In this comprehensive article, we will talk about online marketing.
What is online marketing? Why it’s so important nowadays?
Let’s discuss a basic introduction to online marketing.
Online marketing is a technique of promoting products and services via digital devices.
Digital devices can be anything like a laptop, PC, Mobile, Tablet, etc.
Nowadays the market of products and services completely shifted to digital.
Traditional ways of marketing are getting old because in traditional marketing we can’t measure the performance like how your marketing efforts behave and how much we can spend to acquire customers.
Online marketing creates lots of new opportunities where you have the opportunity to market your products and services at very little or almost no cost.
As we are aware in today’s world, most of the population is on the Internet. Most people are online.
It means that getting people attracted to business also needs to be online.
If your business is still not online in 2019 then you are losing most of the audience.
Nowadays the Traditional way of doing business is completely changing.
Promoting content online via digital devices like mobile, laptop, PC, etc. is called online marketing.
Online marketing helps in determining the conversion rate.
Conversion rate can be determined by the total number of conversions divided by the total number of visitors on your website multiplied by a hundred.
Conversion can be anything. It can be filling up a form, hitting the subscribe button, downloading the free ebook, etc.
Have you ever noticed you’re using your smart devices like mobile, PC, Laptop, etc., and browsing the internet, and suddenly the ads will come up?
Sometimes you’re visiting websites and see lots of ads.
These ads may be banner ads, display ads, text-based ads, content ads, etc.
These are all part of digital marketing.
You may also notice when you’re using Android or iOS applications on your device suddenly some ads will come up on your website.
These are also part of online marketing.
When you search for something on Google, what do you notice? The results come up on the first page of Google.
Some search phrases when you search on Google will show ads at the beginning of the SERP and later are all organic listings.
Organic as well as paid ads both are part of online marketing.
Now the main question is how we can learn online marketing.
How we can implement online marketing in our business so that we can get more customers and users for our business?
Here is a comprehensive guide about online marketing where you’ll learn in-depth knowledge about online marketing.
Well, it’s my second blog post. If you don’t read my first blog post, go read it first.
Let’s cover them one by one. These are the questions that will surely help you to shift your products and services online.
What is Online Marketing?
Online marketing as explained above is a technique of promoting the content of the products and services of a company via the internet online.
There are so many ways to promote content online, let’s take an example, you can promote your products via Social Media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc. is a way of online marketing.
In 2019 most of the audience shifted online. So you also need to be there to promote your business.
Now the way of marketing products and services completely changed.
There are lots of opportunities that are there in the online world.
The traditional way of marketing is completely shifted to online.
Billions of people are online these days.
They spent most of their time browsing the internet, managing their social profiles, watching videos online, etc.
Your potential customers are online so you must be online.
There are various resources for promoting stuff.
Here in this article, we will talk about all the mediums of promoting the stuff online through various channels.
There are many steps to promote products and services as discussed below:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (Paid Marketing)
- Social Media Optimization (SMO)
- Social Media Marketing (SMM Paid)
- Email Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Automation Marketing
Let’s take a short overview of all the tactics as shown above.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
Search Engine Optimization or also known as SEO.
It is a technique for optimizing the content of the website for search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, etc.
Whenever the user types some queries on search engines like google then the results will come up.
These results or websites did their SEO that’s why these sites come up on the first page of the search results.
The pages that show these results are known as search engine result pages or SERPs.
Search engine land explains search engine optimization in a very comprehensive way. Have a look.
Let’s understand more comprehensively, suppose you’re looking for information about social media optimization.
You want to know everything about social media optimization.
What will you do?
You’ll open your device browser and search for the same keyword.
Suppose you’re using the Google search engine for finding information about social media optimization.
The result you’ll see on the first page accepts the first few results (The first results come up as maybe ads and later are organic listings).
These organic listings are called SEO results or Search Engine Optimization results.
If you’re a webmaster then your primary aim is to come up on the first page of Google and other search engines so that you can get more traffic.
The free traffic you’re getting from search engines is called free organic traffic. SEO is a well-known term these days.
If you’re an Internet nerd then most probably you might be aware of this term.
The most important part of SEO is liked by Google.
This means there is always a trust factor in Google.
If you’re new or you just have purchased a domain and just started your journey then most probably it’ll take time to gain the trust of the most popular search engine Google.
