1. Introduction to Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a broad concept that encompasses all marketing efforts leveraging the internet and electronic devices. Companies use digital channels that audiences engage in one way or another — search engines, social media, email, and other websites — to connect with current and prospective customers. It doesn’t matter how you define digital marketing; it’s impossible to separate digital marketing from a company’s overall marketing strategy. But it’s important to note that this doesn’t mean that are one and the same. To a small business owner or entrepreneur, the terms digital marketing and digital marketing strategy may be interchangeable. However, to a marketing professional — one that has studied the complexities of mass communications — the two concepts have distinctly different meanings. Digital marketing refers to the actual assets and tactics that are used to deliver the overall message. Your digital marketing strategy encompasses your entire plan for how you’ll reach potential customers and convert them into buyers.

Some people insist that the term digital marketing is a misnomer, that it’s more accurate to call it online marketing. They argue that digital marketing is less about the tactics deployed and more about the strategy used to connect with consumers at the particular point in the customer journey. However, to say that digital marketing is solely inbound marketing isn’t accurate. Digital marketing also encompasses outbound tactics, like retargeting ads, but we’ll get into that later. Digital marketing is important for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that today’s consumers are huge consumers of digital content. Look around you—everyone, it seems, is glued to their devices, whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer—and there’s a good reason for that. Using the internet for information and entertainment is simply the most popular activity for consumers.

2. Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

To grasp the influence of SEO on digital marketing practices, it is crucial to first define SEO and its goals. Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to a collection of methods implemented to enhance the ranking of a website or webpage on search engines, improving visibility and attracting user attention. Although SEO is frequently categorized as “user-focused” or “crawler-focused,” these actions are always intertwined: allure the search engine algorithm to rank the website highly to effectively compete for the users’ attention. The foundation of search engines is established on the organization of prioritized and accessible results to user inquiries. The goal of search engine optimization is to secure higher positions on search engine results pages, as users interpret results that rank higher as more authentic and relevant.

Search engine optimization techniques can improve visibility and ranking on search engine results pages through two understandings: one is to facilitate crawling, indexing, and ranking; the other is to fundamentally enhance site quality. These strategies can then be classified into two groups: “white hat” and “black hat” SEO practices. Black hat strategies employ unethical methods to inflate a website’s ranking on search engine results pages, such as clickbaiting, keyword stuffing, and other dubious techniques that can produce short-term gains. Such techniques often result in a low-quality web experience. On the other hand, white hat SEO strategies employ authorized techniques based on good website structure and high usability, services, and content quality. High quality yields reputable backlinks, key to driving traffic and improving visibility. Similarly, inbound links from these sites reinforce the significance of the website for specific keywords, critical to ranking for these key phrases.

3. The Role of SEO in Digital Marketing

SEO is broadly defined as the practice of optimizing a website to make it as high-ranking as possible in search engines. It draws visitors to a site by means of organic or free searching results as opposed to using an ad. SEO usually forms an important aspect of digital marketing strategies, or even all of digital marketing. Search optimization involves a lot of different things, all aimed at creating a site that serves the needs of both consumers and search engines and therefore deserves to rank high for search terms that relate to the site.

SEO begins with keyword research: determining the most useful words or phrases for search. The goal is to select words based on their relevance and competition, so the site will be high-ranking in searches. Next is on-site optimization: creating the title and headings of a site’s pages, working keyword phrases into the text of the pages, creating images and captions, and writing meta tags. Finally, off-site optimization makes the site trustworthy and authoritative in the eyes of search engines. This involves generating links from other high-ranking sites and using social media to create signals showing the site is valuable to consumers. These processes require altering code and content, working on usability and social sharing aspects, and constantly measuring and refining.

4. Key Components of SEO

Search engine optimization is a broad concept that includes a number of components. These components in different forms have been in existence for a long time. Although their nature has changed, their core objective has remained the same, that is, to optimize a website in order to provide the best possible experience to the search engine users visiting the website. You can refer to SEO as the science of understanding the relationship between the keywords or phrases that your target audience uses to make a search and the results returned by the search engines. These keywords or phrases are also known as search queries. It includes all of the components that go into helping a search engine determine that your website holds the information a user seeks when typing in search queries relevant to your niche market. Some of the main key components of SEO include keyword research, on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and technical aspects.

Keyword Research

If there is one task that forms the basis of all search engine optimization, it has to be keyword research. Keyword research identifies specific keywords and phrases your target audience uses to find products, services and information during search queries. This information is crucial because it forms the basis for optimizing website content that persuades people to take the desired action after landing on your pages, whether making a purchase, filling out a lead form, or calling your business. Best keyword research practices involve identifying keywords and phrases with high search volume and low competition and devising a keyword strategy that includes optimizing for long-tail keywords, which are longer and more specific search queries. Last but not least, we recommend using only high-quality keyword research tools to ensure the best results.

4.1. Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing actual search terms that people enter into search engines. The words or phrases used in search engine queries, which are called keywords, are the foundation of SEO. Operating as a bridge between users and content, keywords help search engines understand a web page such that users can find relevant content quickly. A search query is a word or phrase that a search engine user would enter into the search bar. Users enter search queries when they search for particular content, product, or service. A search query can consist of one word, also known as a short tail keyword, or often referred to as head term. A search query can also have a few words in it, known as a long tail keyword. Long-tail keywords specifically pertain to your niche and have little competition. Long-tail keywords are usually highly targeted and low-volume phrases, which people often search for while discovering information about a product or service and are further down the funnel. Long-tail keywords may not have as much traffic as head terms, but they usually attract more qualified traffic that’s ready to convert. An SEO strategy that focuses on long-tail keywords is usually much more effective than one focused solely on short-tail keywords. Keyword research can help you discover both long-tail and short-tail keywords that interest you and what you should be writing for. The information can inform you whether you should be investing time to create that content on your website that doesn’t currently exist and whether or not you would receive significant engagement from your audience. Working with the resources of better-focused and carefully planned keywords means figuring out what users actually want when you conduct searches. These keywords would be your primary and secondary keywords, which you would include in your content.

4.2. On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is the process of optimizing all the factors from a website that are under the control of the website owner. It is an essential component of SEO because it consists of the many activities that help search engines to understand the concepts of the content of a website and the extent at which a website is addressing the needs of its users. Search engines increase the trust and relevance of a site on a topic by analyzing its on-page SEO. Therefore, the higher the trust and relevance of a website on a specific topic, the higher the chances that its search visibility, audience, and earnings will grow.

