Every successful online business is balanced on the backs of three whales: SEO, digital marketing, and branding.

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and in layman’s terms, it is defined as the set of activities that help a website rank high on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Digital marketing refers to any activity that aims to market a brand and its products or services to a target audience online and generate leads. 

Branding is the image a company cultivates and advertises to the general public. In digital branding, this is done via online means such as websites and online advertising. Branding is critical to securing a consistent customer base as it generates customer loyalty and trust.

In this era where the internet has taken over everything, it is very important for companies to establish an online presence through marketing and branding. And in this article, we will see why SEO is necessary for that.

Importance Of SEO For Online Marketing And Branding

In this section, we will look at how SEO reinforces digital marketing and branding. 

• SEO improves the visibility of a site in the SERPs

We’ve already noted that digital marketing aims to spread awareness of a brand to the largest number of people. Thus, SEO plays a significant role in any brand strategy. 

Search engines look at various factors to determine where they should rank a website. The first thing they check is what kind of keywords the site ranks for. Then they check whether the people who search for those keywords spend a significant amount of time on the visited sites.

Through SEO tags, websites can tell search engines what keywords they rank for. This allows search engines to match the sites with the searcher’s intent properly, which helps in improving the website’s visibility.

With higher visibility, more people are able to see the website on the SERPs, which increases its traffic and brand popularity. And that is one of the key objectives of digital marketing.

• SEO complements your content marketing efforts

Simple technical SEO is not enough to get a rise in SERP ranking. It must be paired with valuable and properly optimized content. Content that targets the right keywords and provides helpful information to its readers is one of the most important aspects of SEO writing.

Content marketing is related to both branding and marketing. Good content not only provides value to your readers but also instills trust and loyalty in them (which is the key objective of branding). 

That’s why SEO specialists make it a point to create high-quality content that targets the right keywords, is valuable to its readers, and is easy to read and understand. They achieve this by doing in-depth research about their topics and utilizing techniques such as paraphrasing.

Professional content writers also use a variety of tools to make sure that their write-ups are up to the mark. One tool that can be used for this purpose is a paraphraser, which can improve the content’s readability. They are mostly available for free and are a great resource to rephrase online.

Paraphrasing helps improve content readability and boosts user engagement. When the content is engaging, the people who visit the website will stay on it for longer. This, in turn, contributes to an increase in vital user behavior metrics such as dwell time and bounce rate.

Search engines use these metrics to determine whether content on a website is useful or not. If they notice that dwell time is high and the bounce rate is low, they will rank the page higher on the SERPs.  

• SEO generates more traffic

This is a marketing-related benefit, as one of the purposes of marketing is to increase the number of website visitors who are potential clients. SEO is used to improve the visibility of a website, which results in significantly increased traffic.

Now, why does visibility affect the traffic? That’s because the first page of search engines is generally trusted by the users. If any web page shows up on the first page and is near the top, the users will be inclined to visit it because they know search engines only put relevant web pages on such a spot.

• SEO improves lead generation

In marketing, a lead is either a person or an organization that has the potential to become your customer. Lead generation is an important aspect of digital marketing that allows brands to increase their number of customers and scale the scope of their business.

Now, how does SEO help in lead generation? The answer is quite simple. We know that SEO can improve the visibility of a site, inculcate trust in the users, and increase the amount of traffic. As a direct result of these benefits, people who didn’t know about your brand/business will be introduced to it, and they may even become customers in the future. 

All people interested to learn more about your company (by submitting a lead form, giving a call, or emailing you) are considered leads. Of course, the number of leads you will get will be different depending on whether you are a B2B (business to business) business or a B2C (business to consumer) business. When applying actionable lead generation techniques, you dramatically increase the percentage of website visitors who convert into leads.

Conclusion

 SEO is an essential part of digital marketing. It allows brands to market their products and services more efficiently by driving organic traffic and increasing their b2b leads database. You can improve your brand image through different website marketing strategies and show the world what kind of company you are. 

However, without proper SEO, these objectives cannot be completed. If you don’t know how to implement SEO as part of your digital marketing strategy effectively, consider referring to a professional SEO agency. The top-tier SEO and content marketing experts from ReVerb will gladly help you build an impressive web presence on Google and across numerous other channels!