You need to create regular content on your website.
You need to provide value to your user and it all will be natural.
As long as you’ll share content on your website and users will like and share your content your website will start getting rankings on search engines.
There are some golden rules that you should always take care of.
Nowadays people want to create a multi-topic website like the big giants already present in the market.
Yes, you can create and it’s even easy to create such a website but my friend it takes time to rank high in search engines because your main objective is not clear.
You need to be niche-specific.
Once you have a perfect niche your main goal is to create outstanding content that’ll rank on search engines.
There are two types of SEO techniques.
1. On-Page SEO
2. Off-Page SEO
As it is clear from its name, On-Page is a technique of implementing SEO on website web pages called on-page SEO.
There are certain factors to which search engines adhere.
You can say there are certain guidelines for search engines.
You have to implement these guidelines on your website to get ranking on search engines.
As Google is the master of the internet, everything depends on google.
Now google shares almost 80% to 90% of searches on the internet.
Other search engines also take their data from Google.
On-page SEO is the most important term these days.
If you want to rank high in SEARCH ENGINES then it needs to keep in mind that on-page SEO is the key to that.
You need to make your website user-friendly and also search engine friendly so that search engines can easily crawl and then index your website on their database.
You need to implement certain operations on your website so that your website can be easily indexed on search engines.
If you want to get most of your traffic naturally or what we call organically then it’s a primary thing for you to make your website SEO friendly.
If you’re using popular CMS like WordPress, JUMLA, and Drupal then it can be easy to make a website search engine friendly even if you’re not a tech nerd.
If you’re using a custom website then you should implement certain operations on every page of your website.
Your domain name is the primary website and the search engine sees every page of any website as a new website.
Make sure to optimize every page and post.
Some points need to take in On-Page as mentioned below:
Title of the post/page:
The post/page title should be catchy and must have a focus keyword that you want to get optimized for.
It shouldn’t be more than 60 characters long.
Before writing the title of any page/ post, get research via various keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz SEO Tool, SEMRUSH, AHREFS, etc.
The SEO title is the most important part when you write a blog post or page.
Suppose you want to write a blog post about “best ways to boost your ranking on search engine” then do keyword research and find out which keyword has the maximum searches and lower competition.
I would recommend Ahref and SEMRUSH, and the free one is Ubersuggest. Make sure to use these tools and research the best keywords for your blog post.
Now after analyzing the keyword now the main work is to think about a catchy title.
Just do a google search and see hows your competitors are optimizing the content for the same keyword, make sure to use the skyscraper technique.
This means if someone already wrote an article on 10 ways to boost rankings on search engines then your article would be 25 ways to boost rankings on search engines.
Make sure your content should be in-depth and should be a well amount of multimedia elements like images and videos.
Always keep in mind optimize your web pages and posting for the right keyword will bring close to you to your target audience.
Meta Description:
The meta description is the most important part of the on-page tactics.
The meta description is something that reads by both search engines and users.
It should be short enough to be informative but large enough to get all keywords and search terms.
The meta description should be up to 160 characters not more than it.
Just do a google search and see what happens.
When you’ll do a google search you’ll find the results will come up. Now make sure the title and description of each website.
You’ll find the well-written title and description will get more clicks and you also want to click on those results that have well-written title and description.
Make sure to optimize your meta description for users, not for search engines.
The more you’ll get click the better you’ll rank on search engines.
If you’re using popular CMS like WordPress then I will recommend using Yoast for optimizing your title and description for each post and page.
Generally, for search engines, there is not any difference in pages and posts.
Make sure to include the title for both pages and posts.
Meta Tags:
Well, meta tags or meta keywords are the search terms for search engines to optimize your posts/pages.
Meta tags may or may not include in your post/ pages because sometimes it creates a duplicate content issue.
Like, take an example you had written an article. The article is about “how to play the guitar”.
Suppose you had included keywords like how to play the guitar, play the guitar, and play guitar step by step.
It will index in search engines like the main URL example.com/post and also be index example.com/tags/post.
Both are the same content but the index in search engines like different.
That can decrease your ranking on the search engine.
You should avoid writing the keywords or tags and search engine generally doesn’t consider these as ranking factors.
URL Optimization:
URL should be in a systematic format like example.com/post or page. It shouldn’t include any date-time or any other element.
It should be catchy to understand by users and search engines also.
