UNIT 4

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the process of getting traffic from the
“free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing

the quantity  and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

To understand the true meaning of SEO, let's break that definition down and look at the parts:

 Quality of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they're coming
to your site because Google tells them you're a resource for Apple computers when
really you're a farmer selling apples, that is not quality traffic. Instead you want to
attract visitors who are genuinely interested in products that you offer.
 Quantity of traffic. Once you have the right people clicking through from those
search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is better.
 Organic results. Ads make up a significant portion of many SERPs. Organic traffic is
any traffic that you don't have to pay for.

An SEO strategy (also referred to as “SEO approach” or “search engine optimization

strategy”) is the process of planning, outlining and implementing steps designed to improve
search engine rankings. In other words: an SEO strategy is the process that you follow when
you want to get more organic traffic.

Search engine friendly website structure

An SEO friendly website it’s easy for search engines to crawl and understand the structure
and its content.

The most important characteristics of a SEO friendly website are:

1) It has unique titles and Descriptions for all pages: Each page of the website (including
the home page) has a unique title and description. The titles are between 60-65 characters
and the descriptions are aprx 150 characters. Titles and descriptions accurately describe
what the page is about without being keyword stuffed.

2) Well formatted URLs: Permanent links or slugs are descriptive, all lower case and
separated by dashes.
3) Fast loading web pages: Neither people nor search engines want websites that are slow
to load. On the contrary fast loading websites are SEO friendly (meaning they have an
advantage in ranking algorithms over websites that are slower) and generate more user
interactions (sales, newsletter signups, contact forms submissions etc.)

4) It has unique content

Content on the website is not found anywhere else on the web, all pages have unique and
useful content. This means a website cannot be SEO friendly if it has content copied from
other web sites.

5) Includes images that are optimized for search engines

Search engines prefer text that’s the truth, but you also need to have images to your pages
because people like it, it makes your content more interesting, easier to read, sharable etc.

6) Pages have a meaningful structure

A web page usually has the following elements:

 Header
 Breadcrumb menu
 Page Title
 Well formatted text – text is separated into a number of short paragraphs with
subheadings

 Author information

SEO AND KEY PHRASES

Key phrases are short, simple descriptors that people type into search engines (like Google,
Bing, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.) in order to find information or answer a question about a specific
interest or need. For example: "chocolate chip cookie recipe," "fun things to do in St. Paul,
Minnesota," or "order Mother's Day flowers online." As little "summaries" that return
information, keywords are also a way to quickly sum up what a business or brand does or
offers.
The thing about key phrases is that users create them to fit their search query. These
phrases are super important to search engine optimization (SEO) because they help online
users.

Here are some of the top reasons why keywords are important in digital marketing:

1) Help Your Audience Find You: With proper keyword research and optimization,

your audience will be able to see you using the common terms and phrases that they
use for search. Keyword research also helps you find the right words and phrases that
align with the theme of your business. 

2) Identify Your Audience: Keywords serve as the link between what people are
searching for and the content you are providing to meet their needs. The keywords
you pick to target or include in your content will determine the kind of traffic you’ll
get. Essentially, keywords are about your audience as much as they are about your
content.

 Understanding your customers’ needs and interests allows you to create

content that your audience will find interesting and valuable.
 Knowing where your customers spend most of their time enables you to
better target your marketing efforts. You can place ads or promote your
content in platforms where your audience is most likely to see and share it.
 You can generate better quality leads and give your marketing campaigns
a more personal touch.
 When you know which personas your marketing team should focus more
on, you can easily allocate your budget and resources into the right
channels that are most efficient for attracting your ideal customer.
 You can build future products and product features that are more closely
aligned to your customers’ needs.

3) Boost Leads and Sales: The most critical function of keywords is to help you obtain
high-quality leads. In a nutshell, the keywords you choose should help boost your
conversion and, ultimately, increase your revenue.

4) Streamline Marketing Efforts: Keywords represent what your business is all about
—from the products and services you provide to whom you target.
 LINK POPULARITY

Definition
A measure of the quantity and quality of sites that link to your site.

Information
Link popularity is an example of the move by search engines towards off-the-page-criteria to
determine quality content. Off-the-page-criteria adds the aspect of impartiality to search
engine rankings, as citations from other authors in the Web community helps define a site’s
reputation. In theory, great sites will naturally attract many links, and content-poor sites will
have difficulty attracting any links.

