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    Home > News > Stages Of Digital Marketing

2^nd August 2011 | Author: Maria Appleton

Stages Of Digital Marketing

When search marketing was first introduced, many digital marketing professionals thought of organic search traffic as free. They would simply create a website, make the site easy to navigate, and make a few technical changes, so that the search engines would crawl and categorise the website. Their main strategy was a simple 'create website and forget website'. If the website managed to get good rankings and traffic, it was considered a free bonus. This was a lot different from paid search marketing, on which big investments were made.

As more and more companies began to enter the digital marketing arena, the competition to catch the attention of the search audience hotted up. Savvy digital marketing professionals realized it was not only possible but vital, to actively manage, both their SEO and paid search programmes. This stage was the second stage of SEO marketing, or the 'active management of rankings stage'. During this digital marketing stage, various SEO best practices were formulated. Marketers began to actively manage technical aspects of their website, such as site structure, meta tagging and configuration of content. Other digital marketing strategies such as keyword selection, keyword density, and link-building, also emerged.

This resulted in the evolution of SEO efforts from a technical speciality to a marketing speciality. Such a change required additional funds and manpower, to support the process of driving organic traffic to a particular website. According to various digital marketing statistics, more than $1.5 billion was spent in 2010 to maintain 'free' traffic from organic search, and ensure that competitors were kept at bay. This takes us to the third phase of digital marketing. During this phase, marketing professionals were required to justify the funds allocated to them for SEO, and compete for resources with traditional marketing methods.

At the DOMAINfest, held in February 2011 in Santa Monica, one of the primary topics of discussion was the growing importance of ROI for SEO campaigns. When a panel of digital marketing experts at the conference were asked what had changed the most over the previous year, most of them replied that 'SEO is now been subjected to the rigourous demands of ROI and accountability'. In recent months, SEO has begun to be evaluated by companies, just like other parts of their marketing mix. If this is combined with the fact that marketing companies also receive occasional requests from their clients about ROI metrics, it is obvious that accountability and ROI has become as important as driving traffic through organic search.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency and can be contacted on 020 8891 2077 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.

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