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What is Digital Marketing

Google Ads, SEO

What is digital marketing really?

In short: Digital marketing comprises of any kinds of marketing over the internet. 

There are many aspects to online/internet marketing, ranging from the most old school, namely SEO or Search Engine Optimization, to Display remarketing where images follow you around based on products you have viewed of specific search terms you may have searched for.  

 

Let’s delve into some of these aspects.  

 

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) 

Google, BING, Yandex and Baidu are all examples of Search Engines. 
Search engines work by indexing different websites and thus adding these websites to their long list of known websites.  

How does a search engine know which websites are relevant and which aren’t?  

Google for instance knows this using a few methods, some of which are listed here:  

  1. Amount and Relevance of backlinks
  2. Age of the domain 
  3. Type of content on the site, including images 
  4. Layout of the content on the website 

Many backlinks pointing to and from a website gives a search engine some important insights into how relevant the particular website and domain is. Ahrefs refers to this as Domain Authority.  

This should give you a reinforced idea that a websites ‘authority’ is directly linked to the amount and strengths of backlinks which point towards it.  

The thinking is as follows; the more articles and references there are to a specific website then clearly it must be quite important. Therefor, a search engine is likely going to list it higher up in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) when a person searches for something relevant to this type of site.  

Note: It is possible to buy backlinks, however this is strongly opposed as search engines are becoming smarter at determining these kinds of backlinks and has been known to penalizing websites for purchasing links.  

The age of a domain gives a search engine the insight that you haven’t just popped up recently and thus gives some credibility.  

Type and layout of the content is critical as search engines index what the website is about and use the content to know how relevant your information and website is.   

There are many more factors to SEO but these few are some of the most critical to think about.  

 

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) 

Most search engines make their income from having advertisers pay to be listed higher on the search results page (SERP). These engines have also become smarter at the types and styles of Ads that they have available to advertisers. SEO can directly impact Advertising costs. So, the better your page SEO is the lower advertising costs can become, so the two aspects do go hand-in-hand.  

To name a few types of Search Engine Marketing available:  

Search Advertising

This allows advertisers to market based on keywords searched. So, if someone searches for a specific product and the search term contains a keyword which you are targeting then your potential Ads may show up in the SERP. These are probably some of the most effective Ads available.  

 

Display Advertising

These are images used to entice potential customers to visit a specific site. They are displayed on relevant websites and although sometimes they can become a bit annoying they are generally very effective at reaching a large volume of potential customers and reminding them that you are out there. 

 

Video Advertising

As you may know, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, owns YouTube. Also, Video Ads are highly effective as they give the viewer just that bit of extra emotional feeling.    

 

Email Marketing

Email marketing technically also forms part of digital marketing and although they emails generally have a comparetively low open/view rate they are very cheap as it costs nothing to send emails (unless you use a mailer like Mailchimp of MailGun). We’ve seen from countless clients that email marketing is still very effective and does in-fact result in sales for normal and e-commerce websites.  

 

Content Marketing 

Marketing using content, like this blog, is also effective, but over the longer run. Moreover it takes hard work and dedication to write quality content. It also takes time before search engines  index content accordingly and start showing it to people.  

In fact if you’re reading this then it’s proof that content marketing is still relevant and effective today still.  

 

This summarises Digital Marketing. Each is a force in it’s own right and can be very effective if utilized with thought and with purpose.  

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