BENEFITS OF SEO:

1) SEO targets quality traffic

One of the biggest advantages of SEO is that it’s an inbound marketing strategy. Unlike
traditional “outbound” advertising channels, which involve reaching out to consumers
whether they want to hear from you or not, inbound methods centre on making it easy for
your audience to find you when they want information.

2) You don’t need to pay for ads in SEO

Google’s organic rankings are based entirely on what its algorithm determines to be the best
results for any given query. This means that once you’ve created a page that the search
engine deems worthy of directing their users to, it can continue to attract traffic to your site
for months (or even years) after you publish it.

Of course, researching and writing high-quality content requires an investment. That

investment will either be in the form of time, if you choose to create it yourself, or money, if
you choose to hire a digital marketing agency to create it for you.

But once you’ve made that initial investment, there’s no ongoing cost to keep attracting
traffic to your content.
 3) SEO helps PR
Although SEO and PR may seem like entirely separate marketing strategies, you can use
them together to maximize the results you see from each. And considering that a PR strategy
revolves around getting prominent publications and influencers to talk about your company,
this presents a huge opportunity.

4) Helps to move ahead of the competition

SEO is widely considered a staple of any marketing strategy. This means that your
competitors are likely already taking steps to establish high rankings in search results.
And with an SEO strategy of your own, you can keep up with — and ideally, move ahead of
them to stay competitive within your industry.

CHALLENGES OF SEO:

1) IT’S SLOW

According to some of the top industry experts, it can take 3-6 months for a new page to be
crawled and, speaking from personal experience, even a properly changed domain can have
ramifications for years.

2) IT’S HARD TO TEST

Unlike paid ads, it’s difficult to test SEO. The first reason is that it’s difficult to control the
amount of traffic that reaches the page or the number of people who see a particular organic
listing, meaning you could have either an infinite test or an inconclusive one. The second
reason it’s difficult to test with SEO is because, at least with the organic listing.

3) DIFFICULT TO TARGET

Somewhat related to the difficulties with testing, reaching your ideal customer on a consistent
basis can be a challenge with SEO.

Content Marketing
“Content Marketing refers to the process of creating and distributing relevant and valuable
content to attract, acquire and build customer loyalty among a clearly defined audience with
the goal of generating profitable actions among consumers”.

Its fundamental to work with well-developed and quality content. Meanwhile and due
to Content Marketing’s cultural contribution.

Content marketing benefits business can gain from:

 It’s the best way to reach your target audience by offering relevant and quality content
to them.
 It’s the perfect technique for improving your content, website and commercial
proposals’ web positioning
 It enables you to transmit your brand’s values.
 It helps you attract and retain potential clients on Social Networks.
 Creating articles and content that are relevant to your audience makes it possible for
you to utilize SEO techniques, which help to favour your appearance in the first few
results on Google searches.

 Types of Content Marketing

1) Articles on Your Website and Blogging

One of the best strategies for getting the max out of Content Marketing is to create your own
articles for your blog or website, and then promoting them on Social Networks. Why?
Because this enables you to increase web traffic to your site and to offer original and
relevant content to your audience

2) Email Marketing

Email Marketing, which is mailing newsletters and promotions to your audience via e-mail,

is an excellent form of keeping your public informed on your content and news as well as
spreading your commercial proposals.
 3) Videos
Making the creation of videos an integral part of any content marketing strategy is very
favourable since this class of content happens to be one of the most shared on Social
Networks. Therefore, its recommended to create a YouTube channel (currently the most
important video platform) and share your videos from there.

4) Social Networks

Social Networks are where you’ll be able to find and interact with your audience, which
makes it the medium of choice for diffusing your content. Thus, you should remember
to optimize your blog or website so that people can share your articles on Social Media.

STRATEGIC BUILDING BLOCKS

A solid content ensures that business producing relevant growth consistently, keeps your plan
aligned along the same goals, and helps business reliably measure success.

Below outlined a few challenges that arise during the planning process, and discuss
actionable ways to overcome them so marketers can get started on putting together a
documented strategy
 Define your vision for success

Understand your audience

Defining your brand voice

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1) Define your vision for success

The first step is to define why you’re even creating content in the first place. Start by
outlining the reasons why you need to create content and define what success will look like.
Once you understand why you’re spending time and resources on producing content it will be
much easier to align your team, define realistic goals, and implement a strategy for success.
Many teams skip this initial step, overlooking the foundation of their entire plan.

