Holistic Online Marketing
Earlier this year I alluded to a new theory on SEO and online marketing I was working on. At the time I knew what the concept was, but didn’t quite have a name to attach to it. Then I came across some other SEO Consultants with similar ideas and they had already named it. So rather than “re-invent the wheel”, I’ve adopted their name to the same practice.
Holistic Online Marketing
Holistic Online Marketing is essentially the merger of three disciplines of online marketing. Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing. Search Engine Optimization is the act of optimizing your website so the search engines can crawl it easily and give you better organic rankings. But is your ultimate goal to have a website that is only friendly to search engines? The search engine’s goal is to deliver a satisfying search experience to the visitor. Shouldn’t you align yourself with the search engines goal and optimize your website for your visitor?
A Holistic Online Marketing approach looks at the complete visitor experience.
- How easy is it to get around your site?
- Are your URLs human friendly?
- Are your page titles relevant to the content on the page?
- Once on a page does the visitor know what the page is about, are you delivering a satisfying experience to your visitor with good relevant content?
Holistic Online Marketing encompasses SEO Best Practices. This involves “traditional” SEO also known as On Page SEO Best Practices. This is working “under the hood” on the meta tags. Your site’s meta tag information is optimized on a page by page basis, and other factors which help the search engines are also taken into consideration. I have a series of posts in the works examining the various aspects of SEO Best Practices.
Off Page SEO Best Practices
With the major search engines placing more weight on external links to your site cutting edge Off Page Best Practices are implemented. The days of linking to hundreds or thousands of directories are gone. Now the search engines want you to link to sites that demonstrate a level of trust with visitors. This is where Social Media marketing takes over. Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook allow you to create a wealth of external links and more importantly engage in an inbound marketing conversation with your visitor. Creating and regularly updating a blog and producing videos and placing them on a popular video site like YouTube also expands the conversation and inbound marketing efforts. These platforms work for you in two ways. You establish a transparent communication channel with your customers and you create valuable inbound links to your web site. As an added bonus, with the right content you will be seen as an expert in your field.
The last part of Holistic Online Marketing is Search Engine Marketing, but this is more than Pay Per Click Campaigns. Search Engine Marketing can also involve placing ads on sites such as Craigslist, Kijiji (although they now charge for external links) and other classified sites. These ads function in two ways, they drive traffic and they also get your name out into other areas of the web. This can be very effective, I have one client who gets over 25% of his traffic from the ads we run on various classified sites.
Pay Per Click Campaigns are great for quick boosts to your online marketing efforts as they can drive traffic to your site quickly and give you a prominent position on the search engine result pages.
There is a lot more to Holistic Online Marketing, and over the coming weeks I will be bringing you more in-depth posts on the various aspects.
