Does digital marketing really work?

It’s all very well for the big companies and corporations – they can afford to establish and maintain teams of personnel dedicated to analysing marketing data. Working in conjunction with web designers and content managers they assess the effectiveness of every single aspect of their digital marketing campaigns and act, or react, accordingly.

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For the small or medium business however, a digital marketing department is simply not achievable. And the smaller the business, the less likelihood there is that any digital marketing strategy has been researched and analysed for maximum effectiveness. Far too many small businesses operate on the basis that a website – any website – is sufficient to attract visitors, although nowadays that is far from the case.

The internet is huge!

According to a report last year by Mail Online, there are now more than a billion websites. Although many of these sites are not currently operating live, this figure demonstrates that the internet has grown faster than anyone could have predicted.

Trying to make your own business, products or services stand out from the crowd is therefore not as simple as you might have anticipated. Simply throwing together a website, adding a few choice keywords and hoping for the best simply doesn’t cut it in today’s competitive online world.

As if it weren’t hard enough to make your digital voice heard above the online chatter of millions of sites, the big search engines are continually moving the goalposts. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) used to be all about the keywords, but nowadays the systems for ranking sites have become much more complicated.

All change for the search engines

The big search engines want to provide excellent service to their visitors and were becoming increasingly frustrated by the manipulations of site owners using nefarious means to manipulate their rankings. Packing text with keywords and using hidden meta tags with no relevance to the page in question were just two methods employed by webmasters keen to improve their own rankings. In an attempt to stop these practices, along with many others, the search engines constantly update their algorithms, meaning that no site owners can afford to rest on their laurels, even if they do manage to attain the coveted front page rankings.

Search Engine Journal documents five ways to avoid incurring Google SEO penalties, including checking expired and irrelevant links and keeping on top of your anchor density. And if that has you reaching for a search engine to find out what it means, then you should probably call for some professional assistance!

“But I don’t have the budget to spare!” you cry, and if you’re thinking about London prices then to some extent you could have a point. But thanks to the power of the internet you don’t have to. A huge range of services including a free website review, so you can see what needs amending and what the effects will be, all at zero cost.

Look out for similar offers which allow you to see the financial benefits to be gained before you part with your cash. It could be the best thing you’ve ever done. So once you have started becoming more successful you might need to look at getting an Office Space Reading location to move into to really expand your business. You can find out what they offer at sites like https://www.arlingtonbusinesspark.co.uk/ and get moving.

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