Analogies are awesome tools for furthering our understanding of any given situation, but when it comes to getting a firm handle on what can otherwise be fairly complex concepts like SEO and Internet marketing, they’re incredibly helpful.
That’s why we’re sharing one of our favorite SEO analogies to help you understand the basics behind Internet marketing and get to the root of what the best online marketing services set out to accomplish, and how they go about doing that.
Internet marketing, when it’s boiled down to the basics, is just like baseball. There are bases that have to be reached, and each base is an essential step towards reaching the next base and the next, and ultimately a home run, which in this case means more sales, bigger ROI, and better business. So whether you’re looking to further your own insights into SEO or trying to explain what Internet marketing is like at your next holiday party or family dinner, here’s a handy Internet marketing analogy that might just help.
1st Base: Rankings
Getting to first base is where the whole sport, and in this case, your whole Internet marketing strategy, starts.
So what’s first base when it comes to online marketing? Rankings.
Getting seen and found online is key if you want to get visitors to your site and ultimately grow your customer base. To get to first base takes a whole host of SEO services and optimization strategies. Driving powerful rankings means selecting keywords where you can compete, onsite optimization, technical SEO, creating optimized content, building a natural link profile, a wide online presence, and a powerful authority online through link generation, high-quality content marketing, video sharing, blogging, active social media marketing and more.
Another option, for those looking for a quick boost onto first base, is Pay Per Click Advertising. PPC is essentially like buying your way onto first base–giving you instant rankings and visibility at the top of the search results pages.
2nd Base: Traffic
Once you’re getting the visibility your business needs, you need clients to actually click on your site. Being able to drive traffic is crucial to the success of your online marketing, yet this “second base” tends to be overlooked. Rankings are great, but rankings themselves aren’t everything. In fact, they aren’t anything if no one is clicking through to your site or taking action. So in order to really start driving traffic and making the most of your rankings, you’ll need another set of SEO solutions.
This is where Rich Snippets and Meta Data come into play. Optimized meta descriptions, titles, tags and rich snippets with images, rankings and more help capture the attention of searchers and can turn what might just be a top ranking into a top ranking that drives real traffic. Having this optimized data is what differentiates sites ranking at the top, and will motivate traffic, leads, and potential clients to click on your site instead of your competitors’.
3rd Base: Conversion
Halfway home. It’s a nice feeling, improving your visibility and increasing your site traffic, but this is where many get comfortable and tend to forget that final sprint still lays ahead.
If your business really wants to leverage the benefits of online marketing to the fullest, investing in improving the look, the feel, and more importantly, the performance of your site is essential. Having a conversion rate optimization campaign will ensure that none of this new traffic is being wasted and that you are taking each of these site visitors and converting them into paying customers. Focus on creating targeted landing pages, compelling calls-to-action, persuasive copy, well thought-out design, clear sales funnels, and making site navigation easy and taking-action even easier.
4th Base: Sales, ROI, and Tracking
Home runs are always incredible to watch and they’re even more thrilling to achieve. Internet marketing has a lot of moving parts. It can be confusing to some, and complex even for the best of us. This is the fun part, but the work is far from over. Now it’s time to track, to analyze and to continually optimize. Whether its your Adwords campaign’s click-through-rate, your Google Analytics reports, your rankings, your conversion rates, your Facebook fans or your retweets and more you’re watching–keep track of your campaign and always measure your success not on profits or spend alone, but on ROI.
Without tracking and understanding your metrics, you won’t be able to pinpoint what works best and what could be improved, and your success could very easily remain at a standstill. Internet marketing and SEO is not an exercise in staying stagnant. The Internet has given businesses limitless opportunities for marketing themselves, which is why the main goal of digital marketing is constant growth.
Gaining powerful visibility, driving traffic to your site, optimizing that site for conversion, and constantly monitoring the ways you can enhance your campaign are what enable more sales and better ROI. They are the basics behind growing your business, the steps that drive successful Internet marketing, and the secret to home run after home run after home run.