How to spend your marketing budget
Business
Every business needs a digital marketing strategy. It doesn’t matter if you have a brick and mortar store, or if you conduct all of your business online. It doesn’t matter what size your business is, and it doesn’t matter if you’re going to use offline marketing strategies. You still need to have a digital marketing strategy asking an SEO expert for advice will help you decide how best to invest your marketing budget.
SEO
SEO, or search engine optimization, is how a business can increase its traffic, and the quality of that traffic organically. Search engines look at many aspects of a website when they decide how to rank it in the search engine results page. Every search engine has its own algorithm for ranking, but there are some similarities and differences. Most people optimize a website based on what is known, or guessed, about Google’s algorithm, as it’s the most popular search engine, but you should still pay attention to the other search engines as well such as Bing, and Yahoo.
Location services
Search engines will also use their location services for local SEO. This means that a page can rank highly when searcher looks for products or services in their specific area, or based on the location of the device at the time of the search. Location services, such as Google Maps, are extremely important for small businesses, but online business can take advantage of this as well. Location based marketing can help you reach your target audience and drive them to your online store.
PPC
PPC, or Pay Per Click, is incredibly important. If you look at Google’s SERPS, more and more space above the fold is taken by sponsored results – PPC. In PPC advertising, you can use Google’s AdWords to target specific keywords. If a searcher searches for one of your keywords, your page will be displayed. If the user clicks on your page, you pay a fee. AdWords is a highly competitive marketplace, and the cost of PPC is becoming higher. This is why some businesses are focusing their PPC efforts on Bing Ads, Yahoo Gemini, or AdRoll instead. However, as these platforms have less of a market share, while you are looking at a cheaper CPC (Cost Per Click), you are also looking at less traffic.
Social media
Social media has evolved into a bit of an advertising giant. People want to see businesses on Facebook, or follow them on Twitter and Instagram. As as online business, you need to have a social media marketing strategy that includes not only those three social media platforms, but others as well, such as YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google +. Social media platforms also offer organic reach, which is similar to SEO, and paid reach, which is similar to PPC. Social media marketing has many different benefits, such as better customer retention, and improving brand awareness, but you should also know that some search engines, such as Bing, include a website’s social media presence in their ranking algorithm.
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