This is an emotion anyone who has tried to demystify digital marketing has
gone through at some point in time.
There are countless resources available online, but this one is meant for the layman, as not every startup founder has in depth knowledge of digital marketing. SEO, SEM, SMM, PPC, CTR, CLV, CPC, LTV are terms that throw clients into a dizzy and rightly so.
This series of blogs is aimed at, explaining what digital marketing is, in the simplest of ways. We will pick one topic a week and delve deep into it. Again, without complicating it. So here goes.
The world of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Simply put, this is the process of getting your website to appear on the top of the search results when someone searches for anything relevant to your business.
There are 3 main objectives to indulge in SEO;
- to increase the quality of traffic that visits your website (relevant users who are or would be genuinely interested in your offerings)
- to increase the quantity of traffic (the number of visitors), and…
- increase organic traffic (traffic that ended up directly on your site without you having to pay for it).
Quantity I can understand, but why quality?
We don’t do SEO to increase the number of visitors alone, but also the right kind of visitors.
Example: If you are a fruit vendor, why would you want someone looking for furniture end up on your site? This means, there’s someone giving wrong directions and sending them to your website when they in fact looking for furniture. Repeated wrong directions can cause your website to lose it’s quality score. The Quality Score is a calculated score used by leading search engines based on 3 main factors.
- How many times have people clicked through your link and found it helpful, otherwise knows as the Click Through Rate or CTR
- How well thought out, to the point and helpful your ads are. In other words, your Ad relevance
- And finally, your website’s Landing Page Experience or the user experience (UX) of your landing page.
Search Engines – Behind the scene/How they work
Search Engines constantly send out crawlers throughout the internet. As the name rightly suggests, these crawlers (Step 1) crawl over every single page that exists on the internet and return to the search engine with information. This information is then (Step 2) indexed like how a librarian would organise books in a library so it’s easy for readers to find the right book, in the right place in the shortest time possible.
The O in the SEO
Optimisation is the part where the owners of the websites ensure the content on their websites are relevant, attractive, engaging and worthy enough for users to spend time on their site and carry out the intended actions. Optmisation is an iterative process and can take a while to fall in place, but what is important is to constantly keep working on your website to ensure what people search for and what they get when they land on your website is aligned.
And there you go, you have successfully gained knowledge on the basics of SEO.
Interested to learn more, look out for the next article on learning SEO in-depth.
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