5 Reasons to love SEO

1. Search Landscape - you can learn a lot about your competitors

We are however overwhelmed with data these days, so it really is about being laser focused on getting the insights you need. A Search Landscape, which is really a fancy word for a type of environmental analysis, can help you achieve this.

To do a Search Landscape you need to have a very clear understanding of what your users search for during their buying journey to build a list of strategic keywords. With some clever SEO tools to grab data from the web and our analysis we can identify:

• Your domains %share of search, categorised if needed by areas of your business
• Identify influential domains to benchmark against, be they competitors or publishers
• Discover content and pages which rank well for strategic keywords
• See how competitors earn links from other sites and what marketing they are doing

All of this can help inform the focus of your brand's marketing and influence your content marketing calendar or useful when planning a new website strategy. What's not to love about gleaning these types of insights?

2. Community - a large community of SEOs worldwide

The discipline of SEO is constantly evolving in line with algorithm changes from Google or Bing, but also in step with changes to website technologies.

SEO's are an unusual lot as they range from the seriously technical through to the fluffier content or digital PR side. Translating what can sometimes be highly technical into marketing strategies can be complicated - and over many years a global community of passionate SEO's has grown across the web sharing their insights and findings on forums like MOZ, blogs and publications like Search Engine Land.

The fact there is a global support network of SEOs is in my book something to love about SEO.

3. The one discipline that influences other business areas

SEO intrinsically touches nearly every part of a business. For example:

• When looking to optimise product naming to capture more searches we can train your buyers or product teams to write product names that are optimised for SEO. This means they are optimised at the start of the process not at the end.
• When looking at developing a marketing campaign to engage audiences we can work with a local store or internal department to arrange giveaway prizes and do online PR to promote instore events to local media.
• Through creating guides and latest product or lifestyle articles for your customers to engage with online, SEOs work with your internal teams to develop a plan and create content for your users. Your published content gets widely shared, searched for and generates more traffic for your site.

The insights from SEO can help inform a better understanding of seasonality, user search behaviour and consequently influences content marketing or campaigns which are promoted further with paid advertising, social media and email.

One of the biggest things to love is that SEO is worth the investment as organic search often returns the best ROI online.

4. It's really about users

For years digital marketers have sought to get around Search Engines to give their clients competitive advantage - as methods have become increasingly sophisticated so has Google's ability to police standards on the web.

At the end of the day there is only one gold standard to create a Google-friendly website and it's a very straightforward principle - give your users a great experience online with great content that helps your users achieve their goals. Nobody likes dull overly promotional content.

What's not to love about setting the bar high for great SEO - it means putting user experience first for web design, development and content practices.

5. Skinny jeans and beards

Something to love about the digital industry and SEO is that there is often a more relaxed approach to workwear in the office.

Estate agents wear suits, workmen and women have overalls and SEOs wear anything but. What's not to love about self-expression.