzzle. When understood and approached correctly, SEO can help define your brand’s voice, drive awareness and engagement, and enhance reputation management – leading to trust and loyalty.
Breaking Down What is SEO
At its most basic level, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. I like to break this down for clients by explaining that this is the ‘free’ type of marketing – the content you or your brand produces, as it pertains to your website.
From there, SEO is broken down into four categories:
- On-page SEO
- Off-page SEO
- Technical SEO
- Local SEO
On-page SEO
On-page SEO pertains to certain keywords or phrases on pages. Based on the focus of the page, various elements of each individual page are optimized.
These include:
- Title tags
- Explains what your page is about
- Ideally 50-60 characters
- Meta descriptions
- More thorough description of what the page helps answer
- Ideally 160-character maximum
- Content structure
Putting careful thought into the above mention gives the content of page a better chance of ranking in search results.
Content structure is exactly what it sounds like: paragraphs, lists, tables, graphics, and internal or external links that make up the content of the page.
Internal links are links back to content on your website, whereas external links go to pages that are not on your website. These can be marked in different ways to tell web crawlers different things.
Web crawlers, or spiders, are digital bots that are created by search engines to find content across the web.
Types of links:
- Follow
- One website passing authority to another
- Example: citing a research paper in a blog to lend credibility
- One website passing authority to another
- No-follow
- One website linking to another but choosing not to pass authority
- Example: A large media company posting about a new start-up that has no discernable history beyond this initial posting
- One website linking to another but choosing not to pass authority
- Sponsored
- A link that someone pays for to have listed on a page
Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is a mix of a few different things, but it boils down to what helps direct people back to your website.
One example is word-of-mouth. Someone had a great experience with your brand, told their friend, and that friend searched for your brand name.
Another is a concept called link building, which is when a link to your website lives somewhere else on the internet.
This includes, but is not limited to, the following:
- Media mentions
- Being an industry expert and getting featured on a website
- Directory listings
- Review sites
- Google Business Profile and Yelp
- Social media pages
- Blogs
The types of links mentioned above feed into this, as well. Most review sites, directories and social media page links are usually marked as ‘no follow.’
Media mentions are where things tend to fluxuate. Unless you have SEO tracking software, it can be difficult to determine if a link to your website is marked as a ‘follow’ or not.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO affects web security, health and performance, especially as it pertains to the user. Through various SEO software, your SEO manager or developer can run audits to look for errors affecting various things.
These include, but are not limited to:
- Site speed
- Broken links and pages
- Plug-ins that need updating
- Canonicals
- Mobile optimization
This is also where schema is implemented to help explain to web crawlers what different pages of your website are for.
Let’s say you have an About page, as well as a Meet the Team page, on your website. Both are similar but have different purposes. The former would be classified as an “About Page” and the latter would be a “Profile Page.” This differentiation can help surface different pages in a user’s search based on what it is they’re looking for.
Local SEO
Local SEO is especially important for small businesses as it helps them compete with large national brands. Implementing local SEO piggybacks off regular SEO tactics.
Three big takeaways for local SEO:
- Ensure business listings are consistent across all types of directory listings
- Develop valuable content on your website tailored to your local area
- Optimize your Google Business Profile and keep it up to date
An example of content that gives value on a local level could be a plumber based in Austin, Tx. The plumber could provide an FAQ section on their website answering commonly asked questions about plumbing as it pertains to Austin regarding local laws, seasonal issues, etc.
Now That We Know What SEO Is, Why Does It Matter?
Think of SEO as the digital footprint of your brand. All mentions, linked or not, feed into SEO and help provide a wholistic digital picture of your brand.
SEO in the First Quarter of the 21st Century
Before 2024, many tactics for SEO affected a website’s visibility in search engines, with people competing for the ‘top-10 blue links.’
This was done by writing and optimizing for keywords – usually two to four words long – using what was already ranking in the top-10 as a guide of what to do.
AI Overviews and Chatbots
With the rise AI Overviews and Chatbots, that frame of thinking has changed drastically. In addition to ranking well in search engines (namely Google) content, all content must also be crawlable for AI models.
Now, it’s no longer a Google bot scanning your website and someone else’s; it’s agents like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini scraping as much as they can across the entire internet for any sort of mention of your brand – linked or not.
It also means restructuring content to account for these new crawlers. Instead of writing long chunks of text, these agents are looking for skim ability, lists, bullet points, alt text … things that are easily digestible to work toward the summaries they produce.
Why This Is Important for Your Brand
Search (i.e., how consumers find your brand) is experiencing a monumental shift. ‘Top-10 blue links’ has been swapped with Instagram content and captions, YouTube videos, media mentions, social media and chatbots.
Content Continues to Be King
Without content – whether that be a blog post, About Us page, social media presence or FAQ section – there is no SEO. Without SEO, there are no rankings or visibility. Without visibility or rankings, your brand is floating out into the ethers of the internet.
This means brands must be everywhere and anywhere, diversifying their content to be seen across all facets of the digital world. Cohesive, constant and current branding is key to surviving in the digital age and ensuring all SEO efforts work toward the same goal: getting your brand in front of the right people as often as possible.
And that’s where a great digital PR team comes in.