Every web page should be optimized in such a way that search engines can understand what is its topic and what value it provides to users. It means that a website should also be optimized at the level of each of its pages and sections, addressing all the information needs of users interested in a specific core topic, a specific keyword or keyword phrase with a defined search intent. This type of optimization is known as topic or keyword clustering. It is performed by selecting a core topic and a list of keywords targeting the specific pages or sections of the website and then performing keyword research to select the final keywords that will be optimized on each page and content section of the website. Proper implementation of on-page optimization signals search engines that the site is capable of providing value to the users’ requirements, who are keywording the products or services of the business.

4.3. Off-Page Optimization

When we talk about off-page optimization, we are referring to the actions you take outside of your own website that impact your SEO rankings. This is most often the building of backlinks. A backlink is when another website links to your website because they value your content and views it as a reliable source. However, numerous other variables can affect your Off-Page Optimization.

Some of the most important off-page factors affecting search engine optimization include:

• Backlinks: Backlinks are a link from another website to your site. The quality and number of backlinks to your site can have a huge impact on how highly you rank on a search results page. However, not all backlinks are created equally. High-authority websites will carry much more “weight” than lower quality sites. Backlinks from sites on different topic areas from yours will also carry less weight, even more so if they are not reputable. Finally, there must also be a natural link-building process taking place, as search engines can detect link schemes and artificial link building attempts and may penalize your site.
• Content Creation: Regularly posting great blogs on your website that people actually want to read can have an impact on SEO without it actually affecting your website. If your content is good enough, people will want to link to it. If it’s really good, they might even want to share it on their social media channels! Search engines notice that, along with the social media engagement. This all signals that your content is trustworthy, and it may help boost your rankings in the SERP.
• Social Bookmarking: This is a little different than the social media sharing listed in the above point. Basically, there are websites people go to for bookmarking content they have read online, so others in their network can see it too. If you submit links from your website on these sites, it’ll drive traffic from these networks to your pages, which search engines notice, and in turn, consider your site authoritative, therefore boosting your rankings.

4.4. Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the optimizations that support the infrastructure and connectivity of a website. If it is not correctly optimized, search engines may not be able to crawl and index a website properly, affecting their visibility in the search result pages. For this reason, technical SEO should be prioritized for succeeded SEO. All websites should have an SEO-friendly infrastructure to guarantee their success in search results and reach potential clients.

Search engines are eager to improve the user experience of the web. If a website presents errors or a bad user experience, search engines will de-prioritize this website in the search results, harming user experience. For this reason, there are numerous tools available that help optimize technical SEO aspects. However, these can be overwhelming for somebody non-technical. Therefore, making the required changes might be easier with an experienced digital marketer or web developer. Specific aspects that need attention include website speed and performance, mobile responsiveness, indexation, Sitemaps, robots.txt, 404 error pages, hosting and security, and good URL structure.

Website speed and performance refer to how quickly a website loads, how efficiently it uses its server’s resources, and how many resources it needs from the server. Page speed is an important ranking factor. If a page does not load within two seconds, a significant percentage of users would abandon the website, while a larger percentage of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes more than five seconds to load. Poor website speed turns potential clients away; therefore, if not optimized correctly, it can have a significant negative impact on conversion rates.

5. SEO Tools and Resources

The growing influence of search engines has led to the development of a wide variety of analytics, keyword tracking, and optimization auditing tools. This section presents some of the most commonly used tools in these categories. Not all of these tools are free, but they represent some of the best and most popular options available.

5.1. Analytics Tools Data-driven marketing practices are built upon tools that assist marketers in measuring how visitors hear about the brand and what their behavior is on the corporate Website once they arrive. This is particularly true in the case of search engines, whose primary purpose is to drive traffic to company websites and provide a return to investors. A number of companies provide analytics packages that analyze Website traffic and document the elements surrounding traffic. There are numerous key performance indicators that can be examined. However, most companies say they simply rely on the number of conversions; that is, visitors who respond to a desired call to action.

5.2. Keyword Tracking Tools Keyword tracking tools allow digital marketers to monitor specific keywords on SERPs. These tools identify which keywords drive traffic from search engines to individual Websites. It is important to remember that the lists of keywords that result in Website visits differ from the keyword lists used by search engines to rank Websites. Keyword lists indicate the keywords associated with a Website, while the keyword lists used by search engines are not available for analysis. The specific keywords that drive traffic to a Website are revealed through Website visibility analytics.

5.3. SEO Auditing Tools Analytical data about Website traffic, keyword usage, and competitive presence are powerful indicators of a Website’s state of health. However, without advanced technical knowledge in the areas of Web development, link building, and Website marketing, it is impossible to make use of keyword and competitive visibility data without the assistance of SEO experts. SEO audit tools, like the name implies, present Website managers guidance on how to discover and fix Website problems.

5.1. Analytics Tools

If you run a website for business or a blog, you want to know how many visitors you get, how they got there, and how they interact with your content. Website analytics tools help you with that information so you can determine your digital marketing strategies and optimize them for the highest results. Gain tremendous insight by discovering what your best content is, which pages are flops, and improving weak pages with internal links to high-traffic pages. Or maybe you want to write more content similar to the successful posts. You can spend more time boosting traffic to the pages that bring you the most sales, leads, or conversions, and improve ad performance with insight into the non-converting traffic. Analytics tools will also help you understand where your audience hangs out online. It could be social media or elsewhere. You can find out by gaining insight from referral traffic sources. If a large portion of your website visitors are coming from one source, focus your efforts there. But don’t ignore the other streams of visitors. Make your time spent on social media worthwhile by investing it in the platform that pays off the most. If you use advertising, whether on social media or search engines, you want to know which ads are worth the spend, and which are wasting your time and money. Analytics tools provide you with reporting capabilities that show you your ad budget’s ROI, allowing you to make necessary adjustments. With these insights, you can make better ad buys for the highest conversion rate. Using analytics tools will give you a better understanding of your audience so you can deliver tailored content over time. You’re never done though. As your audience grows or changes, you must continue to analyze and tweak to provide the best experience while optimizing your conversions.

5.2. Keyword Tracking Tools

After finishing your keyword brainstorm, you probably have a giant spreadsheet with different keywords and clusters that you want to rank for. But now, what keyword tracking tools help you keep track of them? Unfortunately, there isn’t a keyword tracking tool available. So you’ll need to turn to third-party resources such as apps or premium services to see how your website ranks for keywords.

