By Anthony Lambrianos – s3668693 – Digital Marketing Blog – Week 9
Firstly lets classify what Search Engine Optimization (SEO) really is, according to Moz an official SEO learning centre, SEO can be understood as the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.
Now we look at some reasons why Search Engine Optimization is so beneficial. The first reason is that an optimized website often receives more traffic and this means that more consumers are visiting your site, the more consumers that visit the more likely you are to make a sale. Its also important as having an optimized site can help you to build your brand, and according to Crazyegg.com SEO and Branding often involve similar steps.
Another reason for using SEO is to build trust and credibility among your consumers. Essentially the goal of any SEO strategy is to create a strong foundation for a website that is clean, effective for users and their experience and that is easily discoverable in searching, all of this due to the brand and its digital properties. Strong Search Engine Optimization means a better user experience, and according to Sam Hollingsworth, Google has learnt how to interpret a more favourable or unfavourable user experience, and having a very strong and enjoyable user experience is a imperative for a websites success.
All though there are many more benefits the final one we will speak about is the cost efficiency of Search Engine Optimization. Sam Hollingsworth states that of-course it costs money, but all great things do. SEO is considered relatively cheap for its payoff will often be considerable in the sense that brand benefit and bottom line will increase. Its better to consider this an business investment rather then a marketing cost as strong SEO implementation will be of use for many years and will only improve as more and more businesses use it.
Finally, I would like to conclude by saying that I as a digital marketer feel that without making use of Search Engine Optimization the business is holding itself back as there is many benefits to be gained from participating in SEO. I would also like to thank you for reading my Blog this week and ask as fellow Digital Marketers to comment below if you feel that the benefits of SEO far out way the cost and if not tell me why.
Kind regards, Anthony Lambrianos, S3668693, Week 9, Digital Marketing.
Anthonys Blog 
Great Blog this week Anthony, Glad to see you are keeping up the good work. What do you think of other Search Engine Marketing (SEM) techniques such as Paid Search Marketing (PPC)?
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Hey Stellios, thanks for commenting with such an interesting question. Personally when it comes to pay-per-click marketing it think that it’s viability heavily depends on the product or service your trying to sell. For example I think if your trying to sell plumbing it’s not a great idea, however, products like highSmile have gained a lot of traction and attention through these methods. So in my opinion it just depends on the situation and but as whole they are great marketing methods.
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Hey Anthony, great blog! It was really informative. I just wanted to get your thoughts on whether you think SEO is a viable strategy for smaller businesses? Obviously the relative cost will be higher to them – so do you think it’s still worth their while to invest in something like this?
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Hi Robin, I’m glad you enjoyed the blog and the content. Your question is really thought provoking and Ive come to the conclusion that if the business has capital to invest then it would be worth it, as SEO is everlasting with more and more companies investing in it everyday and as long as people want your product and service it will be beneficial to the business. However, if the business doesn’t have any capital to be spending and is on a tight budget then it may be better to wait as the return on such an investment is not instant but rather over-time/long term.
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Hey Ant, this is a really well written blog, well done! There are also great comments and replies which I would like to add to. Firstly, I think it’s most important that you improve the user experience across the entire website. There are also very valuable things you can do which people tend to forget about or not think of at all. For example optimising for voice search or focusing more on topic clusters instead of the usual keywords.
You can also conquer video by using YouTube SEO. You could easily target local searchers by creating local listings and landing pages. And last but not least know how to measure your SEO performance so you are getting the most you can possibly get out of it.
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Evening Michael, I appreciate your reply, and I much enjoyed reading through your comments on SEO and the benefits that could be gained through those various methods. I also specifically felt that what you said about measuring the SEO performance is very important, any companies that decide to optimise their search Engine need to be monitoring and measuring it in order to ensure that its effective and worth the expense. However, I have a question for you, do you feel that SEO is viable for smaller businesses?
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Personally Anthony, I feel it is not, however, if the small business is making a substantial amount of money as is hoping to expand in the future I would say its not a bad investment in preparation for future business. However, that doesn’t mean that a small business shouldn’t have a nicely optimized site, it just doesn’t have to be on the level of major international corporations with millions of visitors.
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Thank you for this response Michael, I find myself agreeing with you 100%, most small businesses should be focusing funds in other places with more value to their current business structure.
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