I am a senior at the University of Michigan - Dearborn obtaining my BBA with a concentration in Digital Marketing. This semester (Fall 2024), I have been taking a course in Digital Consumer Research and Marketing. This class has allowed me to learn more about SEO and how to utilize Google Ads to create campaigns optimized to show a site on the first page of Google search ranking. 

The main focus of the Digital Consumer Research and Marketing course this semester has been learning how to optimize SEO in order to organically bring traffic and conversions to your site. The class semester project was to create this website, and get it ranked on the first page of Google Ads for keywords assigned by my professor. Although this is a part of a class assignment, I am happy to share the wealth of knowledge I have gained over the course of the semester. 

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is critical to ensuring that when prospective customers search for things relevant to your business, they see your site on the first page of results. SEO is essential for making sure that there is organic traffic on your site, which is more trustworthy to searchers. 

There are two SEO types. On-site and off-site. On-site SEO is using things like optimized URLs, title tags, and meta descriptions. Off-site SEO consists of social media optimization and backlinks. 

On-site SEO is a very easy way to get your site higher ranked through searches. Using keywords related to your business within your site is the best way to optimize your page’s rank on a Google search. When creating your site’s URLs, using keywords within the URL such as, “site.com/keyword”, will allow Google’s “crawlers” to quickly identify that the keyword within your URL is related to the search. Title Tags are the actual title of the portion of the site you want to optimize. To create an optimized title, you could use “Keyword” as a title. Meta descriptions are the copy that is seen on the search display as the description of your site page. Using keywords in meta descriptions further ensures that Google knows that your site is valuable for a search for that keyword, and entices searchers to click. 

Off-site SEO also helps with getting traffic to your site and optimizing SEO. The most important off-site SEO is backlinks. Backlinks are simply linking out to your site on other platforms. Examples of this are commenting your link on a social media post, reddit post, or putting your link on your own social media posts.

There are a variety of factors that add to the value of your site's SEO. First is using keywords. For a more in-depth look at keywords I have another post focused on them! Keywords help to make sure that specific search words and phrases are relating back to your site. Quality content is also very important on your site. When search engines "crawl" your site they are looking to make sure you aren't spam. Your content should not only be authentic, but have a quality and well branded feel also. 

The importance of authenticity on your site has been one of the main topics from my course this semester. With the rise of AI, human authenticity has been compromised on many sites. Google’s crawling is able to tell when a site is AI trying to spam a keyword as much as possible. Not only can AI affect your site’s ranking due to crawling, it also can affect how consumers view the value of visiting your site. A human, authentic approach allows you to connect deeper with site visitors. AI can be an incredibly helpful tool for ideation, and other factors within Google Ads and SEO, but I would not recommend copy and pasting AI copy into your website for SEO. 

These are just a few of the SEO processes I have learned this semester, check out my other posts for an in depth look at google ads, keywords, and ads consulting!