What Is the Role of SEO in Digital Marketing?

SEO involves optimizing a website to improve its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs), which can help increase your reach to potential customers and support your wider digital marketing efforts.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an integral part of a business’s digital marketing strategy, but it can sometimes be forgotten about, or put on the back burner, in order to focus on quicker wins and greater revenue-driving initiatives. This is quite common for small to medium businesses that maybe don’t have the resources to invest in a long-term marketing strategy such as SEO. It can also be quite difficult to convince stakeholders and decision-makers of the importance of SEO because it is not easily tied to specific financial numbers. Additionally, many people might not really understand what SEO is and how it can successfully help a business’s online presence.

Digital marketing involves businesses using digital channels and technologies to promote a product, service, or brand and to ultimately achieve their marketing objectives. Digital marketing is becoming increasingly important for businesses, as more and more consumers take to digital channels to make purchasing decisions. With digital marketing, businesses can reach a wider, and more global audience, target specific markets, e.g. by demographics, track and analyze consumer behavior, and drive greater brand awareness, sales, and revenue.

Such digital marketing techniques include:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

• Social Media Marketing (SMM)

• Content Marketing

• Email Marketing

• Influencer Marketing

And more! Any way you can advertise your business and its products or services through digital channels and technologies constitutes a digital marketing technique or tactic. A successful digital marketing strategy often involves a combination of different types of digital marketing activities to reach and engage with the target audience across multiple channels and touchpoints.

If you’re reading this, you may already know what SEO is, but here’s a quick refresher… SEO is a set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results. In other words, SEO is all about optimizing your website’s presence on search engines through various tactics, and because organic search is one of the greatest ways for people to discover your website, a good SEO strategy is necessary in increasing traffic to your website.

SEO is as much about people as it is about search engines. It’s important to understand what people are searching for online, and knowing how to answer their questions will connect you right to them. Knowing your audience’s intent and being able to deliver it in a way that search engine crawlers can find and understand is the sweet spot of SEO.

If your business does not have a website, there is a high chance that you could be missing out on all the benefits that ranking on search engines can offer your business. If you do own a website, having a distinct online presence offers more opportunities to increase the visibility of your business online, among many other benefits.

The role that SEO has in your business’s digital marketing may include:

Boost your authority and credibility online

SEO can help boost your authority and credibility online, because the higher that your website ranks on search engines, the more trusted your business will seem to both your target audience and search engine crawlers. This can boost brand reputation and encourage visitors to trust and engage with the brand.

Improve organic search rankings

By optimizing your website's content, structure, and technical aspects, SEO helps improve its ranking on search engines. A higher ranking leads to more visibility and traffic, which can translate into more leads and sales. This can be achieved through several tactics, such as keyword research, on-page optimization, technical optimization, and link building.

Gain organic website traffic

SEO can be used as a customer acquisition tool. By conducting effective SEO, you will help to drive traffic to your website, which is done by improving your visibility on search engines, or in other words, your rank position. This traffic can then be leveraged to convert these new visitors into customers, subscribers, or followers.

Enhance user experience

SEO involves optimizing a website's structure, content, and navigation, which can enhance your user's experience. Ensuring your website is accessible is something that is important to search engines, such as Google. There is strong evidence that Google rewards accessibility when ranking websites, and even has its very own Webmaster Guidelines that websites can follow as best practices. By making your website accessible, you are also making sure that everyone on the internet who lands on your website has a decent user experience, including people who may have particular disabilities. This, in turn, can reduce bounce rates, increase user engagement, and boost conversions.

Surpass your competition

SEO can help your business gain a competitive advantage over your competitors. This can include having more topical content via keyword research, greater website experience through accessibility best practices, ranking in a higher position on the SERP, greater brand awareness, and ultimately more targeted and converting traffic.

Maximize ROI

SEO is a cost-effective digital marketing strategy that can generate a high return on investment (ROI) when done right. SEO provides long-term benefits, as once you achieve a high-ranking position, you can continue to receive leads from it (as long as you’re able to compete for that top position). By driving more organic traffic and leads, SEO can contribute to a brand's revenue growth and bottom line.

Support other aspects of your digital marketing strategy

SEO can support other aspects of your digital marketing strategy, and vice versa. SEO can support social media, paid advertising, email marketing, influencer marketing, content marketing, and more.


While SEO is just one single digital marketing tactic in the grand scheme of things, it’s still so important to include it in your overall digital marketing strategy.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn greater and more relevant traffic through search engines. On-page refers to optimizing both the content of a page and the HTML source code of that page. Effective on-page SEO helps users quickly find answers to their questions. The ultimate goal of on-page SEO is to make it as easy as possible for search engines and users to understand what a web page is about, identify if that page is relevant to a search query, and find that page useful and worthy of ranking high on the SERP. Some key elements of on-page SEO include creating high-quality, relevant, linkable content, effective use of keywords, optimizing title tags, URLs, meta descriptions, image alt text, and more.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to optimization techniques that are done outside of your own website. The goal of off-page SEO is to get both search engines and searchers to view your website as a trustworthy source, by boosting its authority and credibility. This can be done by other reputable places on the Internet, like pages, sites, and people. This can look like link building, social media marketing, guest blogging, influencer marketing, and other promotional activities in order to help improve your website's ranking on search engines. But, building backlinks is at the heart of off-page SEO, as search engines use backlinks as an indication of the linked content’s quality. A website that has many high-quality backlinks will typically rank higher than other websites with fewer, and less valuable backlinks. When actively building links, it’s important to avoid black hat activities, and rather focus on more organic link building.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website’s technical aspects to improve that website’s visibility and ranking on the SERPs. Improving technical aspects can help search engine spiders crawl your website more effectively, and improve the usability of your site. It’s great having well-thought-out and useful content, but if a search engine can’t crawl your website, it’s likely that very few people will actually see it. A technically optimized website is fast, easily crawlable for search engines, has limited duplicate content, a wide variety of links, is secure (for example, HTTPS is implemented), utilizes robots.txt, has structured data, and more. Having an XML sitemap is a plus, and can greatly improve the way search engine spiders crawl and find content on your website. Check out the free Technical SEO Site Audit Checklist to quickly check your own website’s technical SEO performance.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the practice of optimizing a business's web presence online, to improve its visibility in local organic search results Any business that has a physical location or serves in a particular geographic area can benefit from local SEO. Search engines rely on a number of signals when ranking local businesses, such as website optimization, local content, social profile pages, links, citations, local business listings, and managed reviews. Having a Google Business Profile presence is also critical if you’re serious about optimizing for local search. When done right, local SEO allows users to find information about your business quickly and easily, so it’s a benefit for both parties. It's clear that local SEO should not be ignored!

Keep learning

• What Is SEO?
• The Beginner's Guide to SEO
• The SEO Keyword Research Master Guide
• How to Create an SEO Strategy
• On-Page Ranking Factors
• The One-Hour Guide to Technical SEO
• Local Search Marketing