Digital Marketing Resources
Education and commentary on current trends in search engine optimization, digital advertising, and all things digital marketing. Our resources give you the actionable advice you need to follow digital marketing best practices, from in-depth blogs to handy tip sheets, and webinars led by industry experts.
Frequently Asked Questions
Digital marketing follows the same principles as traditional marketing funnels but uses the internet to reach and communicate with customers. It’s about connecting with your audience where they are, which is online. Digital marketing leverages internet channels such as a website, search engine, email, social media, or any additional digital medium.
The most significant advantage to digital marketing for any business is the audience it reaches. You can communicate with more people because you have the entire world within your reach. Adding digital marketing opens the door for new customers from outside your brick and mortar community. Ignoring digital is ignoring where your customers are. Even your traditional, local shoppers are going online to find, research, and purchase products and services online.
The other advantage of digital marketing is its cost-effectiveness. You can create new digital channels to reach your audience with minimal costs. No large and expensive billboard and newspaper ads needed. Along with lower costs, digital marketing allows you to adapt quickly to market changes. You can track performance easily, and if a campaign is not working, you can adjust rapidly.
For many, the first they think of when they hear digital marketing is actually digital advertising. However, digital marketing is the larger umbrella encompassing all digital channels including advertising. Along with digital advertising, other digital marketing channels include search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, email marketing, and more.
Digital marketing agencies drive awareness, interest, and conversions for their clients using various digital channels. While every agency is different, digital marketing agencies should be experts in online visibility and leveraging digital tools to boost web traffic, leads, and sales. Of the digital marketing channels, an agency capitalizes on search engine optimization and multiple forms of paid digital advertising.
Yes, in most cases. While some small business owners believe they can find success outside social media, most increase their sales and improve their return on investment by capitalizing on the appropriate social channel. Social media is a free advertising channel with a chance to raise awareness of your company even if you never purchase an ad.
While it’s a good idea to be on at least one social network, not all channels are the best fit for every business. Work with your digital marketing agency to find where your customers are online, and meet them where they are. In many cases, you’ll find being on two or three social platforms is best.
A buyer persona is a representation of your target audience. It is a fictional character that serves to focus your content toward their wants and needs. Creating a buyer persona is a traditional marketing technique that is easily applied to the digital audience. A buyer persona should be an example of your customer, defining their age, gender, occupation, income level, and pain points. The goal is to gain a clearer picture of who you are marketing to in order to target them with content that speaks to them.
Borrowed from scientific experimentation, A/B testing is essentially a chance to test a single variable. In marketing, it’s a chance to try new content, design, or campaign and then measure the performance. For example, if you are running a digital advertising campaign (control group A), you can change one element of the campaign (test group B) and see how it performs. Digital marketing allows you to gather and track the performance of both groups to compare which campaign is connecting better with your customers. Using that data, you can make better decisions for your next campaign.
Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are an essential part of a successful business. KPIs are measurable figures used to determine how a company is performing compared to its goals. Without goals or KPIs, a business does not have a defined direction. Common KPIs in marketing include leads, conversions, cost per acquisition, and sales revenue. With digital marketing, you can create more detailed, specific KPIs to focus on your goals like traffic-to-lead ratios or lead-to-customer ratios.
Digital marketing agencies provide expertise and specialization but can be intimidating for companies who are used to keeping work in-house. Businesses of all sizes turn to agencies to supplement their current marketing efforts. As you consider if you should turn to an agency versus staying in-house, consider your current needs, challenges, and expenses. In many cases, collaboration is the best option: working with an agency where your team lacks experience while letting your team focus on their marketing strengths.
There is no one-size-fits-all pricing from digital marketing agencies. It depends on the agency, the scope of work, and their expertise. Most agency pricing relies on a monthly charge following an initial startup fee. The monthly fee can be a flat rate, an hourly fee, or a percentage of your ad spend. You can expect to pay anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000 a month.
SEO and PPC are both vital to a successful digital marketing strategy, and integrating them is your best option. However, the two digital channels have their own pros and cons. Which one you turn to depends on your needs now and your long-term goals.
SEO drives organic traffic, which is driven by unpaid search results. However, SEO takes time and is not an overnight fix. It also takes an investment of resources to make technical improvements to your website and build out high-quality content that will move you up in the search engine results.
PPC is quick and targeted for faster results. A PPC campaign can be launched in only weeks if you’re looking for more visibility fast. However, you are paying per click and competing with others for visibility, which can drive up costs.
Google ranks websites based on its algorithms and more than 200 ranking factors. It sends out ‘spiders’ to crawl websites and then ranks them for relevance, usability, expertise, and location.
Using its algorithms, Google ranks websites for its search results. If you have a website but it’s not appearing for relevant search terms, you may be missing key information for Google to find and validate your business.