While there are countless tools that track your keyword rankings, they don’t all work the same way, or they have all the features that you would need, so here is a brief comparison of the best keyword tracking tools to help you choose:

1. A free keyword rank tracker is very useful! Not only does it allow you to track the rank of keywords your site is already ranking for, but it does so using relevant information! Essentially, it has all the keywords that you’ve gotten impressions and clicks for, along with their click-through rate, and allows you to filter out the data using different date ranges, countries, devices, and more. And it even allows you to choose which page you would like to review if you have more than one tracking.

The only downside is that it does not display the changes you had when searching or give you updates when you rank for a keyword, meaning you’ll have to come back constantly and create a report using a spreadsheet with all the keywords to know if you’ve improved or declined in rankings. But it’s still the best way of knowing how all your keywords are doing. So we’d still consider it a keyword monitoring tool.

5.3. SEO Auditing Tools

Where do you begin when developing the ever-continuing SEO path for your web site? You need to find out what you’re doing right, what you’re doing wrong, how your site is currently being indexed, and whether your desired keywords or phrases are actually bringing visitors to your site (or are at least sending up a red flag). You can do this through your log file analysis, as well as through analytics, crawling, and keyword tracking tools. However, a quicker way to run a check of your entire site’s SEO issues is to use one of the many auditing tools available to check for common SEO oversights. No self-respecting SEO should be without at least a couple of these tools in their toolbox.

A thorough audit includes a manual review of your HTML code along with running your site address through valuable SEO tools. The following are just a sampling of the many valuable tools available for auditing your site. A combination of these will give you a complete picture of how well your site is currently optimized for search. I suggest using the free tools first to see what they find. If you’re working on a client site or an especially problematic site, it’s worth paying for additional information. If you find an answer with a free tool that works well for you, there’s no reason to pay for the service. Use it to your heart’s content, save money, and maximize your SEO.

6. SEO Best Practices for Businesses

For a successful SEO implementation in digital marketing, the following basics can be reviewed.

6.1. Content Creation Strategies

Search engine results pages return users with the most relevant content to their search query; hence, businesses must create and publish content that has a high potential for ranking well. Keyword searches done on current business goals can help with understanding what topics to create content about, as well as what keywords to use in order for the target audience to easily find the material. Keyword tools can help create, identify, and map these keywords into journeys, so that businesses post timely and relevant content. The keyword tool can be supported by analytics tools that will allow businesses to see which keywords their website currently ranks for, and allow for optimization of content so as to enhance the ranking of quality content. Moreover, businesses should add various forms of content, such as images, videos, and infographics. These may increase customer engagement, as videos can be immersive, and infographics can make for more easily digestible content.

6.2. Link Building Techniques

Link building is a technique that builds authority among different websites and content. Businesses should build high-quality backlinks from other relevant websites that have a high authority. Backlinks show search engines that the content is credible and trustworthy. There are several ways businesses can build backlinks, including posting guest blogs on websites with a good reputation in the same niche, creating sharable content that other creators will be likely to cite, and mentioning influential content creators in posts so that they may reshare the post when they see it.

6.3. Mobile Optimization

To optimize the mobile experience for customers, businesses can make their websites responsive by using mobile-friendly testing tools. The mobile version of the website should have fast loading times, fitting layouts, and accessible menus. Moreover, businesses should verify that their website is reasonably secure so that customers do not be apprehensive putting in any information. This is especially true for e-commerce businesses where customers would add their payment information to purchase a product.

6.1. Content Creation Strategies

The emergence of SEO has transformed the digital marketing landscape significantly over the years. Businesses are actively working on creating and sharing more and more content since content is considered to be the main driver of conversions on business websites and blogs. The content on websites is dependent on the type of website you have. If you have a blog website, then your content would primarily be blog posts, infographics and videos. But if you have an e-commerce website then product descriptions, product reviews, blogs, videos, guides, infographics and images are considered as your main content. Content serves several purposes such as attracting users, providing them information about your services/products, answering their questions, engaging them and converting them. The various forms of content that businesses use are blog posts, e-books, white papers, guides, infographics, images, videos, podcasts, webinars, social media posts, product descriptions and responses to reviews.

Different types of content have different roles to play and help businesses achieve different objectives. Take for example blogs, articles or guides. One of the critical factors that influence your rankings, visibility and credibility is the quality of your content. Your content needs to be unique and original. You should never copy someone else’s content. The search engine crawlers will detect copied content and you will be penalized or banned for it. Keyword usage is very important. You should do enough research to understand your audience and what they are looking for. Creating your content is not an easy task at all. It involves a lot of effort and hard work, but still the majority of businesses leave it to chance and publish content consisting of any activity blindly.

6.2. Link Building Techniques

Link building is an integral part of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but developing the right techniques can be difficult. Believable businesses try to avoid the type of manipulative link exchanges that had been utilized in the past, instead focusing on natural, beneficial link building. With the shift from using keywords in domains and brunt link numbers to considering the quality and relevance of those links, there are several new and reputable methods to create healthy link building strategies. Companies can encourage these positive links by creating educational or extreme content that is likely to gain attention. One strategy, which is becoming more common, uses newsworthy information to attract links. A press release is published on a news site, but instead of writing about who is participating in an event, for example, a more attention-grabbing fact like what the event is focusing on and what type of people will be there could be sent out. Many people would be interested in an event where some famous or highly regarded people are working towards a cause. If that press release is picked up by the news, it will be seen and more readily available to anyone who would wish to link to it. The press release could even be published by the company, with a link to their website directly from it. Using unique links in press releases can also help track the exposure the release has achieved. Other popular methods of positive link building include guest blogging, obtaining business and non-profit organization listings, and sponsoring scholarship programs.

6.3. Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization has become a crucial aspect of digital marketing, as more people access the internet via mobile devices than desktop computers. As such, businesses need to ensure that their websites are optimized for mobile use. This includes having a responsive design that adjusts the layout and content of the website based on the screen size of the device being used. Additionally, websites should load quickly on mobile devices, as users are likely to abandon a site that takes too long to load. This can be achieved by minimizing image sizes, reducing the use of plugins, and using a content delivery network.

Another important aspect of mobile optimization is local SEO. Many mobile users search for businesses and services near them, making it essential for businesses to have accurate and up-to-date location information on their website. This includes having a listing that allows businesses to appear in local search results and on maps. Businesses should also include location-specific keywords in their website content, and ensure that their name, address, and phone number are consistent across all online directories. By optimizing for mobile devices and local searches, businesses can attract more traffic and potential customers.

