Online Marketing in 2018

2018 is now upon us and the web is still steamrolling as the best place for online marketing. Since Internet marketing and can make or break a business, I have come up with a plan that can be used to avoid pitfalls and generate useful leads.

The 7 topics of Internet marketing discussion are SEO, SEM, content marketing, social media, ppc, Google Business Listings and Structured Data Markup. Since every website will receive traffic from various sources at different rates, I have put forward a list of the top places where you can make a presence and attract visitors and friends.

SEO

SEO is the short hand term for search engine optimization. Most people online know the meaning of seo and tend to have a wanting to rank high organically with the search engines. With proper coding, text, images, links and document structure, this can be a pretty straightforward procedure from the start. But, it can be tricky and patience is required.

Although the ultimate outcome cannot be achieved overnight, you can acquire excellent results relatively quickly. It helps to have strong writing, coding and reporting skills in order to have an edge of the competition.

When pages are built to gain organic traction, you must remember to test for local terms to hit the desired audience. For example, a recent survey explained that 17% of people searching don’t use a local term. It also explains that 21% of youth do and a whopping 63% of older searchers do add a local term. Keep that in mind; especially if your market is an older audience, or maybe someone who prefers using a local modifier as the results without one are often irrelevant.

SEO just not mean just pleasing Google. For example, in Canada you can find estimates that ~21% of searchers use Yahoo and another 9% use Bing; which are both owned by Microsoft. Essentially, the combination can be attributed to almost 30% of web surfers. This may be slightly less than half of the queries that Google receives, but they do cater more to SEO techniques like content writing and proper coding than does Google.

Therefore, always make Yahoo and Bing a high priority because they will grade your documents an ‘A’ like a teacher while Google can make it very hard to show up and conquer the established competition. Even though that is just the way it is, your efforts will be rewarded from them too, although a different process.

SEM and PPC

Search engine marketing and pay per click advertising can be implemented immediately in various forms. Typically, they are paid ads which are displayed when someone browses the web using specific keywords.

The ads can be used to display broad matches, phrase matches and exact matches. In addition, you can add negative keywords like free so that when people search for ‘tacos in Anaheim’ they will find you, but when they search for ‘free tacos in Anaheim’ they will not.

In rural areas, Adwords and Bing Ads are typically much more affordable and it is cost efficient to get to the top and stay there.

Asides from traditional search ads, joining paid directory websites and others listings can bring in referral traffic too.

Content Marketing

In general, I see online content marketing as a writer’s dream, and the most common source of marketing weakness in most websites. For whatever reason, whether it reminds someone of those dreaded University papers or a high school dropout that hated writing anything down, people just tend to want to avoid doing this and it looks as though they would rather save their writing bursts for social media where social wording is natural, short and sweet.

Since content marketing works well in all search engines; especially Yahoo and Bing which seems to make coding and content a priority, one should use this method to grab the bull by the horns and go to uncharted territory.

But, this method does not best as a marathon, rather than a short sprint. As a site is updated regularly, search engines will take notice. You will likely find that other pages and your site as a whole will show traffic increases that resemble a hot trading stock. Take away the momentum and it can drop the other direction.

Thus, creating content regularly is a key. In fact, once or twice a week is not overdoing it.

Social Media

Social media is a great place to build awareness. Again, there are some tricks to making social media be effective. Posts should be published often, and local ads and posts can be boosted from time to time as a mixture of organic and paid advertising will get the word out; especially if people follow your page.

Google Business Listing

For any established business or new business, building a Google business listing should be automatic.

Structured Data Markup Helper

Adding Structured Data Markup to your websites can allow for alternative presentations when your site is crawled; such as displaying future events. There are various formats that can be used to display your results, but one stands out; JSON-LD. JSON-LD is a simple snippet of JSON that can be added inside script tags. The two links below can be used to create and test the markup.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool

December 31, 2017 by kent