A beginner's guide to Digital Marketing:
What is digital marketing?
Digital Marketing is the art of promoting the products or services of businesses and brands online. It’s a huge field. There are many aspects to digital marketing including SEO (search engine optimization), Social Media Marketing, PPC Advertising, Analytics, SEM (search engine marketing), Graphic Design, Content Strategy, Content Writing and many more.
SEO:
Also known as Search Engine Optimization is the process of ranking webpages higher in search engines like Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, etc…
Have you ever wondered why or how some pages appear at the top while others at the bottom on the results page of any search on a search engine?
When we search about a certain topic on a search engine like Google, we get many results. These results are arranged by the search engine in the order of relevancy of the content on various pages.
The answer is SEO. The people who know SEO take advantage of it because SEO has many benefits. Some of the primary benefits are increased traffic to your website, more leads resulting in increased revenue.
SEO includes Keyword Research, Writing Meta Tags like Meta Titles and Descriptions for your webpages, Indexing your website on Google (if you haven’t already), Link Building,
SEO can be divided into On Page, Off Page, Technical, Local and International SEO.
On Page SEO consists of:
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- Keyword Research
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- Meta Tags
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- Indexing website
Off Page SEO consists of:
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- Backlinks
Technical SEO consists of:
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- Speeding up your website
Local SEO consists of:
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- Ranking your website high for/in local search results.
Now for getting started with SEO, the first thing you’ll want to do is called a Site Audit or Site Analysis. During a Site Audit, you’ll look at the site’s structure, sitemaps, meta tags (meta title and meta descriptions), alt tags, settings of the website (in WordPress), menus.
The next step you’ll take is Keyword Research. Keyword Research is important. It’s almost like a one-time thing where you determine the best keywords for your site (homepage and services or product pages). So, you must be careful when picking keywords but it’s not all that hard. Just take it easy, pick keywords relevant to the topic and you should be good.
There are many ways to conduct Keyword Research. The first is called Manual Guessing. Manual Guessing is when you try to brainstorm/come up with keywords relevant to the searcher’s intent. Search Intent is the intention/purpose behind a user’s search query. The second method is using keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer, Ahref’s Keyword Explorer and the like.
You should try to find keywords with High Volume and Low Competition.
After you gather keywords, it’s time to make use of them. We’ll make meta titles and descriptions using the collected keywords.
Meta Titles should be 55-60 letters to avoid getting truncated by search engines.
For meta descriptions the limit is 155-160 characters.
The goal of these two meta tags is to convince/lure/hook the searcher into checking your site. Don’t clickbait but try to come up with something
Content Strategy:
AIDA Model:
The AIDA Model stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. It’s a helpful tool to use when planning content production.
Buyer Personas:
Buyer personas are like fake people we create as ideal customers and we persuade the target audience using these personas.
Content Calendar:
This is a calendar we create for our clients, so they know exactly what we’ll create and post for them on which platform and at which time.
Content Writing:
Content writing is an important part of Digital Marketing. It’s a handy tool in your toolbox. After all content is the material on your website which will hook the visitors’ who were looking for something you have. We write content for our clients based on their needs and in their best interests.
Social Media Marketing:
Social Media is a huge part of our lives nowadays and there are many big platforms making social media an important part of digital marketing. Most of marketing on social media is paid but there are some organic ways to grow as well though it might be somewhat slow. Popular social media marketing platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, and there are many more.
Analytics:
Analytics is about presenting data. The data from marketing campaigns, social media, seo, customers, etc… The thing is, you don’t want to just copy paste the data as you get it. That’s not what business owners what to see nor pay for. Instead, your clients want data showing how your services or the services of others (in case you’re only doing Analytics) are benefiting their business. Analytics is also used to construct content and business strategies catered to your client’s business using the data.
Graphic Design:
Graphic design is an important skill for marketers. You know what they say: “A picture is worth a thousand words”. We use state of the art software to design and develop our creative marketing ideas in the form of images which catch visitors attention right away.
PPC Advertising:
PPC Advertising stands for Pay Per Click Advertising. It’s a form of paid marketing where you or your client spends money for your or your client’s ads to be shown to your target audience.
Web Development:
If your clients don’t have a website, then they can’t use SEO, and their marketing wouldn’t be as effective. Every business needs a website, a place where their potential and loyal customers can go to discover, interact, and buy the products or services (or both) of the business. So, even before SEO your client or you yourself (if you don’t have one) need a website.
You’ll want to use some famous content management system to build your website. CMS or content management systems are basically software which allow pick and drop building of websites potentially eliminating the coding/programming aspect of web development. You can of course change the code, use CSS or whatever else you want to fix/edit/better something as you like, if you know the languages you’re trying to edit otherwise it can get messy.