Digital Marketing: A Road Map of the Basics


July 27, 2010

Survival of the fittest

To this day, the Internet is the fastest changing industry which adapts many changes throughout every month, even on a daily basis! With the Google algorithms always increasing in complexity, it becomes harder to be able to generate organic results for any given website. If you just now want to start with Digital marketing campaigns for your business, you must start with a very well defined niche which is in demand, yet is still not saturated with competitors.

On top of that your Digital marketing campaign should use a combination of strategies, keep consistency and intensity while maintaining a perfect balance to avoid being penalized as a spammer by search engines. Search engines are now incredibly smart, so much that they are even able to measure the ease of readability of your site and search across the web looking for potential plagiarism on the content.

Getting "Google Smart" has been the trend with all search engines trying to catch up with the internet giant. Now Yahoo and Bing (MSN) have decided to combine their efforts in a strategic alliance/partnership making them a stronger competitor looking after Google’s bigger share. This should increase even further the bar for internet search standards and making it harder for someone to promote their site without being targeted as a spammer.

The solution:

A smart internet marketing campaign.

Even if you already know that the key behind organic results is building back-links, just this alone won’t be of use to you unless you know what you are doing, how you do it and by which means you would be promoting those backlinks. No matter what, you will need to combine different strategies and techniques, in order to effectively spread the awareness of your presence on the internet and have a chance to show up in organic search results.

The Road Map:

1. Keyword Research: What your audience is looking for.

Understanding what people are looking for when they are searching for your product and/or services, what they are typing and identifying the “money keywords” that will bring the highest qualified visitors and convert them into customers/sales/leads. Performing what we call “reverse search” and finding other suggestions is key. Rather than highest volume of searches, look for where your product/service is really strong and focus on these keywords.

Find a niche within your market in which to focus efforts that are not as competitive yet still reflect a demand for it. This will allow you to break in that market easier, bring results quicker and move on to higher competition keywords.

2. Maintaining Your Website with Relevant Fresh Content

If you really want to dominate your industry, there is no other way better than increasing the relevant content in your site with keyworded internal links. The easiest way to do this is with a blog in which you can express your personal opinion among topics of interest within your industry and by using your “money keywords”. Creating great content is no crime.

Make sure a likeable personality shows through in your blog (and create great content) to attract more readers.

3. Gauge Your Website’s Traffic with Analytics

If you want to get anywhere with your campaigns, it is crucial that you install some form of statistics to gauge your marketing efforts and Impossible to run campaigns without gauges to measure where traffic is coming from, what works and what doesn’t. 

Although there are many solutions out there, one we always recommend is the industry standard to measure traffic: Google Analytics. Spend the time to truly understand what they're telling you and how they can help improve your marketing.

4. Submissions to Online Directories and Search Engines

Although still important, if link submission is the only thing you are planning to do (some digital marketing companies only do that) you will fall short. Nowadays most websites with over a certain number of links do not give you the link weight they used to.

Continue to post in as many directories as you can without spamming, however, take the time to find relevant directories/vertical portals that are related to your industry that allow you to place links from relevant sources to your site. 

5. Social Media

Social Media is an excellent way to “stay in touch” with your visitors once they start browsing your site. Some of them will just breeze through your profiles quickly; but your objective would be to have them “like” you enough to “follow” you on each network and receive updates about the most up-to-date news and/or events regarding your business.

Use social media to create a more engaging experience for attendees of your live and online events.

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