One of the key elements of mobile optimization is ensuring that websites are responsive. This means that they automatically adjust their layout and content based on the screen size of the device being used. Responsive design provides a seamless user experience across devices, and is preferred for ranking purposes. Additionally, mobile load times are a significant factor in search rankings and user experience. Slow-loading websites can lead to high bounce rates, negatively impacting SEO efforts. To minimize load times, businesses can reduce image sizes, avoid excessive use of plugins, and utilize a content delivery network. In conclusion, with mobile optimization playing such an important role in search engine rankings, it is crucial for businesses to integrate mobile optimization into their overall marketing strategy.

7. Measuring the Impact of SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of an overall digital marketing strategy, but measuring the impact it may have on other efforts isn’t always easy. Search engines send large amounts of traffic to a website, which might then be captured by other campaigns or traffic sources. Determining how much of the traffic would convert via other channels is difficult. Regardless, SEO can have an influence – positive or negative – on pretty much every other facet of a digital marketing program.

Several metrics are traditionally used to determine the success of any digital marketing activity, and SEO is no exception. We can analyze traffic volumes as measured by web analytics logs, search query and page performance, and finally, ROI. Below is a brief explanation of what we should look for and how to determine whether the amount of effort being put into SEO is producing sufficient results.

Traffic Analysis

Traffic is the easiest and most common determination of SEO success. What we are really looking for here is an increase in organic search engine referral traffic, meaning traffic coming to a website from clicking a result in the natural search engine result pages for a query performed on that search engine. Almost all web analytics solutions are able to break down traffic summaries by referring source. Depending on the tracking method in use, however, it’s usually best to confirm these numbers against web server access logs.

Viewing reports of search engine referral traffic as compared to fellow traffic sources can provide insight into possible ranking problems – for example, a decrease in the percentage of traffic coming from organic search referrals compared to email or banners. This would generally occur if an overall drop-off in traffic is happening, and is caused by visitors going directly to the site instead of clicking from another site, or if referral traffic from those sources has surged.

7.1. Traffic Analysis

Measuring the effects of search engine optimization on digital commerce has proven to be not only arduous, but also enigmatic for search engine marketers. Some of the difficulties with measuring the effects of SEO are the absence of surveillance methods associated explicitly with SEO and insufficient analytical precision to separate the effects of SEO from other aspects of online marketing. However, proficient SEO practice begs for some form of evaluation, particularly if the investment in SEO prudently consumes some fraction of the online marketing budget.

Web traffic is measured in terms of the volume of customers who visit a company’s site, the amount of pages viewed per visit, the amount of time spent on the site, the amount of customers who return to the site, and other measures of visits. Web ecommerce measures include the standard marketing measures of click-throughs and conversion rates, as well as defining the value of either a click or a customer. The importance of online revenues as a measure of business success has caused many firms engaged in pure play ecommerce to abandon brick and mortar operations, thus increasingly requiring companies to measure ecommerce to assess company performance.

The standard traffic report displays information in three main sections: Total Visits, Visit Geography, and Visit Length. The Visits Geography report identifies the geographic source of visits by continent, country, sub-country, and city. The Visits Length report shows how long visitors stayed on a website by tracking the number of visits, the percent of total visits, the amount spent in minutes, and the average amount spent per visit. These reports are useful to a digital commerce marketer because it can identify foreign traffic that may require translation and currency tools; hours to answer emails; customer service support and time zone issues; and customer-specific associativity, pricing, and payment options.

7.2. Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization formulates, implements, and tests strategies that enhance the efficiency of conversion pathways in the process of user engagement. The conversion pathway begins with the methodologies used to attract visitors to a website and pre-sell the products or services offered on that site. Virtually all visitors who come to a website for the first time leave without making a purchase, and those who do return before making that first purchase are notorious for being slow to act, generally not making their first purchase until at least 5 weeks after their initial visit and frequently taking between 3 and 10 weeks to purchase.

There are two major considerations in preparing to optimize a website’s conversion rate: determining what constitutes a successful conversion, and increasing conversion rates for the factors that can be optimized. A successful conversion is any hyperlink click that results in a user completing the objective associated with the conversion pathway from the homepage, but there are many possible definition options. Advertising-driven sites may define conversions in terms of the amount of revenue generated by the click-through or other interactions enabled by the advertiser. With many kinds of inbound traffic, however, it may be more helpful to focus on the conversion event from the website’s perspective, which is the successful user’s action or engagement that indicates acceptance of the site’s offer. For marketplace transactions, the site has both a buyer and a seller; the conversion event may be a completed sale or transaction from either party’s perspective.

7.3. Return on Investment (ROI) from SEO

7.3. Return on Investment (ROI) from SEO

Most businesses focus on their ROI (%) from a particular marketing activity. This is very straight-forward for activities with a predictable cost and revenue model. For every $100 you spend on ads and every sale of $600 you make as a result of the ads, you can calculate your ROI from those ads. Similarly, costs and revenue from SEO are also trackable. You need to calculate this at least once every quarter. This will help you to decide if you need to scale back, refine or expand your SEO investment.

A simplified calculation of the ROI from SEO can be done as follows:

Monthly Earnings from SEO – (SEO expenses)

Monthly Earnings from SEO Where:

Monthly Earnings from SEO = earnings for the month, unless there are no earnings from non-SEO channels, in which case, the earnings used are the proportion from organic search. SEO expenses = recurring expenses incurred to generate those earnings from SEO SEO expense is usually a small fraction of the Monthly Earnings from SEO. The formula gives a percentage return. For example, if your expenses are $2000, and you make $10000 a month on average from SEO, you get a very healthy ROI from SEO: 400%. Would you remove $2000 from your bank every month if you had to pay $400 every month for the privilege of doing that?

8. Challenges in Implementing SEO

In spite of its extensive advantages, there are also some challenges in implementing search engine optimization which are heightening the demands on resources. This chapter discusses the changing of algorithms, analysis of competition, and efficient allocation of resources in an SEO implementation.

8.1. Algorithm Changes Search engines are successful when they possess relevant and high quality content. Black-hat techniques for gaining superficial elevated rankings, in the past, attracted the wrath of web-spiders more than once. However, promoting high-value content that is shared voluntarily has become part of optimizing.

There are a number of pseudo SEO websites that are selling some link and are taking a very high amount of money, but they are not providing something worth. These are spammers were using Black Bay strategies in the first place, but there are still people taking care to ban spammy websites for these strategies.

8.2. Competition Analysis Effective implementation of SEO does require highly analytical tools to assess the critical parameters and modify web-efficiently to create high ranking. Firstly, the tool should be available at a reasonable price which needs to be flexible enough to analyze the data and reduce junk parameters. The users of SEO should also allow meaningful analysis of Search Engines periodically and forward this to SEO tool people using a collaborative file-sharing technique.

