Digital Resource Room
Helpful Technology Resources
Sold Out Designs Digital Resource Room is a quick guide to the terminology and FAQ used in the Marketing world. Providing you with accurate information to help you make an informed decision with your marketing goals.
What is SEO?
SEO refers to Search Engine Optimization.
The term itself can encompass a very wide range of techniques.
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SEO vs. Local SEO
SEO - Search Engine Optimization refers to the general techniques used to refine your website to conform to the guidelines and best practices of the major search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and many others, too. By auditing performance analytics and performing routine adjustments to best serve your websites to the search engines, they will serve it in their search auctions more often. And the more exposure your website gets the more prospective customers you can engage with.
Local SEO - refers to specific actions that improve your search engine placements, locally, such as in Google Maps, Bing Maps, Local Map Pack within the SERPs (search engine result pages) and several other areas online. Local SEO is about thinking locally and engaging more local prospects who are seeking products and services like yours. By optimizing your local online presence, you will gain more local exposure. This web traffic is often the highest quality and best-converting traffic for your business model. You need to be placed online really well, organically, to perform exceptionally well in your business.
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What does Organic Traffic mean?
With any digital presence (websites, social profiles, etc.), you will see the terms paid and organic interchanged often. However, they are not the same, in any respect.
Organic refers to the free placements you can earn or create online for your business. If it’s free, it’s organic. Paid refers to the ads your business can run with search engines, social media platforms, directories, and pretty much any online placement opportunity where you pay.
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Should I run paid ads or go after organic placements?
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Ideally, you would want to create a business strategy that covers both.
If you only run ads, your presence shrinks when you stop the ads, and paid placements cannot always reach all of your possible audience. Yet, paid advertising works nearly instantly and can be highly profitable, when done correctly. You should only use credible advertising professionals to perform such actions for you since bad results can be costly and even bring a permanent suspension to your business, which means you can never again advertise your business with that online service.
If you only focus on organic placements you will miss out on a lot of potential customers right now, at the moment, online. Organic placements take time and after a long journey of building upwards, you can be on top today and way down at the bottom somewhere down the road. Organic actions take continual, careful, and quality performance with your entire online branding presence to do well, in the long term. No matter how difficult it may seem to operate your website correctly, having an organic presence is vitally important to your business. You must build a solid organic foundation to build a successful business in the modern world.
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A company says they can give me a #1 ranking on Google.
Is this true?
WARNING!
Google clearly states that no one can guarantee a #1 ranking with Google.
It would help if you were always cautious about working with anyone who promises anything like that to you. These types of SEO service providers typically do not adhere to Google's guidelines and don't have a professional relationship with Google. Because of this, those SEO service providers will lead to your website being de-indexed from the search engines and ultimately costing you time and money. It may not happen right away and you may even enjoy some better placements, at first, but the cheating actions of those SEO providers will catch up to you.
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What happens if the SEO work violates search engine guidelines?
If you or someone working with you violates the guidelines of Google Search, Bing Search, or another major search engine – your website will be de-indexed from their search engine. This means the complete removal of your website, including the web contents and the web pages. Your business will cease to exist on that search engine.
It happens often and this is a catastrophic reaction from the bad SEO actions and a severe blow to any business.
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What is Branding vs. Organic Branding?
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Organic Branding is not just a logo or a snazzy strapline―it’s a simple story in a complex world. The catch? You don’t write your own story. An Organic Brand isn’t what we tell the customer it is—it’s what customers tell each other about your brand.
Branding is deliberate and helps to develop customer loyalty.
Organic Branding is how you communicate your company’s morals and values, products, or services.
Simply put, it’s how you speak to your audience and
what your audience says about you.
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Google Ads Help
The Google Ads advertising platform is a great way for a business to present their products or services to the masses through a robust auction-based ad system. While anyone can use it, being experienced in it has advantages such as better performance for less cost. And having some basic understanding of what things mean can greatly help any business work with Ads themselves or simply interact with their digital marketing agency more effectively. When you understand the basics, you will present your needs and wants better, which will bring better performance from your Ads account.
Google Ads Term
Click Through Rate (CTR)
Your CTR is the ratio of clicks to impressions. Each time your ad is displayed to someone, it counts as an impression. And each time someone clicks on it, that counts as a click.
Cost Per Click (CPC)
The required spend amount to produce a single click on your digital advertisement is the cost per click. Most all digital advertising uses a CPC system.
Conversions & Goals
This is a really important aspect of any successful digital advertising campaign and it is the first question to answer when designing a new ad campaign. What is the objective for running ads; what do you want to accomplish? The answer is your goal and when someone completes it, that is your conversion.
Conversion Rate
The ratio of conversions to visits is your conversion rate. This is a rather important metric that most all digital advertisers track. The higher the conversion rate the better.
Conversion Optimization
The refinement process of improving the performance of your conversions and/or goals is conversion optimization.
Keyword
A keyword is a word or phrase entered into a search engine, which triggers the search results. This is the foundation of an SEM advertising campaign. The AdWords platform allows us to bid on specific keywords so that our ads will show for that specific search.
SERPs
This term stands for Search Engine Result Pages. When you do a search in Google Search, the listings that are presented to you are the SERPs. The Google Ads platform allows us to target these as ad placements.
Landing Page
To run most ads with Google Ads, your advertising campaign will utilize a specific webpage on your website. This precise webpage that a person ends up at after clicking on your ad is your landing page. The user lands there, hence the term landing page.
While there are hundreds of terms used throughout the Google Ads, digital advertising, or SEM (search engine marketing) world, the above terms are a great start.