2) Understand your audience

One of the most important components of a solid content marketing plan is audience
profiling. How will you know what type of content to produce, where to publish it, and where
to promote it if you don’t understand your target audience?
Step 1: Create Demographic Profiles. These should include important data like age, race,
religion, gender, income level, profession, family size, education level, and marital status.

Step 2: Develop Buyer Personas. beyond the demographic information and looks at their
needs, goals, desires, challenges, values, and attitudes. 

Step 3: Cater to them with content. Now that you know who your audience is it’s time to
think about what social channels they live on, what keywords catch their attention, and what
content they’re searching for. 

3) Defining your brand voice

Defining your brand voice is another way to maintain consistency throughout your content.
Putting together a voice and tone guide will differentiate your brand, create a standard that
you can measure quality content against, and help you create content that resonates with your
audience.

4) Create engaging content

there are a various ways to increase engagement:

 Use visuals.  content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without
relevant visuals.
 Leverage user-generated content. Ask your followers to submit images and stories
or use a hash tag campaign to generate a discussion. According to Forbes, 62% of
millennials say that if a brand engages with them on social networks, they are more
likely to become a loyal customer. Don’t just throw content at your audience, ask for
their participation.
 Be useful. Offer something useful to your audience for free. Entrepreneur suggests
providing your audience with a white paper, ebook, slide presentation or video that
gives your audience actionable tips, insights from industry experts, or templates to
help them do their job better)
 Reach out to influencers. Connecting with people who have established themselves
as thought leaders in your space will lend your brand credibility. Reach out to
influencers in your field for guest posts or interviews. You can also ask them to share
these posts on social media to help generate traffic and brand awareness. These
relationships must be cultivated over time, so bank this as a long-term strategy.

5) Measure and optimize your content

Marketers are obsessed with measuring the “effectiveness” of their content. But what does
“effective content” actually mean?

You can analyse bounce rate, time on site, average pages per visit, percentage of returning
visitors, frequency of visits, and audience engagement rates to better understand what’s
working and what isn’t.

ONLINE ADVERTISING

Online advertising is a marketing strategy that involves the use of the Internet as a
medium to obtain website traffic and target and deliver marketing messages to the right
customers. Online advertising is geared toward defining markets through unique and useful
applications.

Since the early 1990s there has been an exponential increase in the growth of online
advertising, which has evolved into a standard for small and large organizations.

Online advertising is also known as Internet advertising or Digital Advertising.

 KEY TERMS IN ONLINE ADVERTISING

1. IMPRESSION: It means how many times the user saw your ad or banner or any other
online advertisement. Each time your ad has been viewed counts as an impression.

2. CTR( COST THROUGH RATE: How many users saw your ads and clicked on it too
and visited your websites or landing page. For eg: if ad reached 100 inpression, and
10 user also clicked on ad, it means your CTR is 10%.

3. CONVERSION: once a user saw your ad, clicked on it and visited your website and
does any action like buying any product or registered or download depending upon
which action has been considered as a conversion for the campaign.

4. CALL FOR ACTION: call for action is what drives the users to interact with your
campaign
 5. Ad dimension : the size of creative measured in pixels. Like728*90, 160*600 etc.

6. Ad space: the space reserved on web page to display the ad.

7. Cookies: cookies are the small files that are sent from a web server to user’s local
computer.

8. Banner

9. CPA

10. CPC

11. CPM

12. POPUP etc.

 TYPES OF ONLINE ADVERTISING

There are a wide variety of advertising types marketer could use – we’ve listed the
seven top types here:

1. Display Ads
The original form of online advertising, these are visual ads that appear on third party
websites (usually ones that are related to your content or service in some way).
Display ads have evolved from the basic form of banner ads. Nowadays, display ads come as:

 Static images – these are your basic banner or square ads that appear around the
content.
 Text – these are text ads that are created by algorithms to make text ads relevant to
the surrounding content.
 Floating banners – these move across the screen or float above the regular website’s
content.
 Wallpaper – these appear and change the background of a website, filling the whole
page.
 Popup ads – these are new windows that appear in front of the website content;
newly opened window displays the full ad so visitors can see.
 Flash – these are moving ads that “flash” different content at the viewer.
 Video – these are small video ads that auto play or wait for the video to be played by
the visitor.

2. Social Media Ads

Very similar to Display Ads, Social Media ads can be anything from a simple banner or
image to an auto-play video.
Social Media advertising is great because you can target your audience perfectly. For
example, Facebook’s targeting options include age, region, interests, educational background
and more.

