What is Digital Marketing?

What is Digital Marketing - Twitter Photo

Digital marketing is essentially how you promote your businesses reputation through any form of digital media. This includes on the internet and social media platforms - as well tv and radio advertising.

As more and more people use the internet, the way we shop has changed – meaning traditional offline marketing isn’t as effective as it once was. With the internet being so accessible and always available, digital marketing can make sure your business is in the right place all of the time.

Methods of digital marketing

There are many different types of digital marketing but most fall into these 11 categories:

Many of the biggest companies around the world use the majority of these methods. Smaller businesses can benefit from just using a few of these services suited to their needs, goals and budget. Creating a marketing strategy and outlining these is a great foundation to start mapping your digital future. A major benefit of digital marketing is that it is easily measurable in real-time.

SEM

Search Engine Marketing refers to both SEO and PPC. Bringing traffic to your website through a search engine is not as easy as it once was. Using SEO and PPC together works to bring in traffic through both paid (PPC) and unpaid (SEO – organic) means. Unpaid doesn’t mean SEO is a method without a cost, see below.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is an important part of mastering search engines such as Google and Bing. Many website owners create a sitemap for their website with the key search terms of their industry – chances are, competitors (both nationally and locally) are doing the same. This makes it a very difficult job to compete in the SERP for these keywords.

Our keyword research tool can help you build on you sitemap. It helps identify keywords and long-tail keyword opportunities that your competitors are yet to discover. Keyword research also helps you understand and build your internal link structure as well as identify any Schema markup opportunities, such as FAQ’s and Google’s rich snippets – both great for taking your SEO beyond the traditional ‘top 10’ listings.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of enhancing the content of your website to follow the guidelines set out by search engines such as Google and Bing. These search engines have a series of ‘checks’ that work out how your website should rank for a search query. These are set out in pre-determined algorithms, allowing a search engine to quickly sort out content in less than a second.

When done correctly, SEO is the key to ranking on the first page in the organic set of results and an essential part of attracting more visitors to your website via search engines. Although you will see an initial bounce in SERP from implementing SEO procedures, this should be viewed as a mid-long term method and reviewed periodically. SEO is an on-going strategy with the simple philosophy of ‘the more time you have to invest in it, the more positive the results will be.’

How Do Boost SEO Plans Work?

We determine how you perform against your competitors through keyword research, ranking analysis and looking at the on-page ranking factors of your website.

We then build an SEO strategy with monthly, quarterly and annual goals to review. Once the strategy is in place, we then begin by optimising your website and the content on it to help make it more understandable by search engines. We’ll also start an internal and external link building campaign to add structure to your website and build quality relational links that are relevant. These help the search engine crawl bots collate data from page to page and website to website before indexing it in their search results. We also look at ways your content can be given more exposure. Part of content optimisation is enhancing it through Schema – a coding language that seeks to get an in-depth understanding of your content set up together by major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft). This helps categorise your content and enhance user experience.

Once work has been carried out, we then provide monthly reports that show your top performing keywords, top performing pages, site visitors and much more. This data allows us to look at areas of your website we can improve and how a better user experience for the site visitor can be attained.

SEO: What position should I aim for?

The top 5 results of a search get over 75% of the clicks. Our advice is to focus on a few valuable keywords to your business and build content to support those terms. If you try to cover all of the keywords in your industry without the time to commit, you are unlikely to rank on the first page of Google.

PPC

PPC is a form of advertising on search engines by paid means. PPC advertising requires money to move to the top of a search engines results – whereas with SEO, time to produce quality content is the key. These advertised spaces on Google are a maximum of 3 at the top and 3 at the bottom, with the organic SEO results sandwiched in the middle.

It’s called Pay-Per-Click because it is exactly that – your account is charged each time your advertisement link is clicked. The cost of each click is determined by the quality of your website and the selected keywords in your campaign. If competition for the keyword is high, the CPC (cost-per-click) increases. You can set daily budgets for your campaign – once the budget is reached your advert will be removed until your budget is next available.

Keyword research is cost-effective before launching a campaign – You can use Google AdWords to identify the keywords and their costs before launching a campaign. We can help you find successful keywords that do not charge as much as the mainstream words and yield similar search volumes collectively for a prolonged and successful campaign.

Search Engines: What is a search engine?

A search engine allows users to search a query which then returns content related to the users query. Search engines use algorithms to determine how pages should rank with the most relevant to the search query ranking near the top. The video below by Google explains perfectly what factors are taken into account and how it all works!

Did you know: 1 in every 7 searches on Google is a query that has never been searched for before.

The main search engine is Google but there are others such as Bing and Yahoo. Even YouTube is a search engine (the second highest volume of searches Google in fact) specialising in video search.

