Search engine optimisation is not just about ranking on search

There’s a misconception that SEO is about keywords. Select the 10-20 most important keywords that define your business, add them liberally across your site, spend some time and money on Google and your site will rank on page 1 for searches involving those keywords.

It’s about 5% true. Yes, keywords are important but that’s a bit like saying if you were to put the words ‘marketing manager’ across all your offices and branches in your company, everyone would get to know you.

Marketing Manager is a designation and function. As a keyword, it is a descriptor for what you do. But it doesn’t even begin to define the number of things that you have to think about and implement, if people within the company need to know about you and how it impacts their life. 95% of what SEO is beyond keyword stuffing and the sooner you get hold of it, the better your brand will perform.

SEO starts from within your website

Imagine you were taking a potential client through your actual business. Where would you start? What would you tell them to convince them to buy into the products your company makes?

Now imagine that you were not present at the meeting at all and you had to convince potential clients you make great products. Where would you begin?

Your website will have to do all the talking. So it has to be clear, consistent and provide enough details to keep prospects and clients interested. And exactly like you would not overwhelm clients with too much information at one go, you have to prioritise the way you direct and help them navigate your website in digestible doses.

Titles, Tags and Metatags, the foundations of your SEO

Every single page on your website should have a plan and a purpose. They have to be discovered by search engines and indexed right. If people come to your site by mistake and don’t find what they’re looking for, your ranking will automatically go down.

Think of search engines as judges who follow strict rules. If you abide by the rules, your website will steadily rise through the ranks. If you try to artificially boost your ranking, the penalty is that it will remain stuck at some point indefinitely or keep dropping

There’s a discipline to be followed – in the way information on your website is structured, the way you lead visitors through the site, how easy you make it for them to find the information they are looking for and how often they come back to your site.

Now, you do need to use the right keywords but in a natural flow and structure. When people find an article or post interesting, they either spend more time on site or they bookmark it. The titles, tags and metatags used to describe the page headings and the content on the site has to match visitor expectations.

You don’t need huge traffic numbers. You need the right traffic. And CMS Hub helps you understand how the best websites in the same business as yours attract traffic. Copying what they do is a bad idea. Create your own content in your own style and tone – keeping in mind what your customers want.

So, do marketing managers need to understand SEO? Of course they do. The principles are easy to practice if you know what your customers are looking for. Give value and you’ll get a hundred times of it in return. But not all at once! Like bank interest, it builds over time.

At BlueOshan, we have been working with HubSpot’s CMS Hub for a while and our design and development skills have grown manifold over time. Be it your existing installation or a new one that you are planning, our CMS consultants will be happy to support you.