Picture this – Someone googles “Best Running Shoes.” …and (literally) seconds later, your competitor’s site is the top organic search result. Yours is somewhere down the page, if it shows up at all.
It’s a small slice of time, but when it happens, you know. You see your potential customer right there. You just don’t get to prove to them why you’re the best running shoes.
Here’s the interesting part (and this is where people’s eyebrows go way up):
The first organic search result on Google receives about 27.6% of all clicks. Go ahead and let that sink in. SEO is no longer a fringe strategy. It’s no longer a “nice to have.”
SEO is what makes or breaks your business, from being visible and in the mix to simply not being seen at all. So, how do you integrate SEO into your marketing efforts as an essential component, and not just an afterthought?
In this post, we answer that question (with examples, practical takeaways, and actionable info you can actually use) whether you’re a small business owner, a mid-sized brand trying to level up your SEO, or an entrepreneur hoping to launch a new idea or side hustle.
Let’s move your brand from the shadows into the spotlight, together.
SEO as Part of your Marketing Strategy
SEO is not an island. SEO performs best when integrated into everything else you are doing online. It should be consistent with your social posts, your emails, and even the ads you run when you want quick results.
When all those pieces play together, rather than ignoring each other, you get a flywheel effect. There is more reach, more engagement, more, “Wow, these guys really know what they are doing.”
But how do you make it work? And why would you even want to?
Integration is fairly simple to understand. On its own, it means just taking SEO as part of the bigger picture. SEO is the foundation (making sure the site, the pages and the content are findable), and the social channels, email list, and paid ads take the content to the various places your audience is hanging out.
For example, you might write and publish a blog post that is targeting “best SEO agency in SA.” Left to its own devices, that page will slowly begin to rank in the search results. If you share the post on X.com, you can start a conversation around it. If you include it in your email to subscribers, they are more likely to spend time on the page. You can even run a small Google Ads campaign just to test how the topic is performing.
All those channels feed off each other. And when it works in concert, the results tend to accumulate in a way SEO alone never could.
Okay, but how do I actually do that?
One great first step is actually understanding what each of your marketing channels is best at. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, which is to say, distinct personalities.
Social media, for example, is best used to get attention right now. Share the assets you’ve already optimized for search—your how-to posts, short explainer videos, any other content with an easily digestible hook—on Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever platform you hang out on. The platforms are perfect for posting bite-sized samples or previews with a little nudge: “Check out the full guide on our site.” The clicks are small, but they do contribute to organic visibility.
Email is different. It’s more of a quiet signal to people who’ve already proven they care. Send your subscribers a couple of sentences from your newest blog post. But not just any blog post, one that’s actually related to what your audience has shown interest in before. You nurture your audience’s engagement, and Google notices people are coming back for more.
Paid ads, then, are your experimentation platform. PPC is a sandbox to try out keywords with low organic visibility. You run a small “SEO for startups” campaign and see if you can get anyone to bite. When they do, you know that there’s enough demand to create more long-term, organic content around that idea.
The trick is tying them all together. When your messaging, your keywords, and the objectives of each channel all point toward the same goal, the results start to add up that much quicker.
Why Does It Work?
It works because it’s aligned with how real people move around the Internet. They don’t take a linear path. You may get discovered on a Facebook feed on their lunch break, they may Google you a few hours later and actually convert after opening a link in an email 2 days later. This is the real world.
SEO for a slow dripfeed of traffic is awesome. But when you combine it with touchpoints that funnel people back to your site – social, email, even a little paid campaign can accelerate the cycle. Social signals, even if weak, tell Google people are digging your stuff. Email will keep them coming back for repeat visits, which generally translates to better engagement signals. PPC is a way to gauge which keywords are worth optimizing for in the long run.
The combined effect is not additive. It’s multiplicative. Each channel leverages the other slightly and before you know it you have a fairly formidable web presence.
Analyse Your Audience’s Search Intent
SEO truly begins to take shape when you identify what people are looking for in the search bar. And the biggest part of it is intent. Why are they searching in the first place? Are they gathering information (“how to improve rankings”)? Locating a specific website or page (“Takealot login”)? Or are they looking to purchase something (“buy SEO software”)? Recognising the type of mindset at work in a search helps make everything else easier.