Social Media Management

Social Media Management (SMM) is a great way to increase brand awareness, website traffic and boost sales. There is no doubt that having a social media page that you use regularly can generate a wide audience for your business.

Social media also helps you interact with your customers in a more humanised way. Naturally, this makes your brand more likeable and lead to a more positive result in sales. With social media being an environment where a comment, like and share is almost at reaction-like speed, it can only improve your conversion rates and website traffic.

Social media engagement also has SEO benefits and has been proven to increase brand loyalty.

Social Media: What is the best platform for my business?

There isn’t a definitive answer to this question. Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Snapchat, TikTok – the list goes on… They all have different benefits and which one(s) are suited to you depends on your business.

Number 1 Social Platform: Facebook is the most popular with over 2 billion users and 60 million active business pages.

Content Creation Is Key To Digital Marketing

The phrase ‘content is king’ is used a lot in SEO – this is because it is the most important factor behind SEO. At very least, the written content should consist of a catchy title, an enticing introduction, a detailed body with logical points and related questions and a conclusion that clarifies your post.

SEO factors in more than just the written text in your page content. Aside from the main body of text, the main things a search engine looks at are meta data, heading tags, Schema, internal and external links, URL slug, images, page speed and social sharing before archiving in their search rankings.

Below is a downloadable helpsheet to follow when writing a blog post.

SEO Secret Blog Writing Digital Marketing Steps Guide

Digital Marketing: Other Types of Digital Marketing

Email marketing, affiliate marketing, viral marketing, TV advertising, radio advertising and mobile advertising are also methods of digital marketing. Due to the vast range that digital marketing covers, we tend to specialise in online marketing.

That just about covers the methods of digital marketing available and a brief introduction to our services. If you would like to discuss the digital marketing options available to your business, please contact us.

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Why is digital marketing important?

The answer to this can be found at our fingertips – we are living in a digital age. Chances are you are reading this on laptop or mobile device with other electronic devices in the same room.

We now consume and share information with friends, family and colleagues online more than ever. The internet has transformed shopping habits, changed the way we watch things and has become a means of connecting with each other.

Being readily online at anytime is one of the reasons that digital marketing is a key strategy in any businesses marketing plan. Digital marketing also has four key advantages over traditional marketing – measurability, affordability, speed and engagement.

What is lead generation?

Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting potential clients and prospects into someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product or services.

Some examples of lead generators are blog posts, coupons, live events and online content.

The lead generation process is a funnel-like process made up of these 4 stages:

Attract: At this point the user is a stranger to your brand and may be intrigued by your blog post via a search engine or a shared post on a social platform. Once they click on it they have become a visitor and have entered your lead generator.

Convert: Once the user has visited your site you have the opportunity to convert them to take a particular service or product. This is known as a call-to-action (CTA) and can be a button, a message, sign-up offer or an image. At this point some visitors may drop out of the funnel. The key to this stage is being informative about your service or product in an impartial manner.

Close: Visitors that click on the CTA are taken through to a landing page. This is a web page that is designed specifically to capture information or give the opportunity to purchase a product.

Tip: To make this look more enticing to the user, use an offer. This could be a 10% discount in exchange for newsletter signup or a free trial period of your services.

Again, visitors may leave at this stage if they don’t perceive the offer to be valuable enough to them.

Reach out: With the visitor’s details now captured, this is your opportunity to reach out and upsell your products and services.

You should always review your lead generation periodically – Once you have your lead generation elements, it is important to review the process regularly to maximise the effectiveness.

 

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Ricky Taylor

SEO Terms

Branded Search

What is a branded search? A branded keyword, or a branded search, is any query via a search engine that includes the name of your company, business or brand, such as ‘Boost SEO’. This can include other words too, like ‘Boost SEO agency’ or ‘Taunton Boost SEO’. Fundamentally a branded search includes your brand name …

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Google Ads

What are Google Ads? Google Ads is paid-for advertisement that sit at the top of search results and can also be displayed across display networks on websites that allow advertisements. Google Ad campaigns are based on a Pay-Per Click model and help businesses remain visible if they don’t rank on the first page of specific …

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Google Analytics

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Nofollow Links

What is a nofollow link? No follow links can be used to link to a webpage that you don’t want to transfer your PageRank (page authority) to. The link to the target page will still be there but you are telling no to “nofollow” that link when crawling your website. If Google do not follow …

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Anchor Text

Anchor text is the text used to hyperlink to another page – internal or external. It can provide contextual information to search engines and users about the link’s destination – so it is generally a good idea to ensure that the link text is relevant to the content it is linking to. Anchor text has …

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Sitemaps

What are XML Sitemaps? You want Google to crawl every important page of your website. But sometimes, pages end up without any internal links pointing to them, making them hard to find. An XML sitemap lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all, also helping it understand your website …

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