MGT1021

Digital and Social Media

Marketing
Sudheer Muhammed KM
Assistant Professor
VIT Business School (VITBS)
VIT Chennai
Search Engine
Optimization
 What Is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine
optimization.”
It is the process of getting traffic
from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial”
or “natural” search results on search
engines.
 Three types of SEO that an SEO
strategist can focus on:

• On-page SEO:

• Off-page SEO:

• Technical SEO:
 Search Engine Optimization
• SEO focuses on nothing else but expanding a
company’s visibility in the organic search results.
• It helps businesses rank more pages higher in SERPs
(Search Engine Result Pages.)
• In short, SEO drives two things — rankings and
visibility.
 Rankings
• This is a process that search engines use to
determine where to place a particular web page in
SERPs.
 Visibility
• This term describes how prominent a particular
domain is in search engine results. With high
visibility, your domain is prominent in SERPs. Lower
search visibility occurs when a domain isn’t visible
for many relevant search queries.
 Customer Buying Behavior
Today, more people use search engines to find
products or services than any other marketing
channel.
18% more shoppers choose Google over Amazon.
136% more prefer the search engine to other retail
websites.
And B2B buyers conduct up to 12 searches, on
average, before engaging with a brand.
 Customer Buying Behavior
• 77% people research a brand before engaging with
it.
Customer Buying Journey
How does Google know how to
rank a page?
• To deliver the right information to users,
search engines analyze two factors:

• Relevancy between the search query and the

content on a page. Search engines assess it by
various factors like topic or keywords.
• Authority, measured by a website’s popularity
on the Internet. Google assumes that the more
popular a page or resource is, the more valuable
is its content to readers.
 Three Core Components of a
Strong SEO Strategy
• Technical Setup

• Content

• Links
 1. Technical Setup
• For your website to rank, three things must
happen:
• First, a search engine needs find your pages on the
Web.
• Then, it must scan them to understand their topics
and identify their keywords.
• And finally, it needs to add them to its index — a
database of all the content it has found on the web.
This way, its algorithm can consider displaying your
website for relevant queries.
Website navigation and links
Simple URL structure
 Page speed

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Dead links or broken redirects
Sitemap and Robots.txt files
Duplicate content
Content
 Content
• Here are two reasons why:
• Content is what customers want when searching.
Regardless of what they’re looking for, it’s content
that provides it. And the more of it you publish, the
higher your chance for greater search visibility.
• Also, search engines use content to determine how
to rank a page. It’s the idea of relevance between a
page and a person’s search query that we talked
about earlier.
 Keyword Research
• The process typically involves identifying terms and
topics relevant to your business. Then, converting
them into initial keywords. And finally, conducting
extensive research to uncover related terms your
audience would use
 On-Page Optimization
• On-page optimization, also called on-page SEO,
ensures that search engines
• a.) understand a page’s topic and keywords,
• and b.) can match it to relevant searches.
 Keyword Optimization
• Post’s title:
• URL:
• H1 Tag:
 Keyword Optimization
• The first 100 words (or the first paragraph) of
content:
• Meta-title and meta-description tags:
• Image file names
 Non-Keyword-Related On-Page
Optimization Factors
• External links:

• Internal links:

• Content’s length:

• Multimedia:
 Three Core Components of a
Strong SEO Strategy
• Technical Setup

• Content

• Links
 Definition of link building
• Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks
from other websites to your own.
• Link building describes the actions taken with the
goal of increasing the number of backlinks pointing
to pages on a website.
• In SEO, link building is done with the goal of
increasing a page or website’s ranking in search
results.
• A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for
users to navigate between pages on the internet.
Why is Link Building Important?
• Link building affects SEO
• With PageRank, Google looked at backlinks as a
measure of a page’s importance, usefulness and
trustworthiness on the web.
• So pages with a lot of backlinks would rank higher
in search results because people had endorsed that
page’s quality and relevance.
Why is Link Building Important?
• Link building makes your content more
relevant and authoritative
• backlinks from high quality, authoritative websites
make your content look better in the eyes of new
potential customers.
Why is Link Building Important?
• Link building could help increase time spent
on your website
• Backlinks from relevant content help attract a more
qualified and engaged experience.
 How Do I Build Links for SEO?
• Some strategies to do it:
• Editorial, organic links: These backlinks come from
websites that reference your content on their own.
• Outreach: In this strategy, you contact other
websites for links. This can happen in many ways.
You could create an amazing piece of content, and
email them to tell them about it. In turn, if they find
it valuable, they’ll reference it. You can also suggest
where they could link to it.
 How Do I Build Links for SEO?
• Guest posting: Guest posts are blog articles that
you publish on third-party websites. In turn, those
companies often allow including one or two links to
your site in the content and author bio.
• Profile links: Many websites offer an opportunity
to create a link. Online profiles are a good
example..
 How Do I Build Links for SEO?

• Competitive analysis: Many SEOs regularly analyze

their competitors’ backlinks to identify those they
could recreate for their sites too.
 Advantages of search engine
optimization (SEO)
• Your website will be found
• Improve your competitive edge
• Expand your customer base and target audience
• Cost effective
• Long term standings
• Free traffic
• Targeted traffic
• Higher sales (ROI)
 Advantages of search engine
optimization (SEO)
• Global reach
• All the results can be measured
• Better conversion (sales)
• Pull marketing
• Increased visibility
• Your own 24 hour marketing team and shop front
 Disadvantages of search engine
optimization (SEO)
• Often, websites are never “indexed” by the search
engines
• After sites are indexed, often they are not indexed
for specific keyword(s)
• Website owners have no idea which search terms
would really be best to drive traffic
• Fresh content is very important, but hard to keep
up with
• Domain age plays a role
 Disadvantages of search engine
optimization (SEO)
• It’s hard work and time consuming
• No one really understands how Google works
• If your competition is high, it gest more difficult
• Takes a long time to see the best results
• On going process
Keyword Targeting Best Practices
• https://www.wordstream.com/keywords
• https://ads.google.com/intl/en_in/home/tools/key
word-planner/
 Marketing Automation
• HubSpot
• Marketo
• InfusionSoft
• Adobe Marketing Cloud
• Act-On
• Wishpond
Sample Questions of CAT

• “Digital marketing and Social Media Marketing go

hand-in-hand” Justify with reference to FMCG
Company of your choice

• Employers are cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs

as Covid-19 continues to hit the economy. Describe
the opportunities created by internet marketing for
unemployed people.