The world of SEO and Digital Marketing is ever-changing. Sometimes, the multitude of terms and buzzwords can get a bit too much to handle, even for the best of us.
It would be great, every now and then, if we could just put our hands up and say, " Sorry, what exactly do you mean by that?" Even the fine Ladies and Gentlemen of rankingCoach know this feeling from time to time.
This article is for everyone who just wants to get a few things straight.
Believe it or not, the internet has been around as a marketing channel for over two decades now.
Online Marketing was the term 'to use' in those early days; the sound of it now, to those of us who remember those times, brings to mind the beep beeping of dial-up modems, Windows 2000, AOL, and Altavista - points for anyone who remembers any of these.
Those were the days when Google was a young upstart, the dot-com bubble was yet to burst, and the chief concerns of people using the internet, for marketing purposes, were banner advertisements and emails.
So, you might ask, what happened to this term? The answer: The internet of things happened; Since those early days, the internet is no longer just about desktops and websites.
In the average home, you will find a multitude of devices that use the internet in some way: smartphones, smart speakers, smart televisions, even heating systems, and fridges.
The number of devices that could be used for Digital Marketing expands by the day. This is why using Digital Marketing as an overarching term more adequately incorporates this monumental shift; with the increasing popularity of voice searches and developments such as Google Assistant, these changes are set to be even more drastic in the future.
You may still hear some people talking about Online Marketing as a subset of Digital Marketing, ultimately, the most important broad term for all marketing practices is Digital Marketing. Remember that lingo and we"ll keep you up to date with the rest.
Please don't get the wrong idea with this one. We are not questioning if Google, or any of the other search engines, are up for sale, perhaps in some sort of eBay-style auction, no, we are talking about what money can buy in terms of search engine visibility.
If you were to ask people on the street how they think search engines decide which results to display, you would get some very interesting (and inaccurate) answers, some still believe that all of the top-ranking sites on Google are there because of direct payment to the SE.
This simply isn't the case. To understand this correctly, we need to make a distinction between two types of results that appear on Search engines: Organic Results and Paid Results.
Organic Results appear on search engines because of well-implemented SEO activities such as keyword optimization, and consistently well-written and targeted content.
On the other hand, Paid Results are from direct payment to the SEs; these are the results on sites like Google with 'sponsored' written by them. They can also be found as advertisements surrounding content on many other kinds of websites. The results of SEO, as you will read about later, take longer to appear on search engines but they are not the result of direct payment to Search Engines.
Occasionally, I come across site managers who are frustrated with the results they are getting from SEO activities.
A lot of the time this is to another mix-up between Organic and Paid Results: the results from setting up a Pay-Per-Click campaign are normally seen within a few days. If you need these kinds of results you should use rankingCoach ads, whereas the full results of SEO campaigns take much longer.
SEO results are cumulative: they require a great deal more crawling and indexing from the SE's before the full results can be seen. Use SEO software like rankingCoach to make sure you are on track but don't give up too early on that place at the top. If you have the right SEO strategy you will get where you need to be in the end but it may take a few months.
You may have heard stories of 'magical' websites where you can just buy a load of 'quality' backlinks for your website for a 'reasonable fee'.
99% of the time you should not touch these websites with a barge pole.
It is almost certain that these links are BlackHat. Your company would not be the first to face Google's wrath as a result. Building backlinks is a major part of SEO but it's about quality, not quantity. Check out our article on 4 Steps For Getting The Best Backlinks On Your Site for some better ways of getting that backlink-google-juice!
Talk to anyone who has been cold-called by a digital marketing agency, and they will probably tell you that SEO and Digital Marketing is bewilderingly complex, jam-packed with jargon, and eye-wateringly expensive.
The Search Engine Journal offers a price range for local of $500 a month and $2500- $5000 for a national campaign.
This might be the cost of employing someone else to do it for you. If money is of no importance and you have literally no time, agencies may be an option, but it is vitally important to pick the right one or your money will be wasted.
On the other hand, if you have a little bit of time to take control of your own digital marketing destiny, then online software like rankingCoach provides an all-round-digital marketing solution.
We hope this article has cleared a few things up for you. If there is a Digital Marketing topic or term you would like us to explain in this blog, please let us know in the comments section.