Fighting with shortcuts. Digital marketing: SEO, SMM, SEM, and SMO

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a strategy to promote products or services using the internet. It includes many different disciplines that all have one goal: to get customers to purchase your product online. Within the Internet network, you can divide your activities into those more oriented towards desktop or mobile users, as well as make a different division according to your needs. In fact – where the Internet is – there is also digital marketing, which has many levels. This is a particularly interesting branch of marketing because it is well measurable (it allows us to obtain the necessary data about customers and their behavior), allows for content targeting, and does not require great financial resources from us.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO are activities and strategies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in organic – free – search results. It consists of several stages that affect obtaining the highest ranking position. It is an interdisciplinary issue, meaning it extends to computer science, programming, marketing and promotion. First of all, it should be remembered that it is a long-term process that is constantly evolving along with subsequent updates of algorithms and search engine robots.

This type of positioning focuses primarily on on-page and off-page elements.When talking about the internal structure of the website, we mainly deal with the analysis and selection of keywords, headers optimization (H1-H6), meta tags, content layout and structure, website interface, friendly URL, sitemap, robots.txt file, multimedia, internal links, responsiveness and loading speed. The whole thing is technical optimization and is related to search engine ranking factors.

In the case of external activities, we want to analyze the competition, build external linking, join forces with social media and the blogosphere, in the case of local SEO – a virtual showcase, NAP, synergy with Google Maps.

Search Engine Marketing

SEM is a much broader concept that primarily revolves around paid marketing and promotional strategies. We are talking about PPC (Pay Per Click) ads, landing pages or sponsored articles. The main goal here is to improve the conversion. This is our goal, which is to encourage a potential user to interact with the site. Simply displaying the material or advertisement is not enough, we care about clicking. SEM also can include search engine advertising on both Google and Bing as well as other search engines that target specific geographic regions or languages.

Social Media Optimization

SMO is the newest acronym in digital marketing. Social media optimization is a technique that helps get your business found on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. You can do it by optimizing posts for social media shares or optimizing your profile to make it easier for people to find you on these platforms.

Social Media Management

SMM is what it sounds like – managing all of your social media channels. It includes finding the perfect times to post in order to maximize exposure as well as responding to comments or questions. A lot of people these days are taking advantage of social media management tools that allow them to schedule posts ahead of time so they don’t have to worry about keeping up with everything on a daily basis.

How to choose which strategy is the best for you?

Every company is different and has its own marketing strategy. What will work for one business might not work for another. It’s important to take the time to understand what your unique needs are before you start any marketing campaign. Are you a business that relies on repeat customers or first-time visitors? Once you know what kind of customer you have, it becomes much easier to find the right tools for your particular situation.

Organic vs paid search

Organic search traffic accounts for about 60% of the total clicks on search engine results pages worldwide. More than 90% of marketers say that improving organic rankings is an important or critical goal for their digital marketing efforts.

Organic listings are assigned a top position in Google’s page ranking algorithm, called PageRank. PageRank takes into account various metrics, including content quality (keyword relevance), quantity and diversity of sources, domain authority/page authority, age of content/freshness, social shares/likes, frequency of updates.

Paid results don’t have to worry about it. They show up at the top of search engine results pages because companies have paid them to be there. They make it easier for searchers to find what they’re looking for because they take up more space. While this doesn’t affect organic listings’ ranking scores, these high-paying advertisers get priority over lower paying ones when space fills up on SERPs.

Maybe inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is one of the most popular forms of online marketing. It has two main goals: to attract new customers by providing helpful content and to convert them into paying customers. This can be done through different tactics including SEO, SMM, SEM, or SMO. These tactics should be combined with a company’s website and blog.

The digital marketer needs to keep in mind the importance of optimizing all pages for keywords that are relevant and make sense for the page topic. The user experience is also important for any strategy as this will help guide people to purchase goods or services from your site instead of another competitor’s site. You must also maintain your social media channels as part of your digital marketing plan in order to get feedback from followers on what they like and dislike about your product line.

Last thoughts

Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise, digital marketing is key. With so many acronyms to know, it can be overwhelming to figure out which digital marketing strategy is right for you. That’s where this blog post comes in! We’ll break down what these four acronyms mean and how they can help your business grow. Choose the right strategy for you or combine everything in one.