Before choosing the domain name always remember to have the domain related to your focus keyword.
It will help you to boost your ranking and user can easily understand your products and services.
Make sure the user is your priority so next time when you’ll write a blog post make sure your URL should be small enough to be read by users first then by search engines.
Most of the time you’ll see people use some creepy URL on their posts when someone will come up on your website on search engines they first read your title then the URL and last but not least is the description.
Make sure to keep these terms the same and include your focus keyword in all these three fields.
Body Headings (H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6):
Body headings play a major role in On-page SEO.
It will be not only understood by the user but search engines also. The user gets an idea of the topic of the paragraph.
It must be present on the pages and posts.
It should be serial-wise, don’t just put them randomly, it will not be going to help you.
Body headings should include the focus keyword.
It should be understandable enough that the user can understand the message you want to convey via headings.
Make sure to put the headings in serial order. These headings help users to understand your topic.
Suppose I want to write a blog post about 7 ways to make money online then I’ll write the H1 for the main headline or also the title then later it’ll divide into subheadings as you can see in my current blog post.
If you want to rank high in search engines then make sure to use the headings on your post and pages.
Keyword Density:
The most important is keyword density.
First, you need to keep users in your mind, not search engines because your end goal is to satisfy your target users not search engines.
As per search engine guidelines, give priority to your users, and ultimately you giving priority to us, that is simple.
Keyword density shouldn’t be more than the recommended one as per the search engine guidelines.
Always keep in mind keyword density shouldn’t be more than 4%.
Don’t spam by just putting too many keywords, it will not be going to help you.
If you will put the targeted keyword too many times, maybe you will get a penalty from Google.
Always research the keyword before making a strategy for the content.
The keyword should be relevant and targeted.
The keyword should be focused and relevant to your need.
Just think like a user, you’re doing a google search about “learning piano”.
You’ll land on a website where there is the only term used multiple times, learning piano and there is not any relevant content on that site about how you’ll feel like.
Same as it is making sure to write your article naturally and don’t spam just repeating the same keywords again and again.
Image SEO:
Again images are the most important part of any website. Without relevant images, the website will not look visually good.
People can easily understand things with the help of images. So images must be present along with the texts.
But care should be taken, it should contain the relevant targeted keywords that you are going to optimize your page or post.
It should include the Alt Texts because as all we know search engines are robots that can’t read the images, they can’t understand the images, but they can read the alt text and can make their decision to rank images also.
It can also help you in Image SEO as google also shows images on SEO Terms.
Have you ever tried to search for images on search engines?
There is an option for images as well.
When you’ll do a google search you’ll find the image search option is also there.
Make sure to take benefit of it. Try to create high-quality images and implement these images on your blog post or pages.
Images are pretty important, multimedia elements that may also rank high on search engines.
If you have well images on your site then you can get an extra amount of traffic to your website or blog.
You can use various online tools freely available online for creating stunning graphics for your website even if you’re not a designer then also you can create such graphics.
After writing a blog post make sure to attach that infographic at the end and ask users to share that infographic on various social platforms, especially on Pinterest.
It can bring an extra amount of traffic to your website.
You can also ask your users to give a shortcode of that infographic and ask your user to embed it on their website. That way you’ll get a backlink.
Internal Linking:
This is also very important to acquire traffic for your website because it will not only increase the retention time of the user but also leaves a very good impact on search engines.
Search engines are just robots they have certain algorithms on which they decide what should rank or what shouldn’t.
If you are providing the best results to your user then it will also boost your website authority. Internal link plays a major role in it.
It’s a way of linking your web pages or post internally. Internal linking is a well-known term these days.
I had just done a google search for the most competitive search term online marketing and here I land on the search result.
As you can see the content is even thinner than its competitor, just because of internal linking users retain on the website for a longer period that’s why it’s ranking on the first page of Google.
Internal linking is pretty much an amazing thing, make sure to implement it on your every blog post and page as well.
Search engines are robots as I already cleared, their IQ is zero, and they only judge ranking on certain algorithms.
There are almost more than 200 factors as everyone says.
If you want to rank higher than most of these factors as I already explained, make sure to implement it on your website right now.
Canonical URL:
Canonical is the major problem in On-Page SEO because as we are aware that search engines are just robots they don’t have the human brain to understand and analyze things.
