Since graduating in Digital Marketing this year, I never would have guessed there’d be so much more to learn about my chosen profession. I knew the basics of SEO, and its overall purpose, but to get down to the real nitty-gritty of this technical aspect of marketing has been a real eye-opener for me.
It’s been both a challenge and a rewarding experience, and I thought it’d be great to have a bit of a brain dump by sharing my week-to-week stories about working in this ever-changing industry. Surprisingly, the rest of the team agreed with me, and so here I am, writing my first “week in SEO” and hoping it provides something to look back on in the future.
The Importance of Communication
First, I really want to touch on communication. This is less relevant to my different weekly SEO tasks, and more focused on the day-to-day of being part of an effective team. Nevertheless, I think it’s really important.
Whether it’s making sure you’re replying to emails from clients promptly or just letting your colleagues know where you’re at with a task, communication is often the largest part of your job. In marketing specifically, external and brand communication is an absolute necessity when it comes to getting your message across to the right people, so why not focus on your internal communications just as much?
It can be comfortable to rely solely on your own ability and thus live in a vacuum without criticism, but bouncing ideas around with colleagues can enrich your work and highlight errors you might’ve missed. In the same way, communication and collaboration with your clients only enhances your relationship with them – ensuring they’re happy and remain with us for the long-term.
Content for SEO is King
This is another cliche, (especially within marketing circles) but is important to remember regardless.
Above all else, my main role as an SEO is to deliver high-quality content to our clients in the form of blogs, social media snippets, and website content. It’s easy to view this as a relatively simple task in isolation, but take into account the effort required to plan such content, target the right keywords, and internally link to other relevant content, and you’re in for a bigger challenge than expected.
Whenever a new client comes on board, there’s always a learning curve to understanding their tone of voice, brand, and what they need from a piece of content. Plus, I might be writing a blog on model trains one day and solar panels the next, so a certain amount of versatility is also needed.
It’s easy to get caught up in the more technical aspects of SEO, (website audits, meta descriptions and the like) but the truth is that the most visible, and often most important aspect of our role, is content.
Digital PR Can Change the Game
Without a doubt, digital press releases (DPR) can be one of the most rewarding methods of acquiring backlinks for your business or your clients. Basically, backlinks are when one website (it could be Trustpilot, Instagram, or a news site) provides a link to your own site.
These inbound links are massively important trust signals in the eyes of Google, and really help to boost search rankings. For our clients that have news to push out into the public domain, PR is both a successful SEO tactic and an important exercise in branding, so I sing its praises. For instance, PR can prompt things like brand mentions and social signals, (such as likes, shares, and comments) helping businesses to manage their reputation online whilst reaping the SEO-related benefits at the same time.
So, the credibility established by partaking in digital PR (if relevant for your business) can be a massive win-win. If you have something valuable to say, why not share it and boost your online presence at the same time?
Hopefully, this short brain dump of my thoughts has been a somewhat interesting first attempt at a blog series. I’ll be trying to do this more often, so stay tuned for more!