The tools are available but simple and reliable on various benchmarks. This is important because the lack of metrics that define what is friendly for search engines means they can change direction, values, while crawlers change day by day. Specific SEO tools do capture links to your site but may measure on different timeframes.

8.3. Resource Allocation Another challenge of promoting SEO is Resource Allocation. This utilizes only for 20-30% of its potential, but the results can be enough to finalize a project. Once you realize how it works, you will be able to move forward without the need to put in too much time day after day, but to obtain good results.

8.1. Algorithm Changes

The challenges in SEO are plenty and implementing an effective SEO strategy is no easy task. There are some challenges that can affect the growth of your business involvement in SEO. Marketing decision-makers always have a time-sensitive list of marketing tactics they plan to deploy, and SEO is always at the bottom of that list due to the time, effort, and the expertise required to make it effective. One of the primary challenges of SEO is the ever-changing algorithm. Every year, multiple changes are made to the original search algorithm to keep the quality of search results as refined as possible. Not only is there a focus on making search results output more relevant, but there is also a commitment to improving user experience as a whole.

Over 200 factors are used in the keyword search algorithm to determine what the order of organic listings will be for each search query. These factors include things such as backlinks, quality content, and page load speed to name a few. Keeping up with the numerous changes that are made with these factors throughout the year can be quite a challenge for SEO managers. And if the wrong SEO best practices have been implemented, your site’s rankings might not return to what they were prior to the changes in the algorithm. Every year, the content marketing and SEO industries dance in a tango, where content is the star of the show and SEO is the partner doing all the hard work to achieve the best possible results. In search land, content is king only when it is optimized correctly. Typically, referrals will not come your way for content that has not been properly optimized, thereby negating the exciting potential of your hard work.

8.2. Competition Analysis

Search engine optimization (SEO) lies at the heart of internet marketing activity and, as with all marketing activities, the move to the internet does not reduce the importance of monitoring competitors. In fact, with easy access to the performance of competitor websites, the monitoring of rivals through SEO becomes more important and in many areas, such as hospitality, the tracking of changing user behavior is paramount. Critical questions in any Internet marketing plan should therefore include the following: • What keywords are competitors focusing on? • Are any identified keywords featuring prominently in search results for my business? • How much competition is there for selected keywords? • What positions are competitors occupying in relation to identified keywords? • What search terms are users employing to find competitors’ sites? • What do competitors’ landing pages look like? • Through which keywords do the competitors get most traffic? • Where are the competitors getting backlinks from? • What partners do the competitors work with? • What are the competitors doing on social media? The information relative to these questions can be obtained through a range of software tools developed for this sole purpose. Access to sophisticated analytics tools may also help businesses greatly in terms of feedback on campaigns in real-time.

8.3. Resource Allocation

The general acceptance of SEO as a successful online marketing strategy creates challenges in the allocation of firms’ resources because firms report different levels of success with their implementation strategies. Some firms utilize SEO internally using existing staff to manage the process while others utilize external consulting firms to manage the process. Both implementation strategies have trade-offs. The external consulting firm helps to mitigate the expertise gap but at a cost that allows less internal learning and knowledge accumulation for future projects. This raises the question of whether it is better to spend a lot of resources where the chance of success is relatively low or whether firms are better off devoting fewer resources toward the SEO process.

Firms allocate resources without knowing the weight algorithm changes have on the firm’s site and the specific SEO initiative chosen. A set of structural mathematical equations relates the distribution of resources allocated to the individual SEO initiatives to the firm’s total resources allocated to the SEO process, the outflow rate of the resource, the potential contribution of each individual SEO initiative, and the cost of resources that favor some initiatives and disfavor others. The greater the variability in the potential contribution of the different SEO initiatives, the more concentrated the distribution of resources will be and the longer it will take before the distribution converges to the equilibrium. The emphasis on making the best possible decision depends on the costs incurred in making the decision. Hence, the best decision may still be to use more devolution, but with the benefits of improving the ability of managers at different levels to make these decisions.

9. Future Trends in SEO and Digital Marketing

The future of SEO is in a constant state of evolution, as websites change, technology advances, and search engines develop new algorithms. For these reasons, it’s worth knowing which upcoming trends are likely to affect the future of digital marketing and determine your digital marketing strategy going forward. An extensive selection of different digital marketing trends emphasize the importance of embracing the latest innovations and integrating new strategies in order to remain relevant and effective. Businesses that embrace the following important current trends in SEO will be able to take advantage of the many benefits organic visibility brings, and stay ahead of their competitors.

Voice search has been around for some time now, with the world’s first voice assistant. Lately, other voice assistants have followed, with impressive tools. More than a billion voice searches are conducted every month, and this number is constantly going up. In addition, a significant percentage of consumers who own voice-activated speakers have made a purchase using their device. In fact, a notable percentage of mobile queries are voice searches. That doesn’t mean that the future of search relies solely on voice search. However, as people become more accustomed to it, and as companies improve their capabilities, they’ll hopefully incorporate it alongside the several search query options we have today.

Voice search naturally lends itself to longer questions than we could type with our fingers. And because conversation is generally more natural and less formal than our discarded search queries, those questions often have a conversational tone to them. So, search engines began improving at answering those questions literally; instead of trying to match keywords to links to pages which might contain a variation of those keywords, search engines are developing multifaceted ways of providing fast answers: featured snippets, rich snippets, knowledge panels, etc. As a result, as voice search usage continues to grow, long-tail keywords will also continue to be the most important part of SEO for local searches.

9.1. Voice Search Optimization

The self-explanatory notion of voice search optimization contains the words “search” and “optimization,” so what we’re emphasizing here is that how you offer your content to your audience is somewhat different than typing the query into a search engine. The moment our finger taps the screen, we scan the page for relevant content. When using the search bar allows algorithms to gather and analyze what’s most likely relevant to the user’s question, so optimization is crucial to the viability of appearing in the voice search results, just as it is for your search ads. Because of the information we talk about during our lives, the opinions we share, conversations we have, and especially the questions we ask, there is a wealth of data to communicate relevant information quickly. One of the ways algorithms provide this information is by breaking questions down into parts and doing a reverse search of previously indexed results for similar questions and looking for high-quality content. Voice search involves unstructured speech querying of an on-device personal voice assistant. These applications use a speech recognition engine to recognize speech and convert it into text.