Canonical is the issue, suppose you have a URL link, let’s take an example www.example.com is a link and http://www.example.com is also a link then search engines consider these two links as two different websites.
That’s called the canonical issue. It can decrease your ranking and can have a bad impact on your website.
If your website has canonical issues then make sure to read this article and implement a certain code on your .htaccess file.
Sitemap Creation:
The sitemap is the map for search engines only.
It is basically in XML Format that guides the search engine’s robots that how many links are there on the website.
There can be two types of sitemap one for search engines and one for users. When you’ll visit a website you’ll find several pages or posts.
You can guide search engines by creating a sitemap that how many pages or post your website have.
If you’re using WordPress then you can use the most popular plugin these days.
Yoast SEO it’ll create an automatic sitemap. Here is an example of a Yoast-generated sitemap.
As you can see there is a different sitemap for posts and different for pages as well.
You can also create a sitemap for images, videos, podcasts, or whatever content you have.
If you have a large eCommerce website then you can also create different sitemaps for products and their categories as well.
Robots.txt File:
It’s a text file for search engine robots.
It’s a text file that guides the search engine’s robots that post, page, category, tags, product, service, etc. will need to index or which will not.
It’s a simple text file. As you can see from the above example.
Disallow means we restrict the search engine not to crawl or indexing these terms.
Let’s consider the above image.
You can see we disallow the comments, which means the search will no longer crawl or index the comments.
It means these comments will not see in search results.
Let’s take one more example, suppose you’re using WordPress then most probably you may not want that search engine will index your wp-login because if the search engine index the WP-LOGIN then it may appear in search results, and hackers can easily reach your admin board.
Include the Google analytics and search console codes:
Google provides various free services for its users. It’s one of them. Google search console is a tool to get an idea about the health of the website.
It gives data about how your website is performing on the search engine result page (SERP).
What is the performance of the keywords? These data will provide the search console.
The second one is google analytics, which’s another tool that uses for real-time traffic analysis.
Now come to the OFF-Page SEO. Off-page is a technique of optimizing content with the help of off-page activities.
It is based on link-building strategies.
Link building is a technique of making links on other websites to drive quality traffic to your website.
But link building should be genuine and relevant.
Suppose you have a blog in the shoe category then you need to make links on the same category of the websites.
Other off-page activities can be explained as given below.
- Social Media Sharing
- Blogging
- Forum Posting
- Guest Blogging
- Social Bookmarking
- Question and Answers
- Photo Sharing
- Video Sharing
- Slide Show
- PPT AND PDF Sharing
- Business Listing
- Article Submission
Search Engine Marketing (SEM):
Let’s discuss another part of marketing called Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
It’s a paid way of promoting content.
Suppose you have a business and you just made a website for your business.
Now you want leads for your website because your target audience is online, you know that, so you have two options, first you can go with SEO and the other is SEM.
Suppose you started SEO then it will take time, you have to keep patience for that, but if you want instant results then you can pay to search engines for better and fast results.
Social Media Optimization (SMO):
Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is a way of promoting content organically.
As in general life, we make social media accounts. Let’s take the example of Facebook.
You must have an account on FB and Instagram and you use to post on a daily or weekly basis, it’s an organic way of sharing the content.
You can use various social platforms for promoting your business without paying for sharing the content is what we called social media optimization.
Social media optimization organic reach may take time because you need to do a constant effort for getting more traffic to your website and your reach may be limited because you may promote the stuff in a limited area.
You don’t need to pay a single penny for that, it’s called social media optimization.
I hope you will understand.
Social Media Marketing (SMM):
Social Media Marketing (SMM), it’s a technique of promoting content on different websites using paid marketing.
Suppose you have a video that contains your company product information and you want that video will need to reach as high as possible, so here comes the part of social media marketing.
You can promote that video on various social media channels like Facebook and YouTube.
You can pay them to promote your content.
Email Marketing:
Email Marketing is a technique for reselling products and services via email. It’s a way of communicating with prospects.
Suppose you have an online store, and you daily update your website with good content. You are already providing valuable information for your users.
Now you can secretly ask for their email and name so that you can send them these types of content and secretly push to sell your products via email.
Email marketing is not about sending Bulk Emails or sending push spammy emails that will not beneficial for you.
You have to create your email list by providing valuable content to your users.