Local SEO is one way to help your business get more visibility in the search results. For example, Google Business Profile is a free, customizable profile for businesses with a physical location. It allows you to appear in the search with a billboard of company details: address, phone number, website, hours, and more.
SEO stands for search engine optimization and it’s the strategic use of a variety of specialized tactics, including keyword research, on-page optimization, link building, and both technical and content optimization, to drive qualified traffic to a website by improving its organic (non-paid) rankings in search results.
With a good SEO strategy, you can rank higher on search engine results and drive more organic traffic to your website.
Every website should be customized to meet the needs of the customer. As you develop a website, put yourself behind the customer’s computer and create content that meets their needs. At a minimum, websites should include a home page, product or service pages, and an ‘about us’ page. To improve your website for search engines to rank you higher, you need to use keyword and competitive research to build SEO-driven content.
A backlink is an incoming link from one website to another. For example, a news website linking to an expert’s website within an article. These links build credibility for a website and are considered to be one of the top-ranking factors. However, don’t go for quantity over quality. Google can penalize or ban your site if it finds irrelevant, low-quality backlinks.
We humans speak in a certain way, a natural language that includes different linguistics, colloquialisms, and slang. Natural language processing is the effort of technology and algorithms to understand our language, how we communicate with each other, and how we interact with computers. For example, Google uses natural language processing to understand what you’re searching for when you type ‘tooth pain’ and provides results for medical advice and dentists near you.
The goal of SEO is to increase organic traffic, leads, and conversions. You can measure your progress with key performance indicators. Examples include:
– Organic Sessions
– Keyword Ranking
– Leads
– Pages Per Session
– Page Load Time
– Crawl Errors
Some KPIs can show results in only a month, but most take six months or longer to see results.
Marketing automation is using technology to manage the marketing process automatically. It allows you to create multi-functional campaigns, across multiple digital channels, and run them seamlessly. Digital advertising allows you to automate across the web, social media platforms, emails, and phone applications. Instead of manually hitting send on each one when you want it, you can design your automation to release content when and when you want it strategically.
There are many marketing automation platforms that can help you implement a marketing automation strategy. These include HubSpot, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Active Campaign, and more. Before you begin an automated campaign, it’s essential to know what your goals are. Automation can provide new lead opportunities but can also give you a false sense of success. What good are new leads if they are low-valuable? You should take an oversight approach to automation to ensure you target leads that can turn into sales conversations. A digital marketing agency can help you identify valuable leads and how to create an automated marketing campaign to target them.
When purchasing Google Ads, you can designate where they appear and target specific searches relevant to your product or service. For example, if your sell pet products, you may want to target people who search for ‘dog toys.’ You can place an ad specifically for that search.
A few things to keep in mind about Google Ad keywords: choose your keywords carefully, and not all keywords cost the same. It’s best to do your research to pick keywords that your customers are using. There are tools like Google’s Keyword Planner and Semrush’s Magic Keyword Tool to help you decide on target keywords. Also, keyword ad pricing is affected by demand. If you pick a generic, popular term, you’ll have to pay more.
PPC is a type of digital advertising and stands for pay-per-click, which are ads you pay for based on the number of times the ad is clicked. You can place PPC ads in multiple places, including social media and search results. A PPC campaign is one of the fastest ways to get your product or service in front of your customers. It can also be one of the most lucrative. Paid search can increase your conversions over organic search.
Your PPC budget depends mainly on your marketing goals and the specifics of your business. If you focus on keyword ads, you can expect to pay $1-$3 per click. However, the most expensive keywords cost more than $6 per click. While the cost-per-click sounds like a deal, you also need to look at the cost-per-conversion. The average cost-per-conversion is $56.11 on the Google Ads search network. Because of this, most businesses can expect to spend more than $1,000 a month on ads, with larger companies spending ten times that amount.
Digital advertising can often produce results immediately, but it takes time and finesse to optimize campaigns to perform their best. To ensure you’re getting a good return on your investment, it’s best to work backward: use the generated revenue from one sale to see how much traffic you need, the cost of acquiring that traffic, and if you’re making a profit using those margins.
Pure Visibility works collaboratively with our clients to understand your business offerings, goals, and target audience, as well as your team’s capacity.
Each of our digital marketing offerings begins with a detailed intake survey and discovery session with your team. We put your business goals ahead of generic tactics so we can customize our recommendations to each client and maximize their ROI. Our teams are managed by career experts who are hands-on with their optimizations instead of relying on automated systems.
Because our process is collaborative, there will be times when we need feedback from your marketing team to keep the project moving forward.
The Visibility Audit is our unique process for establishing the current status of your website’s digital visibility, and it’s the first step to any SEO project we tackle.