Here are two types of Social Media advertisements:

 Organic – creates loyalty and gives you feedback from your target audience; new
form of Word-of-Mouth
 Paid – leverage promoted posts and reach specific people

The best platforms to target are:

 LinkedIn for B2B sales

 Facebook for display and top of funnel marketing
 StumbleUpon for amazing, attention-grabbing content

3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

The most dependable form of online paid advertising (and also the most common). SEM
works based on keywords – you and other businesses like yours bid on keywords through
search engines in an effort to get your website up higher on the Search Engine Results Page
(SERP).
All SEM ads that appear in Google, Bing and other search engines are text ads. They’re listed
at the top or sides of the SERP.
Paid ads can either be Pay Per Click (PPC) or Cost Per Thousand (CPM).

 PPC
 You bid on keywords and your results appear at the top of the SERP based on bid
value.
 This is the best value package because you’re only charged when people click on the
ad.
 Also, it’s the easiest to track during the campaign.
 CPM 
 You’re billed a flat rate for 1,000 impressions.
 This makes it easy to apply a budget and you’re guaranteed a number of
“shows” on the SERP.
 However, you risk overspending – if no one clicks through you’re paying for
wasted results.
 Also, you can’t assess or track the campaign until it’s over.

4. Native Advertising
Native advertising is those sponsored listings at the end of blog posts, appearing on your
Facebook feeds and posted to other Social Media.
These pieces of content are integrated and camouflaged into the platform on which they
appear. There are several forms of Native Advertising:

 In-feed
 Search ads
 Recommendation widgets
 Promoted listings

5. Remarketing/Retargeting
The best way to market to people who already know about your product and service is to
remarket to them. Or retarget. Depends on who you’re talking to.
When people visit your site, you drop a cookie on them so that, as they travel around the web,
your ads will appear over and over to remind them about your product or service.

6. Video Ads
While YouTube ads are the most popular and well known of video ads, there are actually
several different formats, types and content options.
You can go the route of educational/informative. Or maybe you want to post a how-to. Try to
pull on the emotional strings of your viewers by creating a visual story. Ideal for branding,
especially if you have a product or service that is best demonstrated visually.
Once you’ve created your video, you can post to:

 YouTube/Google
 Facebook
 Twitter
 Vimeo
 Brightroll
 YuMe etc.

7. Email Marketing
Hanging out with Display Ads back near the start of online advertising, Email Marketing is a
cheaper, faster and effective form of advertising.
It’s a great way to build customer loyalty and boost sales; when you use an email campaign
manager (see the list below) to prepare and send your emails, you can easily track how well
they do and monitor your ROI.

 Pricing Models in Online Advertising

1) CPC or cost per click

The CPC pricing model charges the advertiser for every click on their ad. The clicks usually
equate visitors finding their way to the advertiser’s website. In this pricing model, nothing
else matters except that there were clicks on the ad.

The price for CPC usually ranges from cents to a few dollars. This pricing model splits the
risk between the publishers and the advertisers. This means that the publishers receive more
revenue if an ad is a hit and clicked several times, but the advertisers end up paying more in
this scenario.

2) CPM or cost per “mille” (per 1000 impressions)

The CPM model relies heavily on impressions, which typically means the number of times an
ad is shown. It does not matter if the ad is clicked, or if it prompts any action from the visitor,
as long as it has been displayed.

CPM pricing protocol usually gives a guaranteed number of impressions. The advertising
platform then calculates the price and bills it to the advertiser based on this.

This pricing model is best for display and visually-based ads vis-à-vis CPC, which is better
for response-oriented campaigns.
 3) CPA or cost per action / acquisition

In CPA, the publisher typically charges an advertiser based on actions visitors take upon
encountering their ad. The action may be to sign up for a trial or to download an application.
Advertisers can choose what specific action is to be charged.

While CPA works best for advertisers because it gets results done (certain acquisitions), it is
the most risky for publishers.

Other models:

CPF: cost per follower or fan is a pricing model that’s usually used for social media
marketing

CPV: cost per view is used for online video ads

CPI: cost per install is typically a pricing model for mobile apps

CPD: cost per download of an online application or any downloadable products.

AFFILIATE MARKETING

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards

one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's
own marketing efforts.

Affiliate marketing is the process of earning a commission by promoting other

people’s (or company’s) products. You find a product you like, promote it to
others and earn a piece of the profit for each sale that you make.
Therefore,  affiliate marketing  can be seen as  the process of spreading product
creation and product marketing across different parties, where each party receives a
share of the revenue according to their contribution.