Mobile Marketing:
Nowadays mobiles are the major online devices that most people have in this world. So here comes the part of mobile marketing.
Nowadays there are mostly android and iOS devices. These operating systems run certain types of applications.
Most of the time you have seen the ads running there, it’s called mobile marketing.
Another example of sending promotional messages, text messages is also part of mobile marketing.
Online Reputation Management:
Online reputation management is the technique of maintaining the reputation of the brand by engaging potential customers.
We are aware that nowadays everyone using social media, so most of the time your potential customer is also on social media.
You can directly engage with your customers using interacting with them online and providing them with instant support on social media.
It is part of online reputation management.
Automation Marketing:
Last but not least is automation marketing is the technique of automating the marketing process called marketing automation.
As all aware that nowadays there are so many tools in the market that work completely automated.
They just need to give instructions and they will continuously do their task.
Email automation is an example. Remarketing Ads are also another example that works on automation.
Online Marketing Examples:
There are so many brands that are already using online marketing as the primary source of getting traffic.
As all, we know that internet marketing is the best way to market products and services because it’s affordable and measurable.
Traditional advertising value reduces day by day because it’s too costly and can’t even measure the results so now people are shifting to online marketing.
Some of the brands that recently gained popularity as explained below.
Babysitter Services
Airbnb
Uniqlo
Dominos
Sephora
These are the brands that promoted their service online and now become famous.
What do Online Marketers do?
An Online marketer has many responsibilities because marketing any product or service is not so much easy.
You have to mentally prepare yourself.
You need to keep enough knowledge about your products and services because when you will talk to your target audience, you need to keep expert knowledge about your products and services.
It will keep you out of the box from others.
An Online Marketer can perform all operations as explained below
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (Paid Marketing)
- Social Media Optimization (SMO)
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Email Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Online Reputation Management (ORM)
- Automation Marketing
Either you can be an expert in one of them or you need to have expert knowledge in all of these.
Always need to keep in your mind as an online marketer never promote your product or services directly.
Provide value to your audience, provide knowledge, educate them then secretly push the solution as your product and services.
How Online Marketing Works?
Now come to the point of how online marketing works.
It can be explained by let’s take an example, you are a jeans manufacturer and you want to sell jeans online but you don’t have an idea about how to get customers online.
Then you decide to make a Facebook page for your company and start sharing the jeans images and their details.
You start sharing the details and knowledge about your product and how jeans can help you to have a better lifestyle.
You can also share this information on Instagram. Then you start gaining followers or Facebook page likes.
They might be interested in your information and want to get information continuously that’s why they liked your page.
Then after some time, you have a good number of followers, and now you can secretly pitch these as a customer of your products or services. That’s Simple!
Online Marketing over Traditional Marketing
There can be so many benefits to adopting online marketing over the traditional one.
We will talk about the major benefits like it’s cost-effective, and you can market your company’s product or service at very little cost.
It can be measurable, which means you can measure your ad performance, and how your ad is performing.
From where the users are coming and what devices they are using etc.
You can demographically target your audience based on their income age language etc.
Who can do Online marketing?
Anyone can do Online marketing who wants to promote their goods and services online.
Do you have any type of business? Either B2B or B2C. Everyone needs to acquire customers for their business.
So here Online marketing comes into play a major role in that.
You don’t need to go to any specific institute and then learn marketing rather you can join various online free and paid courses, there are tons of online stuff out there.
You can start learning today and also start practicing simultaneously so that you can judge the real-time results.
How can a business take advantage of online marketing?
Businesses can take advantage of acquiring online customers, trust me guys, the internet is the place where only you can get the best target audience for your business.
Suppose you have a business and you offer services then you can promote your services online to get customers.
You can do tons of activities online for getting more traffic to your online store.
Whether you have an online store business or whatever you have.
Make sure to use these online channels and implement online techniques for getting more traffic.
Is your business eligible for online marketing?
There are not any certain criteria for the business to be online. Nowadays almost all businesses can be online.
Even if you belong to the village side and you are a farmer then also you can bring your service online to get better engagement and ROI.
So every business can be online. TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND COME UP ONLINE!
Conclusion:
So here I cover the comprehensive article where I explained almost all the things about online marketing, I hope it will help you.
Whether you have a business or not, it can hopefully boost your knowledge about online marketing.
Happy Marketing!
