The internet is a beautiful place packed to the brim with information and cat videos.

The sheer size and scale of the internet are immense and almost incomprehensible. But the internet is more than a safe haven for adorable puppy videos and tutorials on how to boil water: it is any company’s marketing dream come true.

On a single platform, companies can connect with millions of people. They can communicate and share their messages effectively.

Companies have swarmed the internet in recent years to take advantage of this, a strategy known as Digital Marketing.

Now you may have heard of Digital Marketing along with various other hype words in seminars and other marketing-related events.

As much as you may not want to believe them, people overhyping the effectiveness of Digital Marketing are often right.

If you have been hesitant about using Digital Marketing, it can be overwhelming. This post will help you slide right into the scene.

This guide will go over:

What is Digital Marketing?
The Importance of Digital Marketing

What is Digital Marketing?
Digital Marketing is any and all marketing efforts that rely on electronic devices, and in extension, the internet.

It’s the group of activities that a company or individual performs online. These activities attract new business opportunities, create relationships, and develop a brand identity.

Digital Marketing is very diverse and versatile.

The sheer amount of tools, data, and channels available on the internet creates opportunities for marketers to deliver effective content to specific people, through personalization.

Are you looking for a more direct advertising strategy for a very particular audience, that will help your brand to grow?

Well, Digital Marketing strategies like using emails or ads in specific social media groups can attract a very niche audience. They deliver a tailored message based on their specific interests.

Are you looking forward to advertising your company to a mass market, garnering massive appeal and brand awareness?

Video ads and regular ads on social media applications and search engines should put your brand in front of millions of people.

Regardless of your audience type or how niche your product may be, you can easily find the public you want.

The Importance of Digital Marketing
By now, it might seem impossible that the number of global internet users is still steadily climbing, but that’s exactly what’s happening. According to recent research, there were approximately 5.3 billion web users worldwide in 2022.

That represents 66% of the global population. And, of course, those numbers have only continued to rise since and will do so into the future as more and more people get online.

Those statistics combined with the way the internet has already changed how people shop make digital marketing more essential than ever.

Successful marketing today involves reaching your target audience where they live and at the right times. Your customers are spending increasing amounts of time on social media, searching for information on search engines, and just being online in general.

That said, online digital marketing isn’t just a good idea anymore. It’s an essential part of any comprehensive marketing strategy. Because without it, it’s just about guaranteed that you’re missing out on valuable business.

Why Your Company Needs Digital Marketing
Not all the people that have told you that Digital Marketing is the greatest thing since sliced bread are wrong.

A single place where you can have access to unlimited information leads, and potential customers is an offer that no one should look over.

If you are not utilizing Digital Marketing, you are giving up on an incredibly lucrative marketing space.

That said, the most important reason why your company needs to use Digital Marketing is simple: the Internet.

SEO is key in any Digital Marketing strategy.

After all, who wouldn’t want to show up within the top organic search results on Google?

It’s where users find the most visible links, as well as those most frequently accessed by users.

Having a good SEO strategy can get you there!

Your site, blog, or eCommerce business becomes more well-known, resulting in authority in the market, a greater number of visitors, and increased conversion opportunities.

Best of all? You can achieve all of this without having to invest in paid advertising.

Through optimizations on your own pages and connecting to other sites, you can improve your users’ search and navigation experience.

With this complete guide to SEO, you’ll learn all you need to know to reach the top results on Google. We’ll cover the following topics.

What is SEO?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a set of optimization strategies for sites, blogs, and pages on the web, which aim to improve your position in organic search engine results.

Every second, millions of searches are being processed by search engines — mainly Google, the most popular search engine around the world.

Users are looking for answers to an incredible range of questions in their daily routine – from the best-rated hotel for an upcoming trip to an explanation of the theory of evolution.

For every search, Google organizes the results by ranking the best answers first. The numbers below show just how much users trust the judgment of search engines:

• The first three organic links receive approximately 30% of all click-throughs.
• Only 0.78% of users access a link on the second page of the results.

Take a look at the graph below to see the correlation between position ranking and the number of clicks:

Every search presents the opportunity for your brand to offer the best response to what users are looking for.

With this as your focus, you have a better chance to increase your visibility and clicks, receive more organic traffic, and escalate results with your online presence.

But, to achieve this, you need to prove to Google that you have the best answer and deserve to show up in the first position on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).

This involves not just having great content, but offering usability, communicating marketplace authority, and helping Google read your pages. 

These are the goals of an SEO strategy.

SEO also plays a role in SEM (Search Engine Marketing), which covers all search engine strategies, including paid ads and sponsored links.

On the other hand, SEO only makes use of organic strategies and doesn’t encompass media purchases. This results in a higher return on investment (ROI) and lower customer acquisition cost (CAC).

What are Search Engines?

Search engines are systems or algorithms used to crawl, index, and rank web content to display it in an ordered way based on user searches.

When we refer to search engines, we’re not just talking about Google, but also Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu and others.

Even YouTube and Pinterest can be thought of as search engines since they’re often used to discover content.

But Google is the clear category leader, with almost 92% of the search market share.

Each search engine has its own methodology and ranking criteria. But in the end, the goal is always the same: offering the best results for what users are looking for.

How do Search Engines Work?

Have you ever considered exactly what Google does when you search for something? Despite only taking milliseconds, there’s a long process to be able to display a list of results that answer your question.

In general, search engines have three stages:

First, search engines crawl through web content using bots, also known as spiders. At Google, it’s known as their Googlebot. These bots follow the connections of links across the web, searching for new and updated pages.

After that, the crawled pages are added to the search engine’s index, which serves as a vast library for the web’s content.

There, pages are organized according to the information the bot collected about them, such as loading time and keywords.

These processes of crawling and indexing are continuously taking place.

The bots are always finding and organizing the content on the web. But the order in which they display their results to users is defined through ranking.

Ranking occurs every time a user searches for something — this is the focus of SEO.

According to the keywords used in the search, Google quickly goes through its index to find pages that coincide with those terms and respond to the question.

Thus, classification is determined by the best relationship between keywords and a series of ranking factors that make up the search algorithm. 

They serve to offer a better user experience and, as a result, increase your page’s position in the search results.

We will focus on these factors in detail below.

But what does “social media marketing” truly mean, and how can we use it’s dominance on the world scene to grow our businesses?

Real social media marketing takes dedication

If you’re new to social media marketing you might believe that a few blog posts, daily, random status updates, and a healthy number of “followers” and “likes” are going to magically grow your business.

The truth is: this stuff takes real planning and dedication.

Serious online marketers know that in order to harness the power of social media you need to incorporate a deliberate mixture of:

• Listening to your audience
• Sharing your relevant message
• Enabling others to share your relevant message

And what do you share, and hope that others will? Content.

There is no such thing as effective social media marketing without content.

Your social media strategy originates from your solid content marketing strategy. Great content gets people to share, and that sharing widens your audience to a whole new world of potential fans, friends, and customers.

Whether you’re a large business or a lone entrepreneur, social media marketing can be the most inexpensive and powerful marketing tool in your arsenal to build the trust and authority that — in the best case — helps exponentially grow your business.