The basics of SEO and digital marketing

If you're a business owner in 2022, digital marketing and SEO are essential to your growth, no matter what industry you're in. Indeed, if your potential customers do not find you easily on search engines, you miss many business opportunities and you will have more difficulty increasing your sales and your profits.

Luckily, there are plenty of digital marketing experts out there to help you navigate the internet's various possibilities and advise you on the best approaches for your business. Before presenting strategies to increase your online visibility, we have prepared a small list of common vocabulary in the world of digital marketing.

The basic vocabulary of digital marketing

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO is a technique used by all web developers and digital strategists to improve a website's ranking in Google. SEO mainly concerns the content and structure of your website. The aim of SEO is to achieve better natural referencing by increasing the notoriety and credibility of your platform.
2. Natural referencing: Natural referencing is the French translation for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Organic SEO is also a translation of the same term!
3. SEM (Search Engine Marketing): SEM includes all paid features allowing you to promote your business online, including Google Ads. The majority of SEM strategies can quickly increase the visibility of a website, but they have no influence on natural referencing.
4. Google Ads: Google Ads is a function offered by the famous search engine. It allows websites to create paid advertisements in order to appear in the first search results for specific keywords. Normally, you will have to pay each time someone clicks on your ad's link (pay-per-click).
5. Remarketing: Remarketing allows companies to present digital advertisements on social media to people who have already visited their website. Remarketing works through cookies that visitors accept when using the Internet.
6. Lead Generation: Generating leads is about getting more information about a company's potential customers. This information may be email addresses, shopping preferences or online habits. A business that invests in lead generation is more likely to increase sales and profit.
7. Automated Marketing: Often, automated marketing consists of sending a series of emails to potential customers to offer them more information about the company and encourage them to take business action. Marketing automation, on the other hand, can take many forms, including posting ads, grading leads, and after-sales follow-up.

How to improve the notoriety of a website?

To rank well in search engines, a website must meet a few conditions to ensure its security and credibility. Here is an overview of the main conditions for your website to be deemed safe and relevant by Google:

• Use HTTPS: Unlike HTTP, HTTPS provides additional protection for visitors. The risk of theft of personal data is therefore lower. Your website should also use an SSL/TLS data encryption system.

• Update the design: Nobody likes browsing a website straight out of the 1990s and Google knows it. You don't have to change the design every year, but your website should still look like other platforms created in the last five years.

• Create a “responsive” platform: more and more people are using their mobile phones to search the web. If your website is not easy to navigate on all types of devices, you may lose a lot of potential customers.

• Avoid lots of ads and pop-ups: Although pop-ups are a good way to grab visitors' attention, they can quickly become annoying, especially if there are a lot of ads on your platform. Generally, Google recommends more clean websites that don't use too many pop-ups.

• Improve the loading speed of your site: it's no secret that the longer a page takes to load, the more visitors are likely to leave it. To improve your ranking in Google, you can eliminate items that take longer to load, including videos.

Monitor your results and adjust accordingly (KPI!)

Despite the wealth of information we have about SEO and digital marketing, there is no magic bullet for increasing a website's online visibility. To avoid using an unnecessary technique or approach, it is essential to monitor the performance of your SEO strategies in order to adjust accordingly. Whether it's the relevance of the keywords you choose or the effectiveness of your digital ads, you'll have a better chance of increasing your sales if you know what works for you and what doesn't.

On the other hand, this type of monitoring requires time and some technical knowledge. To make it easier for you, there are SEO companies like LeadLion that help you design digital marketing strategies and track them. You can thus enjoy the advantages of the best techniques without having to invest many hours to fully understand the workings of digital marketing.

If you have any questions about your website's SEO or if you would like advice on how to improve your platform's online reputation, don't hesitate to contact one of our experts. We are always available to help you achieve your online goals.