HubSpot is an example I’ve often seen cited with success. By simply churning out as many “how-to” content as possible that answer questions that their specific audience has, they made an incredibly massive SEO impact. I personally found that the same applied to niche content in South Africa, and SMEs were still able to rise to the top by chasing keywords like “how to start a business in Johannesburg”.
The contrast was staggering for me. I struggled to make headway by ranking for generic, broad phrases like “digital marketing”. As soon as I shifted my attention to a more specific “digital marketing for small businesses”, I tripled the clicks on my blog within 3 months. And the thing is, sometimes it takes the tiniest adjustment to unlock the greatest outcome.
If you’re stuck, keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush can be an absolute godsend, to be honest. And look for long-tail keywords with clear intent (“best CRM for startups”). Not only are they typically less competitive, ironically easier to rank for, they also have a greater chance of getting visitors that are near the stage of taking action. The behaviour of your audience in their searches should drive your SEO, and less guesswork.
Publish High-Value Optimized Content
Content is the center of SEO but not in the “slap 20 keywords in a paragraph” sense. It’s about providing something of value to the people seeking information; it’s content that lasts, is bookmarked and continues to work overtime for you months after you press publish.
I found a great example of this with GO2Africa in South Africa. These guides for terms like “best safari destinations in SA” are so comprehensive and genuinely useful that they continue to pull in traffic month after month (and, not surprisingly, bookings).
That’s high value content doing the real work behind the scenes and if you’re interested I’d recommend checking out their site in more detail to see how an intentional approach to content can power an entire SEO strategy.
SEO Project Manager Simon Shaw also had a great take on this with his definition of “quality content means content that is packed with clear utility and is brimming with inspiration, and it has relentless empathy for the audience”. It’s a bit of a mouthful but it’s one that resonates with me. I think if you focus on truly useful content that is written with an intent to help—not just to rank—you’ll usually be rewarded by the search engines as well.
On-Page and Technical Optimization
The technical side of a site: the code in the background, the meta titles and descriptions, headers, how fast a page “lights up” on a click, etc. This determines if your site is ignored, if your content can be seen and found.
- Site speed: Many studies have been done on this and here is the summary from Nitropack with their own data from 245,433 visits:
- You guessed it… load times between 0 – 3 seconds works. With all this focus on UX, I can’t believe this bears repeating… Slow load times = Lost visitors.
Extend the loading time between 2-3 seconds, and a 50% conversion drop happens before a visitor clicks “back” out of your site. Once second, lost.
How cruel to humans and their attention spans is that?!? Of course, it’s why… there is a conversion time. That extra second can be the extra wait on that $0.99 book someone decides to buy or not buy. Or that medical appointment a mom books for her sick child or not book. Or a form a user starts, and then a whole page reloads due to some tracking script out of date on an old template. You notice it in lost traffic, then lost revenue.
Google won’t hide the fact that a fast site will be rewarded with rankings, mobile friendliness, lower bounce rate, etc. All this feedback loop… and all things competitive. At some point, I think fast is a point of brand authority.
Consumers notice faster sites. They stick around longer. They can find what they need faster. Site speed UX has improved, and so has our expectation as consumers. These are little to nothing value-added things to your site, and they can make a huge impact.
Build Authority Through Link Building
It’s worth repeating: link building is fundamentally the process of building trust with the internet. When you get a link from another trusted site, they’re making an endorsement of you. They’re implicitly saying, “yes, these guys are experts in their field. People should read this.”
Search engines understand that. They know that Google link juice isn’t quite magical, but it is certainly significant, and they pay attention to who links to your website, what that says about your authority, and how well your industry trusts you.
Trust in new links. The really important ones (the ones that shift your rankings) come from other trusted sources. Industry blogs, well-known news publications, trade or professional directories, and so on. These tend to be the ones you’ve earned by doing something that’s legitimately worthy of an inclusion: a content partnership, a guest blog post request, or something genuinely useful like a long-form guide or an infographic.
Search engines will generally tend to favour the websites that other websites trust. Consider how many backlinks Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO now has — it’s got thousands, largely because people trust it.
GetLinko puts it well: “Link building involves analyzing the disparity between backlinks in number and quality… Websites with high backlinks are from reputable and relevant sites with the content a target website is attempting to drive… Search engine spiders place greater value on the best quality of backlinks, thus increasing the trust, trustworthiness, and web-page ranking.”
Basically, it’s a fancy way of saying what every SEO learns eventually: that links are not created equal, and good ones will go a lot further than you think.
