In the last ten years, digital marketing has evolved from being a sub-category of SEO to a standalone strategy in its own right.

This shift reflects the way that consumers interact with the world around them and the increasing importance of digital marketing in measuring, analyzing, and reporting on marketing performance.

If you’re just beginning your journey with online marketing, it can be difficult to know where to start and what tools to use. In this article, we’ll discuss how to navigate the world of digital marketing and discover the most effective tools for gaining insight, measuring performance, and growing your business online.

Why Should You Care About Online Marketing?

Every day, people make decisions online that have a profound impact on your business. If you want to stay competitive, you need to be able to harness the power of the internet to your advantage.

With more than 4.8 billion internet users across the globe, there’s always an audience available to your product or service. You just need to figure out how to speak to them and what will make them choose your product over your competitors’.

By developing an effective strategy for online marketing, you can significantly increase the exposure and appeal of your website to potential customers. In other words, you can use online marketing to gain a competitive advantage.

What Is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of improving your website’s ranking in search results for important keywords. When a customer types in a keyword or phrase into the Google search bar and your site shows up in the results, you’ve successfully implemented SEO to earn a spot in the top listings.

SEO is not a standalone strategy and should be viewed as part of a larger digital marketing strategy. When used effectively, SEO can help your site appear near the top of a Google search result for important keywords. From there, you can continue to drive traffic to your site and inspire action in some way (i.e., make a sale, provide valuable information, etc.).

Some experts even argue that SEO is more important than ever before because your site’s SEO ranking can influence your site’s popularity and whether or not potential customers will find you. With so much importance placed on SEO, it’s important to understand the basics and how to get started.

How Do You Improve Your Site’s SEO Ranking?

There are several factors that influence a website’s SEO ranking, but you have total control over four of them. Using these four factors, you can put yourself in the driver’s seat and ensure that your site shows up in the right places when potential customers look for products or services related to your niche.

1. On-Page SEO

On-page SEO refers to the processes and actions you perform on your own website to improve its SEO ranking. On-page SEO is a lot more than just filling in the H1, H2, and H3 tags correctly or using the right keywords. There are dozens of tactics you can use to optimize your site for search engines like Google, and we’ve compiled a list of 20+ tactics that can help you reach the top of the search results.

2. Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to the processes and actions you perform outside of your website to improve its SEO ranking. Off-page SEO tactics include things like getting articles published on high-ranking websites, building backlinks through social media, and becoming a review authority in your industry. When potential customers type in keywords or phrases related to your niche into the Google search bar, the results they get back will reflect the content and interaction found on these outside websites.

3. Content

Just like search engines need websites to function, content-based search requires a steady stream of fresh and unique content to work properly.

Creating and curating content can be a daunting task, but it’s an important one. When used effectively, content can significantly improve your site’s SEO ranking. Just remember: it takes time to see results from content marketing, so be patient.

4. Structured Data

This one may seem like a no-brainer, but unfortunately, many businesses still don’t take advantage of the rich data available to them on their websites. Structured Data lets search engines know exactly what your website is about, so they can better understand your content and guide the user experience.

With Structured Data, you can mark up important bits of information — like phone numbers, web addresses, social media handles, etc. — with markup language that can be easily understood by search engines. Marking up crucial information like this ensures that your site will continue to get indexed and can appear near the top of search results when customers use relevant keywords.

Create a Plan

In order to reach your full potential with SEO, you need to put in the time and energy to create a plan. While there are plenty of SEO tools that can help you automate this process and make it much easier to scale your strategy, nothing can substitute for good old-fashioned elbow grease.

By taking the time to plan out your SEO strategy, you can significantly improve your site’s performance in the search engines. Setting a specific goal towards which you can measure your progress and adjusting your plan as needed are essential in order to reach your full potential.

What Are the Most Popular SEO Tools?

There are plenty of tools that can help you get started with SEO, but you need to keep in mind that not all of them are created equal. Popular SEO tools include things like Google Analytics, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Screaming Frog, which we’ll discuss in a bit.

It’s important to find a way to measure the effectiveness of your SEO strategy, so you can determine what changes you should make to reach your goals. Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster Tools offer free trial versions, and you can use their keyword research tools and dashboards to track the performance of your strategy.

Another popular SEO tool is Screaming Frog, from the link brokers at iSayHello.com. With a free trial, you can download and use this tool to crawl and index the content on your site. After completing the free trial, you can purchase a premium version that has additional features for $49/month. With Screaming Frog, you can discover a variety of important SEO metrics including keywords, competition analysis, and more.

Choosing the Right Keywords

If you’re new to SEO, it can be tempting to go with the first keywords that come to mind. While it’s important to use key phrases that are both relevant and popular, you also need to keep in mind the commercial intent of your words. In other words, be careful not to choose words that could be construed as “dirty” or “offensive” given the content on your site.

Backlinks

Backlinks are important because they provide additional opportunities for your site to be found by potential customers. When someone other than a Google bot clicks on a link (i.e., a backlink), that action is recorded by Google as a vote of confidence. Essentially, backlinks help to establish your site as an online destination that other reputable websites choose to include in their link lists. Backlinks can help to improve your site’s SEO ranking, as well as the ranking of the websites that you get linked to.

Content Curation Tools

Content curation tools allow you to discover, monitor, and engage with content published by others in your industry. Using content curation tools, you can stay abreast of the latest industry news and information as well as discover relevant and authoritative content that helps to establish your expertise.

For example, if you’re a fashion expert looking to establish your authority in the industry, you can use a content curation tool like Fashion Buzz to discover and monitor content published by others in your industry. We recommend starting with a free trial version before making any purchase decisions or committing to a paid subscription.

Review Authority

This one may seem more like salesmanship than anything else, but establishing your review authority within your industry can significantly improve your site’s SEO ranking. When other websites and blogs choose to cite your opinion or that of others associated with your blog as a reason to check out a product or service in your niche, you’re automatically conferring upon yourself the status of review authority.