People speak conversationally. Voice search is largely informal, using simple, conversational phrases. Intended audience and offline collaboration drive the main types of content. In a way, this task is similar to the relationships that these concepts have with specific Webpage. Answers are text responses or content related to the semantics of specific pages from earlier work that they have broken down into pieces: title text, paragraph text, related model topics, and document and page-level summaries. Rather than going to the search results, voice search provides instant information directly to the user without a click. Because the user receives this information in response to a natural language spoken query asking for a specific piece of information, services designed to display such information for the user directly from answers are called voice search services.

9.2. Artificial Intelligence in SEO

SEO relies on algorithms. When we’re researching our tactics, what do we rely on to ascertain the best strategy? You guessed it: a bunch of algorithms. They work slightly differently because they look for different things; rank changes, for example, how long it takes to index new pages, that sort of thing. This helps us understand how SEO algorithms work, so we can make the right adjustments and get better results.

With the announcement of a new AI chatbot, a lot of questions have arisen about whether or not AI will eliminate the need for human labor. For the most part, SEO companies have said no. The problem with AI-generated content is that you always need a human to fact-check, clue AI back in when it makes a mistake, and take a look at the content with a critical eye. That being said, we are going to see lots of changes in technical SEO in the future that are AI-based.

Some of these changes predominantly involve automating processes we have already created. For example, tools have already implemented software that answers any queries you have about a specific keyword and tells you which questions people are asking. There have been updates to site audit programs to provide info on which internal links will increase ranking. AI analytics now mean you can literally ask for information and it will tell you.

9.3. Local SEO Strategies

Localization strategies have become an imperative element in the new location-related Internet users’ behavior in the markets. The ever-growing use of mobile tools known as smartphones has created Internet users with urgent needs to locate. Every day, many mobile tasks require the mobile user to visit a physical location to satisfy specific online needs. Consequently, individuals and companies now require mechanisms to enable physical customers to locate them on the Web. The Internet has transformed by continually accelerating the quick transformation of what we know as the local business, or business with physical points that wish to inform possible customers about its offer of products and/or services, given their urgency of need. The goal is nothing less than to turn the Web into a business card, drawn by a digital map, which informs customers about the product or service they need, with updates delivered more efficiently than any other media.

“Location Aware” technology has enabled users to perform searches on the Internet by imprinting a location inside the search. On one hand, search engines have created user-specific tools, and on the other, Web2.0 has provided users with collaborative means to create their own location-based information. In our analysis, we will begin with localized results found in the natural search and we will delve into the world of flexible content offered by social networks. According to our vision, Local Search is in transition from a funnel toward a center offering flexible and collaborative tools. Local Search is not just about search queries producing localized results, rather Local Search is the combination of all these events during users’ lives.

10. Case Studies of Successful SEO Implementations

Despite the rapid changes that probably have reshaped upon access search engines and the web in the last decade, it is actually worthwhile to listen when industry experts talk of the impact of SEO in shaping the landscape of digital engaged advertising and marketing, and generating an important component of web traffic. In this section we have gone through some examples and case studies of businesses that were able to significantly transform their digital visibility, as a result of strategic SEO exploitation. The examples that we have reported in this section are purposely selected.

10.1. E-commerce Success Stories

SEO was born for e-commerce. It is only natural to find that SEO started to make headway in optimizing e-commerce sites. Products that are sold through newsagents and are strictly seasonal are often considered unsuitable for SEO campaigns. However, in many cases, this type of activity is met to optimization of web site indexation, rather than to the conduct of SEO actions following the web site launching. Indeed, online sales grow year after year, and it is only natural that an increasing share goes to e-commerce.

For e-commerce projects, SEO can be of help particularly for optimizing the category and product template pages. A study found that 25% of the 500 top mounted retail sites received traffic from organic results, and compared with year 2000, when such share was equal to 17%, the growth is significant. No doubt, this means that e-commerce is more and more relying on SEO, in other words, on how the search engines rank the results.

10.2. Local Business SEO Strategies

Companies that sell their products and services in physical stores often don’t think of themselves as e-commerce companies. They do have retailers or distribution channels, but those channels are local, community based. These companies can benefit from the power and flexibility of both online and offline targeting. Local Search Engine Optimization can help any type of local business reach relevant customers right at the crucial time and place: when those customers are searching for products or services offered by the local business.

10.1. E-commerce Success Stories

Introduction E-commerce is the most competitive area of business on the web, with hundreds of thousands of businesses competing for space in cyberspace that is increasingly being viewed as a supporting channel for “real-world” business. As an advertising medium, search engines are the mass market for e-commerce businesses. The following case studies examine how a number of successful e-commerce businesses have achieved or maintained high visibility on search engines. Case Studies The business is one of the most well-known online travel agencies. Originating as an online newsletter site, it has expanded to take advantage of the mass market appeal of travel sales. With two main areas of service — Last Minute and Unpublished Fares — the company offers good information and potential savings to customers looking for travel deals. It has focused expertise in securing and distributing Unpublished Fares from U.S.-based airlines. The company is so successful with Unpublished Fares that a significant percentage of revenue generated by Unpublished Fares is received from customers referred by the search engines. Marketing Initiatives In order to be successful with distributed content, the company has decided not to compete for top rankings with keyword phrases that are most likely to lead to the most traffic. Concentrating on high-value, less competitive keyword phrases limits the company’s exposure but increases the likelihood that customers will visit with money in hand, ready to buy tickets. Customers in the Last Minute section are likely to be searching the Internet for the lowest fares available, but are also sensitive to service. Staffed during business hours, the site’s Unpublished Fares section is checked frequently by travel agents looking for under-priced tickets to offer clients. The research and development section of the site is internally hosted, allowing current content to be displayed at the restricted corporate domain. However, to provide non-public material to the clients at the corporate domain, all internal pages are password-protected.

10.2. Local Business SEO Strategies

For many small local businesses, success relies almost entirely on attracting clients from their immediate vicinity. A tiny sandwich shop in a hot downtown might compete not with another little shop two blocks away. Or a tool changer maker operating nationwide may rely on a local base of some 25 customers, spending about a half million dollars a year, for 80% of their revenue. Custom local services flourish throughout the world, and most small artisans and bricks-and-mortar shops depend on their immediate communities.

Many of these businesses have a small “brick and mortar” presence on the Internet—but increasingly, that presence is almost nonexistent. A search for “plumber,” “carpenter,” “flowers,” or “nails” will mostly return links to large sites and regional chains. These small local businesses may not employ a dedicated person to run their websites, nor would they hire a design firm to build glitzy sites for them. But they might easily compose a few pages sketching the businesses products or services, provide contact information, and a map of the location. The local business would not be looking for a “hit” from around the world, but rather to optimize their site for local search. There are two obvious opportunities for local businesses listed in the SERPs: the site description of SERPs and local search.

