A strong web presence is of vital importance to almost any business endeavor and for good reason. The majority of customers will deal with companies online as their preference and nearly every purchase decision is made on the back of previous customer reviews.
What Is a Strong Web Presence?
Literally speaking, your web presence is simply the location that your business occupies on the internet. Knowing this, it follows that a strong web presence is basically taking up either a large amount of space or a very popular location on the internet.
This is fundamentally what is meant by having a strong web presence and the effect that this has on your business is that you get more traffic to your website and, by extension, more traffic converted into customers. While this may be a wonderful concept, the process of strengthening your web presence is somewhat more complex than the idea of web presence itself.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing techniques revolve around the concept that it is far more useful to direct interested customers towards your website than to try and create interest in uninterested customers.
Inbound marketing techniques are intended to increase the scope and popularity of your web presence, ensuring interested customers find your website in searches and that your web addresses exist widely enough that customers who may be interested know it exists.
Two of the most effective methods engaged with Inbound marketing are search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing. These respectively increase the popularity and scope of your web presence and work to improve your company’s visibility online.
What is SEO?
SEO is the process of assessing which keywords and phrases are most relevant to your business and then working to improve your ability to rank for those keywords so that your company is found by searchers who are most likely to be converted into customers. This is a multistage process.
The first stage, as mentioned above, revolves around researching which keywords are most likely to be relevant to your website. Through careful research and consideration, SEO professionals can find both highly specific (long-tail) and more generic (short-tail) keywords that would be beneficial for your company to compete for.
Long-tail keywords are useful to your company as they will bring highly specific searchers to the exact product that they are searching for. These kinds of searchers are highly likely to make a purchase as they are searching so specifically and bringing them directly to a product that matches what they are searching for makes them highly likely to convert into customers. However, long-tail keywords are not searched as often as other keywords and so will only bring a small amount of traffic to the website. This means that it is often necessary to compete for hundreds or even thousands of long-tail keywords at a time.
Short-tail keywords, on the other hand, are far less specific. They are much less likely to bring high conversion traffic to your website. However, they will bring far more traffic to your website overall, meaning you will need to rank for fewer short-tail keywords in total to bring large amounts of traffic in. Sadly, this does come at a price. Because short-tail keywords are so much less specific, there is usually a large amount of competition for these positions, and you will likely have to spend a lot of time or money to rank for these searches.
Because of their vastly different benefits and drawbacks, a good mix of long-tail and short-tail keywords is important for successful SEO. By ranking for a blend of these keywords, you bring a large amount of both generic and specific traffic to your webpage, which often improves conversion rates substantially.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is the process of creating and presenting useful and interesting content related to your company or product on social media platforms. The intention of this kind of marketing is multilayered and precise. It is well known that the majority of people use some kind of social media and by placing interesting and useful content related to their business on social media, companies take advantage of this ubiquity.
The first way this broad placement of media benefits the company is through the mere exposure effect, which is a psychological phenomenon wherein people are more inclined to like something the more they are exposed to it. This means that the more you see adverts for services or products online, so long as they aren’t too obtrusive, the more likely you are to inherently trust the service.
Along with this, social media marketing is beneficial to companies as users of social media are likely to share content that they enjoy with other like-minded users. In this way, companies gain additional and highly specific potential customers through existing customer’s natural inclination to share the content that they enjoy with others that they believe will enjoy it too. This, in combination with the mere exposure effect, can cause social media marketing to snowball somewhat and allows companies to see compounding returns on their investments into social media marketing.
Due to its powerful potential as a marketing technique, companies often make the choice to partner with a global influencer agency in order to ensure they gain the maximum potential benefit from their social media marketing exploits.
How Does it All Come Together?
The successful combination of SEO and Social Media marketing is incredibly effective from a marketing standpoint, as they will often produce highly symbiotic results. A highly effective social media marketing campaign will result in a boom in searches for your website and hopefully for your SEO keywords.
These keywords have been improved by your SEO marketing campaign, and because of this will see a much higher conversion rate as a result of these searches. This will, in turn, produce an increase in positive social media interaction, as customers who are pleased with their product or service will post about their experiences and leave positive reviews online, increasing the effect of the social media marketing campaign.
