Do marketing managers need to understand SEO?

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 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 define the number of things you have to think about and implement if people within the company need to know about you and how it impacts their lives. 95% of what SEO is beyond keyword stuffing; 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?

Imagine that you were not present at the meeting and 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 and 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 how information on your website is structured, how 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 need to use the right keywords in a natural flow and structure. When people find an interesting article or post, they spend more time on the site or bookmark it. The titles, tags and metatags used to describe the page headings and the content on the site have to match visitor expectations.

You don’t need huge traffic numbers. You need the right traffic. And Content Hub helps you understand how the best websites in your business 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 seek. 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 Content Hub for a while, and our design and development skills have grown manifold over time. Be it your existing installation or a new one you are planning, our CMS consultants will happily support you.