Navigating The SEO Landscape: Reflection

Introduction

In our previous digital marketing class, we had the opportunity to gain valuable insights into the realm of Search Engine Optimization by former George Brown student Nirmal Chodvadiya. As a first-time marketing student who is eager to learn the required skill sets to become a successful digital marketer in today’s online landscape, I found the presentation to be enlightening and thought provoking. It was inspiring to see a fellow George Brown alumni who shared his success story following the completion of the Digital Marketing Course; Nirmal seemed very knowledgeable in the field. As SEO is one of the fundamentals of digital marketing, it’s important for us as students to learn all its valuable techniques in order to become successful in future work placements and business projects. I was able to get a deeper understanding of how SEO works, and how to implement its best practices for maximum reach by highlighting examples in real life scenarios, and how to navigate our chosen career paths through his experience. 

Understanding Of The SEO Process

The main pillars of the SEO process that Nirmal highlighted included keyword research for best reach, optimizing your website to fit the search engine, creating high quality links, and analyzing results to determine what strategies work best. The breakdown also included the importance of utilizing on-page and off page seo, which relates to the actual content of your landing page or website and how it’s structured, compared to the actions like blogs, reviews and articles on outside sources to increase traffic to your website. He also touched base on ranking, indexing, and the concept of site crawlers; which was a very intriguing breakdown as I am looking to strengthen my knowledge on the technicalities of SEO and how exactly professionals in the industry take on and develop enhanced strategies for successful marketing campaigns. Nirmal emphasized that improving SEO will enhance your website’s credibility, which will establish higher relevance, and boost organic traffic to your site. Visibility and performance makes websites appear higher in the search rank, and therefore easily discoverable. What I found particularly interesting was the discussion regarding google algorithms, which changes around 500-600 times per year, which I was not aware of. This aspect in particular is why best SEO practices are crucial in order for businesses to flourish in the digital landscape through optimizing content to attract organic results in order to stay on top of these complex algorithms. Additionally, Nirmal also touched on taking all these aspects in consideration when it comes to the modern transition to mobile usage, which is something I found particularly interesting as this is a crucial aspect in digital marketing when it comes to optimizing our websites. As Nirmal mentioned, I was not aware that Google had introduced new algorithms to fit this transition to mobile back in 2015. Through my past professions as an individual who has experience in website design, I am aware how an optimised mobile site might be more important than desktop sites in terms of having seamless functionality and quality content in order for users to easily navigate your page, which will increase rank results and avoid penalties from Google. 

Keyword Strategies And Research 

Continuing in the discussion, Nirmal highlighted the importance of using distinct keywords for multiple search terms to improve rank for brand authority, and therefore increased visibility, resulting in higher traffic volume and relevancy. This will ultimately create a long term return of investment for improving reach and establish better brand authority and recognition. For best keyword research, it is imperative to understand the concept of the user intent, as well as understanding the customer journey when establishing which keywords to utilize. Marketing after all involves not only technicalities, but also grasping a thorough understanding of the psychology and behaviors of your targeted audience, and what is there intention before purchasing a product. Additionally, we learned that it is crucial to have multiple keywords that can be grouped into one category for increased visibility amongst potential customers, and increasing chances to rank higher in the search engine.

Final Thoughts

Similarly to Nirmal, I was aware of the concept of SEO practices in past job placements, but did not have a full grasp of its in-depth technicalities. Additionally, I was curious about SEO and digital marketing techniques as a whole, and wanted to have a career change to learn more about digital marketing strategies to strengthen my skill sets. Therefore, I found his in-depth breakdown of SEO principles and practices very enlightening, and changed the way I see SEO. In this constantly evolving digital age of ecommerce and social media, I have always thought of how exactly I can succeed in online business endeavors when there is such high competition, and faced many difficulties in the past during my own marketing endeavors. It’s a very lengthy and costly process through lots of trial and error to experiment what works to optimize your content and website for best rank results. Personally, it was an inspirational experience in which I will take all I have learned on the intricacies of SEO and apply it to my own art marketing business to gain more brand authority and customer awareness. Through learning about on-page SEO, as well as the importance of avoiding keyword stuffing for best rank results in order for my page to gain increased traction and visibility. Additionally, in order to have a better advantage over competitors and gain my audience’s trust, I will now experiment and find ways to utilize creative valuable content for best off-page SEO tactics. This will relate to providing quality backlinks on other blogs and media sources that will draw potential leads to my art business, as well as utilizing other social media sources to post informative and quality content to promote my artistic endeavors. Overall, this enlightening seminar has altered the way I perceive digital marketing strategies, and I am confident that I will be able to utilise these skill sets knowledge to grow in my professional career.