Digital Marketing
The moment your small business has an online presence is the moment you need to consider digital marketing. Digital marketing encompasses web design, content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns, backlink management, and much more. Combined, a proper digital marketing campaign dramatically increases your company’s visibility in the highly competitive online market.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the advertising and promotion of your business on an online platform. While there are some techniques from traditional marketing that carry over, the digital marketing industry is a giant on its own. The digital and online platform has exploded into a huge battleground for advertising products and services to hundreds of millions of customers around the world. Even if you are a local small business, digital marketing is still not something that you want to miss out on due to Google’s search algorithms for local searches.
Ranking On Google Search With SEO
Optimizing every virtual inch of your digital footprint is necessary to compete against other businesses. Search engine optimization, or SEO, has become a major industry in the digital marketing world. SEO utilizes a large range of methods and techniques to bring as much traffic to your website and business as possible. As your traffic continues, your potential for leads and sales will skyrocket. Just having a website, though, is not enough. Your website needs to be optimized as well, while also being beautifully designed so that potential customers are turned off.
Source: Internet Live Stats and Oberlo
SEO For Small Businesses
The Google Search statistics above should give you important insights on just how powerful a well-optimized digital presence is. Whether you have a large company with national reach or you’re a small business serving local customers, SEO can provide a huge return on investment.
So, how does it work? Well, there isn’t one sole method for SEO that works. Rather, there is a process consisting of many different components that all have an effect on search engine optimization and ranking. The most common methods include:
- Local SEO – Did you know that you can gain or lose ranking in Google Maps? The Google Maps 3-Pack is the local business listings when you search for products or services. This listing will show the highest ranking local businesses for your search term, but doesn’t affect the top 10 listings in the actual Google search page. Nowadays, a high percentage of people use the Google Maps search results to make decisions on where to go for products and services.
- National SEO – This is somewhat similar to local SEO, but on a much more grander scale. Common businesses that utilize the national SEO techniques are those that ship products, have digital products or services, or any business that doesn’t require anything face-to-face. Even the slightest change in your Google rankings can bring in big increases to revenue.
- Content Marketing – This is a strategy that is used to reach and engage with specific target audiences for a keyword. This is done by the actual content on the website, blogs, videos, social media, and more. The intent here is to promote the products and services for the small business but in a manner that answers people’s questions in their Google searches.
- Backlink Management – A backlink is basically any link from somewhere other than your own website that links to your website. For example, if you make a social media post and include a link to your website then this is considered a backlink. However, these backlinks can have both a positive and negative effect on your website. Google can recognize the quality of the source of any backlinks your website receives, and it can even detect “spam links”.
- Social Media Marketing – Some businesses will benefit more than others from social media marketing, but all businesses should use it. It helps to build your brand’s reputation and trust while also helping to improve website traffic. For many niches, Instagram has actually become one of the most lucrative social media platforms for advertising products and services.
- Pay-Per-Click Advertising – If you’re looking for an effective and easy way to advertise your small business on Google, then Google Ads is the way to go. Get professionally managed PPC advertising with our digital marketing partner to give yourself a boost in direct sales and website traffic. Google Ads have powerful built-in tools to narrow down what kind of demographic you want to target for your business.