Online & Offline, you want to receive a return on your investment. You want an increase in your bottom line results for your business.
Online Marketing is a lot more than a pretty looking website.
Which unfortunately is what many businesses do get sold into. In order to get the results you want online, you need to also build the authority of the online entities you have: Website, Online Directory Listings, Social Media Accounts, Blog.
What ‘Authority’ means is that it is recognized by the search engines as supporting their mission statement of providing the best user experience.
So it’s not a case of just looking pretty. It also has to prove it’s relevance to the Search Engines. That’s not something you or I decide. The Search Engines have carefully crafted Algorithms to make that assessment. The algorithms are modified constantly, requiring Online Marketing experts to also keep up with the changes and modify their client’s online entities accordingly.
The factors these algorithms consider are a balance of user experience (from both a visual and functionality POV), and also the relevance and quality of the content. What is an additional component is how a Business engages with their customer via Social Media.
Everything is now wrapped up in one big melting pot. A website must have both on page optimization and off page optimization. The Social Media campaigns must link to the Website and demonstrate that the business is authentically engaging with their customer. The Directory Listings, such as Google Places, Google Plus and a plethora of free and paid directories in the online marketplace must be consistent in the contact information about a business (phone number, url, address MUST be the same throughout the web, or a site is penalized for it).
Content on a site, on the blogs, on the Social Media sites must ALL be original. The Search engines put black marks against sites that offer duplicate content. And they also look for the content to include words relevant to the topic on the page of the site (which is called Latent Semantic Indexing), but they again penalize a site if it keyword stuffs, or is scarce on the amount of content.
It really is a fine balance to achieve success online. It is not about ‘build it and they will come’. You have to drive traffic to your site via using SEO and PPC strategies, and you have to make sure that when they get there, that you offer a top grade user experience.
Everything interconnects online. That is why it is imperative that you approach your Online Marketing strategically, in a way that is going to produce the best results for your business. As online strategies vary in their make up from business to business.