How Do You Align SEO with Other Internet Marketing Disciplines?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is about as likely to work in a vacuum as Stephen Curry is to miss a three-pointer. It works much better as part of an overall online marketing strategy. Your social posts, email marketing, PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns, and more are quietly chugging along behind the scenes, but it’s when these pieces are talking to each other that the magic starts to happen.
Here’s a simple example. Let’s say you create a killer list of the “best safari destinations.” You can’t just post that and leave it on your site. You have to share it on your social profiles and it gets some shares and comments and all of a sudden, Google is taking notice. Maybe you even put it in an email to subscribers in a simple “here’s a useful list we thought you would like” email campaign. But now you have new site visitors who stick around and increase engagement. It’s not really SEO directly, but it’s still related and you have the content created.
PPC works to an extent as well. My view of paid advertising has always been that it can serve as a shortcut to testing the effectiveness of certain phrases. I know that “SEO for startups” is a viable phrase because I’ve tested it in paid ads and received a robust clickthrough. If I tried “SEO for new businesses” or “SEO for entrepreneurs” I could probably see the lack of quality early on in my testing instead of spending 6 months of content creation.
In a nutshell, it’s about discovering low-hanging fruit before you spend 6 months creating content and finding there’s no market for it.
Neil Patel put it more succinctly (in his typical, in-your-face manner): “The only thing to remember is that solid SEO is a slow burn. While you may experience an uptick in SERP ranking when you put your plan into place, keep in mind that this is a marathon. You probably won’t experience success overnight, so hang in there.”
Hang in there indeed. Hang in there because there’s a reason for that last part of the quote. All those pieces I mentioned above—the social media, the email, the PPC. They’re all taking care of business while your organic SEO is plugging away.
SEO Roadmap: Your Step-by-Step Guide
Look at this as a to-do list, not some mystical “master plan.” It’s just a list of steps that build on one another using tools that are available to most folks at little to no cost. Proceed at your own speed — this is not SEO marathoning.
1. Identify Business Goals
This is both the first step and one of the more commonly skipped ones: what, exactly, do you want to achieve? A 20% increase in leads over 6 months? More traffic? Better-quality enquiries? Write this down somewhere where you will see it and remember it — and not on a Post-it that you toss after 24 hours.
2. Research High-Intent Keywords
Now you go find the terms your audience is most likely to be typing into Google. Keyword Planner (free) or Ubersuggest (low cost) should provide plenty of data to get you started. Aim for a shortlist of around 10 phrases. I like long-tails (way more easy to rank) for early wins: “SEO for small businesses in Cape Town” over some vague monster term like “SEO.” Heck, you’re reading this article, called “How to Make SEO a Core Part of Your Marketing Strategy,” probably because someone types that into a search engine.
3. Optimise Content
Select 5 pages at random (don’t overthink it) and optimise them. Add some stats, break up text blocks, add proper headers, use visuals if you have any. Yoast (free on WordPress) is great at flagging readability issues and gently nudging you with keywords, H1s, and so forth. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s helpful.
4. Fix Technical Issues
Welcome to the fun part you all hate. Run Google PageSpeed Insights and take note of what it tells you is causing slow load times on your pages. Squash images (TinyPNG is good for this), clean up caching, and generally ensure your site isn’t an atrocious experience on mobile. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can give you a quick yes/no on that front.
5. Build Backlinks
Backlinks are where you start to get some authority in the SERPs, but it’s also going to require some elbow grease on your part. Publish something worth linking to — be that an in-depth guide, an infographic you’ve done a good job of laying out — and start sending it to blogs, local industry sites, who’s-who web pages. Hunter.io is decent at digging up email addresses for you to contact actual editors at these sites. Aim to get at least one solid backlink in the first few weeks, and build from there.
6. Leverage Local SEO If You Serve an Area
If your business has a distinct local audience, you really don’t want to miss this. Claim your Google Business Profile, ensure your name/address/phone number are consistent across Yelp, Yellow Pages, wherever, and prompt happy customers to leave reviews. Sprinkle location keywords throughout your site (“SEO services in Durban”) but don’t go heavy with this.
7. Analyse Your Competitors
Spy on what others in your space are ranking for, and who’s linking to them. SEMrush (free trial) and SimilarWeb (free tier) are more than sufficient to get started. Make a note of top keywords, top backlinks, and — most importantly — the content that’s working well for them. There will usually be gaps that you can fill with something more in-depth or more up-to-date.