Unlike typical SEO website audits that use a single tool and auto-generated recommendations, our Visibility Audit includes a review of hundreds of checkpoints across eight key areas of SEO. Our digital visibility experts review your traffic, technical SEO, content, user experience (UX), analytics, backlinks, local SEO, and competition.
After your results are scored and compared to the competition, we use the information to pinpoint exactly what SEO tactics will be most effective at improving your website’s rankings and increasing qualified traffic.
We present our findings to your team in a detailed report and provide custom checklists for improving your visibility, step by step. Recommendations are prioritized to ensure you don’t waste resources with trial and error.
The project manager is your single point of contact who coordinates and reports on all SEO Upgrade activities. Your project manager will clearly communicate project progress and ensure that everything runs smoothly.
Our digital advertising contracts have everything you need to quickly increase traffic to your website through PPC. This includes research, account setup and launch, ongoing ad optimization, and monthly reporting.
Your PPC campaigns are managed by career digital advertising experts, who regularly optimize your campaigns and make recommendations to keep your ads fresh and maximize ROI. Custom reporting and dashboards that are tailored to your business goals are provided once a month so you can track the success of your campaigns and make informed decisions on your overall marketing strategy.
PPC campaigns usually launch about four weeks from Discovery. This gives our experts adequate time for research, account setup, and building out campaigns.
Each six-month SEO package includes a dedicated project manager, a comprehensive SEO Audit, monthly SEO tasks based on audit findings and monthly meetings to review progress.
Our SEO plans begin with a detailed intake survey and discovery session with your team. Our experts then perform a comprehensive Visibility Audit of your website and present our findings and prioritized recommendations. The monthly hours included in your plan will be allocated to tackle the issues we’ve identified.
You’ll receive a custom report that is tailored to your business goals each month, as well as a six-month SEO checkup, to clearly show the return on our SEO efforts.
Most SEO experts agree that it takes a minimum of 4-6 months to start seeing results for SEO, which build over time.
No, Pure Visibility does not require a long-term contract for any of its services.
Our digital advertising contracts do not have a minimum monthly requirement. SEO plans require a six-month commitment.
Pure Visibility has more than 15 years of experience working with clients in a variety of industries. We have expertise in ecommerce, healthcare, technology, and multi-location businesses.
Find case studies here.
Pure Visibility can help with all stages of content development. We can conduct keyword research, generate new content ideas, create outlines, and/or write new content drafts. Each SEO client receives a customized content strategy worksheet, which we use to organize all of the research and documents related to our content efforts.
Content strategy and creation is a collaborative process between Pure Visibility and your team. In order to be effective and create the best content possible, we will need ongoing feedback from your team as well as some information to help us get started. This includes information on your areas of focus and customer personas, as well as access to subject matter experts (if relevant.)
Pure Visibility works collaboratively with our clients to understand your business offerings, goals, and target audience, as well as your team’s capacity. We will need feedback from your team at times in order to keep the project moving forward. Additionally, your marketing team and/or web developer should be available to implement technical optimizations and upload content.
Website redesign SEO helps you offset the risk that comes with a redesign project, and ensures your new website is primed for success. This involves pinpointing your current website’s strengths so you can protect and build upon them, and identifying its weaknesses so you know what can safely be eliminated without harm to your bottom line.
Overeager marketers often jump into a website redesign without a clear understanding of what is and isn’t working with their SEO, leading to unnecessary changes. Changing URL structure and site architecture, deleting pages with high-quality backlinks, and rewriting high-performing content are all common mistakes that can have major ramifications for your rankings, organic traffic, and sales.
Much of this loss can be mitigated by following SEO best practices and making sure you fully understand what elements of your website are driving traffic before making any design, architecture, or content decisions.
Pure Visibility does not do website redesign; instead, we leverage our SEO expertise to work as a trusted partner of web design and development teams. This collaboration allows them to focus on what they do best, while we ensure that all the SEO elements are in place for a successful relaunch.
Our approach to website design SEO includes a thorough manual audit by career experts and hands-on assistance throughout your redesign to address technical issues and ensure top performing pages are preserved and optimized.
Digital marketing follows the same principles as traditional marketing funnels but uses the internet to reach and communicate with customers. It’s about connecting with your audience where they are, which is online. Digital marketing leverages internet channels such as a website, search engine, email, social media, or any additional digital medium.
The most significant advantage to digital marketing for any business is the audience it reaches. You can communicate with more people because you have the entire world at your reach. Adding digital marketing opens the door for new customers from outside your brick and mortar community. Ignoring digital is ignoring where your customers are. Even your traditional, local shoppers are going online to find, research, and purchase products and services online.
The other advantage of digital marketing is its cost-effectiveness. You can create new digital channels to reach your audience with minimal costs. No large and expensive billboard and newspaper ads needed. Along with lower costs, digital marketing allows you to adapt quickly to market changes. You can track performance easily, and if a campaign is not working, you can adjust rapidly.