The first strategy is primitive optimization considering just three factors: existence of keywords in the title of the page, existence of the keywords in a link pointing to the page, and existence of the keywords on the page itself, including the prominently displayed title, text, and heading tags. This strategy is crucial for local businesses, because adding their city to a keyword search usually leads to the company’s site appearing at or near the top of the SERPs. Local business sites would themselves not be competing with others for national scope; their only competitors would be others specializing in local search and giving a listing of local businesses typically appearing on the first or second SERP.

10.3. Content-Driven SEO Campaigns

Arguably the strategic pinnacle of SEO campaigns is the melding of distinctive and useful content with a well-implemented technical framework for both pleasing users and search engines. The following three strategies represent different facets of this complex design: attract users with “Linkbait”; proactively build your network of links; and create a business community around your site by creating a large library of useful and engaging SEO information. What are the hottest ideas you’ve seen bouncing around? Usually they’re not just ideas; they’re ideas with an accompanying design — which is to say, they cost some phase of economic development capital to produce. Nevertheless, the best ideas do have a way — provided you have the right pre-existing connections — of going public quickly and easily and with a comparatively low cost in capital of your own. Even with the best ideas, it can be risky; timed and thought through in a way that hyperlinks and social media will trigger, the right concept could return billions, even millions, of dollars in value. The rest of us just have to hope to trail behind them, getting backlinks with lower-profile developments. Creating linkbait, however, is the gold standard. If you’re short on ideas, you’ll need to catch them like the rest of us, but good backlinks always bring traffic. Why should we go hunting for links with lower-profile projects? The answer is that, on occasion, absolutely stellar ideas do come along, and they can trigger the creation of hundreds of thousands of backlinks, traffic, social sharing, and publicity.

11. Integrating SEO with Other Digital Marketing Channels

While SEO is regularly shunned as a lone warrior when it comes to digital marketing channels, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Aside from the fact that most organizations are likely conducting SEO as part of a wider online marketing strategy, search is your ultimate destination. In simple terms, traffic from social media and paid advertisement may be high but the real nuggets will be hidden away in the search results. Here are three channels that when coordinated and integrated with your SEO efforts can help maximize your efficacy and ROI.

SEO and Social Media

Even though there still is much speculation regarding whether or not social media posting has a tangible effect on ranking signals, one thing we do know for a fact is that social media plays a big role in helping you earn those trustworthy links and brand mentions. Furthermore, having your own pages and profiles on the major social networks is an excellent way to diversify brand visibility and dominate multiple search results, making it almost impossible for the internet user to ignore the brand. Combining your social media marketing products with SEO involves performing searches on major networks and investigating what works for your presence. You can then make bigger efforts to harness them for your SEO efforts.

A recent study found email marketing to have the highest ROI when it comes to digital marketing. Combine this with the fact that most users use their unusual email address for creating accounts with a majority of websites and you can see how any email communication exchanged between you and your past or present customers can be leveraged as an opportunity to help your SEO efforts. In short, with a proper newsletter strategy, your customers will be made aware of your new product, service or content offering and can be urged to share it with their audience.

11.1. SEO and Social Media

Integrating SEO with Other Digital Marketing Channels

The majority of businesses nowadays practice one or more forms of digital marketing to reach their audience, and for most, search engine optimization (SEO) is central to that practice. What makes SEO unique is its exclusivity to search engines; it has little or no overlap with other channels like paid advertising, social media, or email. Social media marketing, one of the most engaging forms of digital marketing, has layout, engagement, and targeting characteristics that distinguish it from others. SEO and social media have a complex interrelationship; they supplement, damage, and coexist with one another, and seem to affect each other in different ways.

Social media is basically a mechanism for direct communication between brands and consumers, who can share brand content with their connections, which helps marketers in other channels find their audience. Marketers usually paid for display ads to promote products, but because of social media and other content dissemination platforms, they can now reach out to users without any charge. Brands can gain visibility online without spending money; attracting traffic is no longer an obstacle because of social media. In fact, traffic generation is one of the important acts of marketing; SEO relies heavily on linking from third-party sites, and the top sites are basically those that attract a lot of links or traffic. Because social media communication can drive a lot of traffic, analysts expect it to become an important player of SEO. Of course, many sites like personal blogs are yet to embrace social media, and this might explain the continued importance of linking.

11.2. SEO and Email Marketing

Email marketing is an integral part of the digital marketing mix, as it is an effective method for directly communicating with customers and prospects alike. Unlike paid traffic marketing, emailing really puts the ‘social’ into social media, as it allows brands to engage with their customers. It allows over-building and sending people to your website; you can ask for feedback and present offers that push people directly to your site to take action.

Email can be one of the best-performing channels for driving traffic, especially when you are launching a new product or service. Regular blogs and promotions via email can help keep traffic up without driving price down too much. For longtime boosters of the power of email marketing, this appears to be good news. In buying, they’ve confirmed email remains a core component of their offering. This presumably indicated that email marketing costs far too much cross-promoting media spend cash.

Another thing to know is that, once people sign up to receive email alerts, it is more than rude to blog and deliver content they don’t want. People have signed up to receive information about a particular thing they are interested in, and yet they are getting stuff about your next TV show. This is something that irritates readers and is also in the ‘churn and burn’ category of email marketing disasters, but it just loses subscribers and gives the rest reason to ignore.

11.3. SEO and Pay-Per-Click Advertising

The synergy between SEO and PPC is at the forefront of our discussion when it comes to optimizing a brand’s visibility in SERPs. But first let us clarify what pay-per-click advertising is. PPC-based programs are where advertisers bid on keywords for which they want their ads to appear when a user types that keyword in the search box. When someone clicks on the ad, the advertiser pays the search engine a cost that varies depending on how highly competitive or popular the keyword is. The ads will stop showing as soon as the advertiser’s allocated budget runs out. The great advantage of PPC is that ads can get a brand instant visibility in SERPs, and can be precisely targeted down to what customers are looking for, where they’re located, and even when they are searching. However, PPC can also be quite expensive because users ad-clicking behavior can result in a high cost-per-click for the advertiser, particularly in extremely competitive environments.