8. Integrate Social Media
Cross-leverage your social channels to give your site content some breathing room. A snippet on LinkedIn or X with a backlink can provide an early source of engagement that sometimes cascades from there. Buffer can queue up those posts, so you don’t need to manually publish every day at dawn. Social signals are not an official ranking factor, but they sure don’t hurt with visibility and clicks.
9. Monitor Performance
You need Search Console, full stop. Track your impressions and click-through rates. If a page isn’t performing, try tweaking the title or meta description to make it more enticing. Some people take to tools like Google Optimize (when it was available) to A/B test this, but honestly, even a handful of manual tests can have a material impact.
10. Repeat
SEO changes. Your business changes. Your audience changes. Repeat: SEO changes. So this is a continuous loop, not a one-and-done activity. Check in monthly, and see what can be improved. Refresh older posts, update with new, better keywords, ask around for more backlinks, adjust your goals based on learnings. Rinse and repeat.
Gente HR Services SEO Case Study
The Problem – Stagnant website traffic, technical SEO issues, and an authoritative online presence were all affecting Gente, a supplier of HR and payroll services.
The company’s website had difficulty getting noticed for financial and HR-related topics, and it lacked authority and trust signals to reassure site visitors. Gente’s target clients were failing to find them in search results, and this was affecting business growth.
The Approach – We conducted a comprehensive SEO audit and implemented a holistic strategy to improve visibility and drive results. We fixed the site’s technical issues, such as speed, architecture, and mobile usability, which helped Gente to rank higher in search results.
We also established EEAT signals (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust) by adding expert bios, trust badges, and other credibility signals to the website. This helped to build trust with site visitors and with search engines. Finally, we optimized for local, high-intent keywords such as “HR services Johannesburg” to ensure that Gente showed up when potential clients were searching for them.
The Result – The results speak for themselves, with an increase in organic traffic by 4.5x, from 329 to 1,900 organic visitors in a span of 4 months. In a short period of time, the client increased its visibility on search engines, thanks to the comprehensive approach that encompassed technical SEO, EEAT building, and keyword optimization.
Conclusion
SEO for your business is a necessity, not a luxury. It’s a powerful way to get found online. I won’t lie to you—it can feel overwhelming at first. So much to consider! Keywords, site speed, content, mobile-friendliness, the list goes on.
The key is to start small. Focus on one thing at a time. Make regular progress. Track your results. And then repeat. Over weeks, months and years, you will start to see results. Your website will show up in more and more searches. Even in searches you never considered before. Trust the process. It will pay off.
SEO in Your Online Marketing Strategy FAQ
How long until I start seeing results from SEO?
Truthfully, it depends on how targeted your initial efforts are. Smart choices of low-competition long-tail keywords coupled with resolving some of the basic technical challenges (i.e., slow page load speed) can start to see some progress within a few weeks. But true, long-term growth? Takes time. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. And the gains you make will be compounding. So you will get a few sprouts early on, but it’s the fall harvest that really matters.
Do I need to hire an SEO expert?
Well, you can if you want to but if dont want to, then no you can definitely start with free tools, resources and a thoughtful plan. That being said, if your website has some technical complexities or you are in a high-competition market, an SEO pro can make things run much more smoothly, and, well, you will get results much faster.
When is the best time to adjust my SEO?
Search trends, industry algorithms, and helpful technology change and morph every few months. It is a good idea to monitor these with sites like Google Trends and more, so that when you’re ready to revisit your SEO, you’re not completely behind the eight-ball.
Can social media replace SEO?
In a sense, yes and no. Social media is a wonderful way to drive immediate awareness to your content because social media is fast and direct. However, once the content goes away, it’s all but forgotten. SEO, on the other hand, is slow to develop, but what you build stays. (And continues to grow.) In other words, social is the arrow, SEO is the bow. In short, use both.
I don’t have a large SEO budget. Can I still compete?
Absolutely. There are many free tools to assist you (Google Keyword Planner, Google PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, etc.) and you can build a free website. Most important, create consistent, quality content. It is far more effective to publish a short weekly blog post or add to an existing guide regularly than to go all-in and write one behemoth blog article that ultimately gets little to no real-time visibility.
If you like, I can amp this up a few notches and really have it read and sound like a human wrote it. Think funny, small storytelling moments, brief, focused analogies, alliteration, etc. Highly engaging content for your reader.
