Digital Marketing Simplified: Spend Less and Demand More
When it comes to digital marketing, it’s okay NOT to be satisfied. In fact, its recommended.
Let’s start with two methods that can drive visitors/potential customers to your website.
Organic Search Marketing
One is to rely upon Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so your site is found by organic search. SEO involves making sure each of your website’s pages has an appropriate number of keywords weaved into quality text, and that you have plenty of backlinks from other, quality sites linking back to your site.
All this helps with your site rankings for certain keywords.
For example, someone who has just moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and wants to take horse riding lessons will do a search for “horseback lessons in Cheyenne.” The SERPs (search engine results pages) will return more than 10 pages of results.
With organic search, research has shown most people only look at the top 10 results on the first page. While it’s not the end of the world if your site is on the second or third page of search results, potential customers may never find you if your site is any lower in the rankings.
That’s why SiteSTR gives our clients access to a professional SEO firm and works with you to build on-page SEO.
Search Engine Marketing: Advertising
There are many digital advertising avenues available, from pay-per-click (PPC) ads (such as those offered by Google or Bing) to video ads (that appear at the beginning of YouTube or Vimeo videos, for example) to banner ads to text ads.
Companies that pay for digital ads need to be as careful as those who pay for TV, radio, newspaper, and magazine ads. You need to make sure you’re targeting the correct market and that your ads are appearing in the right places.
As department store magnate John Wanamaker famously said – way back in the 1800s, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
That was then – this is now.
There are a variety of website analytic programs available (such as StatCounter, Google Analytics, and Yahoo! Web Analytics) that tell a website owner which keywords brought a visitor to the site (if they used organic search), or from what webpage they came, how long they stay, and how many pages they visit. And at SiteSTR, we automatically create and install a Google Analytics account for you, or we can install another analytics program of your choice.
Using these analytics programs, it is relatively easy to tell which digital advertising avenues are working and which aren’t.
Digital Ad Fraud is Rampant
According to the third annual Bot Report issued by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and widely reported in the media such as AdWeek and Entrepreneur, only one fourth of all digital ad spend reaches “actual people.” While this generalized statistic covers all digital ad spend from every industry, it’s still telling.
Imperva Incapsula also issues a Bot Traffic Report, and its latest edition found that most website visitors are bots. There are good bots and bad bots. Good bots are such things as search engine bots, feed fetchers, commercial crawlers, and monitoring bots. Bad bots are attacking bots attempting to hack into sites.
So how can you know if you’re wasting half your digital ad budget?
There are a variety of mobile fraud prevention tools available. We’ll list a few – for your information only. We are not endorsing the ones we list any more than we are not endorsing the ones we don’t list.
https://www.adjust.com/
Take a Comprehensive Approach
By taking advantage of these tools, you can help ensure your digital advertising budget is working for you, and you will see a much better ROI as a result.
Search Engine Marketing is complicated, and sometimes you need a little assistance. At SITESTR, we’re here to help. Give us a call or use the form below to be put in contact with a strategist who can talk to you about increasing your net profits and internet presence today.