So what are the different ways this paid channel can influence the organic results generated through SEO? Broadly speaking, there are three buckets into which these various forms of influence may be classified, and they would include: Insights for Keyword Research; Catching More Traffic Share in a SERP; and Improving Your Brand Integrity and Traffic Share via Brand-Related Queries. The most important way PPC positively impacts SEO is as a source for keyword bidding insights that can inform your organic keyword ranking efforts. At a basic level, PPC can help identify keywords worth targeting in your SEO campaigns via cost data pertaining to each keyword. But more than that, by closely monitoring ad performance in terms of conversion rates and other relevant metrics, you can establish whether each keyword is sufficiently high in ROI.

12. The Importance of User Experience (UX) in SEO

User experience is defined as how a user interacts with a product or service, especially in terms of how pleasurable or effective it is. UX frequently relates directly to usability, but may also encompass aspects broader than this. Good user experience, which maximizes usability, has become almost an expectation of users today, and websites that do not provide a pleasant experience may see increased bounce rates, low session duration, and increased cost of customer acquisition due to lower conversion rates. In terms of SEO, while there are many factors to consider when determining how to rank a website, such as keywords in page titles, backlinks, content quality, and meta tag usage, when any of these factors are implemented poorly, they may negatively affect how visitors interact with a website. Some of the most important considerations in User Experience include: Site Security. Mobile-Readiness. Page Speed. Avoiding Intrusive Interstitials. Decreasing Bounce Rate by Encouraging Users to Explore. Minimizing Site Errors. Clear and Useful Navigation. Positive Visual Impact.

13. Legal and Ethical Considerations in SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical component of digital marketing, but it is not without its legal and ethical considerations. SEO practitioners must navigate the complexities of copyright law, trademark protection, and privacy regulations while adhering to the guidelines set forth by search engines. Violating these legal or ethical standards can result in penalties, such as loss of search engine rankings and damage to a brand’s reputation. This section examines some of the key legal and ethical considerations inherent in modern-day SEO.

13.1. Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO

Search engine optimization has garnered criticism for its potential to deceive and manipulate search engines and users alike. The arguments over the rightness or wrongness of SEO oftentimes come down to essential distinctions between “black hat” and “white hat” methods. Black hat SEO seeks to manipulate search engine rankings without providing any tangible or useful information to users, while white hat SEO adheres to search engine guidelines and leverages the proper keyword usage to promote legitimately useful content. While black hat SEO methods may yield quick results, there is a high risk involved; black hat tactics do not help a website in the long term. Conversely, the search engines have a vested interest in identifying and penalizing sites that use deceptive tactics, such as keyword stuffing or incorporating hidden text.

13.2. Privacy Concerns and Data Protection

SEO strategies commonly involve utilizing data on users’ behavior, such as their search queries, click-through rates, and browsing habits, to determine which keywords and key phrases to target in web content. However, in the wake of increasing concerns about data security and the privacy of user information, search engines have restricted the accessibility of this behavior data. Increasingly, search engines are making user data less accessible to marketers — a trend that is likely to continue.

13.1. Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO

There is some debate over what constitutes black hat and white hat SEO. Broadly speaking, black hat practices are those that violate search engines’ terms of service, manipulative tactics that seek to achieve results quickly, and optimizations that are geared toward the search engines rather than users. Conversely, white hat strategies are those that are fully compliant with search engines’ TOS and focus on adopting tactics that allow them to meet their ultimate user needs.

Examples of forbidden black hat strategies include using hidden text or links, adding excessive keyword stuffing on page copy, employing doorway or gateway pages for strategic keywords, using blog comment spam, creating link farms or buying links, and automatically generated any page content through computers or programs. Such tactics can drive up visibility and clickthroughs in the short term; however, the penalties for getting caught often lead to the web pages that engage in such tactics being banished to distant pages in the search results index or sometimes even removed from the index entirely. Indeed, companies that get caught using black hat tactics can take financial hits for both the expenses invested and the lost revenue should traffic suddenly drop.

Most see SEO as those practices that directly impact the visibility and traffic growth of a company’s site on the search engines. If companies want to play the game effectively and adhere to ethical coding and programming strategies, they should start by selecting a white hat marketing company to tackle the job. White hat tactics see the big picture, meaning that they build a solid foundation for a long-term online presence, because they understand that search engine results change and that visibility in the results will be less reliant on SEO techniques moving forward.

13.2. Privacy Concerns and Data Protection

The issue of data protection is one that has been prevalent in various discussions regarding SEO. This discussion is related to large companies and more recently individuals as online users. SEO data tracking is a concern for many people, and options exist to limit data collection. In an effort to address privacy concerns, laws are created to limit the power of companies to track individuals online, ultimately creating rules on what digital marketers can and cannot do. Scandals involving building political profiles, tracking actions related to these profiles, and sending them political-related ads raised awareness since they acknowledged the extent of data that could be collected. Websites need to notify users that they are collecting information, and social media platforms are expected to show strict monitoring regarding the information that is shared on their platforms.

The rise of digital marketing has substantial implications for the practice of marketing. There are new laws governing each digital marketer’s activities, and avoiding ethical issues in using data is no longer a concern but a necessity to avoid breaking the law. Legally, questions have been raised about whether these new laws affect SEO, particularly “do not track” legislation. Currently, the essence of search engine data tracking can only be withheld through plugins and browser choice, which is not an optimal solution. SEO certainly is a developing practice and will continue to be, but privacy concerns and data protection are prevalent both online and in the world. The goal is to strike a balance in which SEO can exist alongside user safety.

14. Conclusion

The study provided a comprehensive overview on the impact of SEO on digital marketing strategies, reviewing some aspects of the online environment and digital marketing strategies. Globalized, society is more than ever business driven and for many companies the digital market is their only alternative. While the traditional marketing mix of 4P’s – product, price, place, promotion – cannot be disregarded, within a digital environment other important factors have to be considered: reachability, optimizing the platforms and verifying the performance. The revenues are correlated to the number of people visiting websites; if this number isn’t enough then no income will appear. The traffic that a website receives is determined both by the effort and intention of the companies and also by the rules imposed by the search engines.

A good digital marketing strategy relies on the continuous improvement of every step, from the ad campaign to the landing page and how these two interact with the users. If a parameter is optimized while the other is neglected, the returns won’t reach their potential. The most efficient option would be for a company to invest in both PPC and SEO, in order to maximize the quality of the landing page, and as long as they afford it, minimize the price needed for the advertising campaign. After optimizing the landing page so that the PPC ad will create the installments with the highest conversion rate possible, the company could afford to stop investing in PPC and gradually start investing in optimizing and linking the page to SEO parameters.