Why Digital Marketing is About More Than Just SEO These Days

One of the biggest myths about digital marketing in the modern era is that if you can only get a handle on SEO, everything else will take care of itself. You'll immediately skyrocket to the top of the SERPs for your desired keywords, you'll have an endless stream of new people coming to your (virtual) doorstep, and soon your revenue will shoot into the stratosphere.

This is so far from the truth it's almost laughable.

These days, digital marketing isn't simply about SEO in the strictest sense of the term. There are a wide range of different things you need to consider for the best results moving forward.

Everything You Thought You Knew About SEO Is Wrong

One of the biggest mistakes that digital marketers make these days has to do with assuming that it's still 1995.

In the "old days," SEO was easy - all you had to do was register a domain, throw up content that was crammed with as many relevant keywords as possible and call it a day. Then, Google started to prioritize things like hyperlinks in their search engine algorithm - which meant that marketers started to prioritize them, too. Even thinking about using a site like Respona to craft better and more compelling content wasn't something people did, simply because it wasn't needed.

After a few years, the first page of every search you conducted was crammed with low quality content that only technically fell in line with what you were actually searching for. Sure, the cream had a tendency to rise to the top - but there was a lot of noise in there, too.

So a few years ago, Google essentially threw out the rules of SEO - and it couldn't have come along at a better time.

From Google's Panda Update in 2011 to now, Google has made its opinion on what you need to do to gain success in the digital era abundantly clear. Google's Penguin update, for example, was designed in part to target low quality links that were included only to impact search rankings. Future updates prioritized mobile sites and sites that loaded well on any type of device a user might be employing. The list goes on and on.

The key takeaway from all of this was that search engine optimization wasn't just about search engine optimization any longer. The domains that were penalized during these updates had likely pulled out every trick in the black hat and white hat books and still found themselves hemorrhaging traffic for a very simple reason:

They were focusing so much on getting SEO right that they stopped focusing on the users that were supposed to be benefiting from their content in the first place.

1. It All Comes Down to Perspective

In the end, saying that digital marketing is about "more than just SEO these days" may actually be something of a misnomer. It isn't necessarily that SEO is no longer important - because it is. It's just that the definition of SEO has changed tremendously in a way that benefits both businesses and the users they've dedicated themselves to serving.

Recommended: The Latest Trend in SEO to Increase Your Sales

As a digital marketer, your goal is to establish a deep, meaningful connection with another person - the type of connection that not only gets someone to come down off the fence to make a purchase, but that also turns them into a loyal advocate for your brand.

You do this by providing them with a steady stream of helpful, relevant content on a regular basis. The type of content that helps them solve a problem, or accomplish a goal, or makes their lives better in some way. This can be a blog post, sure - but it can also be a stunning piece of visual collateral that you've created with a scatter plot maker or a timeline maker like Visme (which I founded).

The point is, your number one goal to gain visibility isn't to cram as many keywords or hyperlinks into your copy as possible in an effort to get to the top of the SERPs. It's to help people. That's always been true and now, thanks to the continued evolution of SEO, it's easier to accomplish than ever.

Google's algorithm is structured in a way where the "old SEO tricks" of yesteryear have fallen by the wayside. SEO is just as important as it ever was, but so long as you're focused on helping people - by providing them real, tangible value as often as you can - SEO is going to take care of itself.

At that point, increasing your rankings isn't something you'll need to worry about.

2. Importance of digital marketing:

• More excellent Opportunity- Digital Marketing for business lies with the option to choose your method of marketing as per your budget and reach a wider audience at an affordable rate. Even a decade back getting your product marketed for a business was a task in itself. The digital modes of marketing are customizable and therefore, less expensive. However, you can make your presence felt by targeting a base of customers.
• High Conversion Rate- As you all know that SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Email Marketing are techniques which have a high conversion rate as they can generate a quick and effective communication channel with the consumer. Surprisingly all the traffic which you might get on your site may not be fruitful. Thus, digital marketing lets you reach out to only those who need your kind of service. And this, in turn, results in better lead conversions.
• Cost-Effective- Digital Marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to promote products and reach out to customers. Marketing online is less cost-efficient to a certain point and this can be done by a digital marketer with the help of an SEO.
• Easy to Communicate- With the help of digital marketing, it becomes easy for organizations to communicate with potential buyers. This, in turn, helps organizations to increase the conversion ratio as they can directly relate to the clients and solve all kinds of doubts which the customer has in his/her mind.
• Higher Earnings- With the help of digital marketing, sales and revenue will be increased in an organization. And this is because people are more interested in buying online rather than going out for each and everything. It gives the companies a chance to sell their products more quickly to the customers.

3. There are 5 main types of SEO that we need to know:

• On Page SEO: On page as the name suggests, it is done for your own website pages. When you are creating a website, the data and technical aspects are completely in your control. For e.g: Blogs, personal website pages are optimized by following the right guidelines creating a user-friendly website, rich content with relevant keywords. All this will help in ranking your website on top search results.
• Off Page SEO: Off-page or Off-site SEO is done through an external link. This basically implies, your website will rank better in search page if the traffic is generated through other sources that your website. For example — Social media links, features/mentions/links from a higher traffic website. For ex — If the Times of India gives a link to your website.
• Universal SEO: Data is just not text. On SERP, we see information in the form of video, images, text & audio (VITA). Universal or blended SEO is a practice to optimize VITA to get maximum weightage and higher ranking. A few good practices are keyword rich content, quality title & description, crisp URL, etc.
• Local SEO/Google My Business: Local SEO is done to promote your business in a local area. If your business has multiple branches or even if it’s a small business/service it is essential to provide your address/location, phone number, timings, etc. The idea is to make the user connect with your business easily and effectively.
• Technical SEO: This is the most important type in SEO. In general, the above practices are done to generate rich content that will rank on SERP. But in technical, SEO is advanced. This means the data on your website should be interpreted easily by search engine crawlers. The goal here is to upgrade the framework of your site to improve ranking on SERP.

4. Why It Is Important?

You know millions of users are using the internet and searching for you & now you want to make them easy to find you, digital marketing can help consumers. Digital marketing is rocket fuel for small and medium scale business.

Audience love to search the internet for any information and using digital marketing you can draw targeted audience attention towards you. It is also more powerful than traditional marketing because you can interact directly with customers.

Digital marketing build the bridge between your brand and customers, so proper strategy and analysis is needed for effective marketing as it is vast and can be complex if actions are not taken accordingly, it would be like you are giving your efforts constantly still you are not able to reach the finish line.

“The secret to building a business online is simple or not so simple. All you have to do is drive traffic to your website, and convert that traffic into sales.”

There’s no denying it, the world is rapidly shifting from analogue to digital. People are consuming more and more digital content on a daily basis – on mobile phones, laptops, desktop computers at work, and more – and companies that have not yet recognized this in their marketing strategies need to adapt fast.

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