Recently, I saw one of my techie friends apparently banging his head on his laptop mumbling the words, “I’m not getting any leads. There is the traffic on my website but what about the leads? This is awful!”
Well, this is not the first time I have witnessed the SEO concept used synonymously with that of digital marketing. Not many people are very aware of the fact that search engine optimisation (SEO) is a significant subset of the larger canon of digital marketing having different functions, approaches, and goals. People misinterpret the practices and role of SEO & digital marketing and have written a lot of blogs online disseminating the same misinterpretation through the blogs and guides.
We cannot even blame the people for believing that doing SEO would get them the customers or clients which, in turn, digital marketing does for you. The both share the identical yet different features and thus are recognized by the same name.
Understanding Search Engine Optimization (SE0):
Search engine optimization refers to the strategic planning, operational practices, and other activities one partakes to increase the visibility of a website in the Google’s (or even other search engines’) scrutiny. An SEO expert would optimize and promote a website as per the algorithms charted out by the search engines for crawling and incorporating websites into the popped up search results. But how would SEO help a website rank in the top 10 search results or even up to the initial pages of search results? Because there are zillions of websites on the internet, search engines hastily yet carefully evaluate each of the websites deserving to reach the masses. The evaluation is mainly done on the basis of trusted backlinks to the website, relevant content enriched with popular or useful keywords, a fully-furnished website with easy-to-access features and much more. Therefore, SEOs take complete care of all these factors to convince the search engines of the usability & relevancy of the websites for the users.
Understanding Digital Marketing:
Digital marketing is a broader term used to refer to all the strategies, operational practices, and other marketing activities one partakes to increase the lead conversions of a business type. The ultimate goal of Digital Marketing is to derive the maximum leads that get converted into the frequent customers. Unlike traditional means of marketing a product or service, digital marketing stretches as well as limits itself to all digital platforms, this marketing type is coined as “Digital Marketing”. It does not merely involve the promotion of the services, products, or other assets on social media platforms and search engines (which attributes to search engine marketing). In fact, the prospect of digital marketing is to positively influence the decision of the potential target audience (or readers) about the usability or the affordability or the prominence of the products.
Top 3 things that confuse SEO with Digital Marketing:
- More and more traffic on the website & its social media accounts
Because SEO is often opted for increasing the traffic on a website, lesser is known that digital marketing is mainly opted for increasing the relevant traffic and boost the human engagement on a website and its social media accounts. - Promising future of businesses made by digital agencies
The companies offering both digital marketing services and SEO services on individual basis confuse the people about the functioning of the both. When one says we offer digital marketing services to get you the leads, seo has a significant, not the sole responsibility. This is rarely made clear to the clients by the firms. - Building the brand & gaining the recognition online
Where SEO established the virtual presence of your business on the internet, the digital marketing turns your business into a brand. In such a case, not only the search engines but the humans also recognize and identify you as a brand having the actual presence online as well as offline.
But what the truth is:
- SEO is technical and complex than comprehensive digital marketing
Because optimizing a website from backend involves the intensive coding skills & surplus technical experience, SEO is often regarded as complex. Whereas, digital marketing is more focused on evaluating the consumer behavior and devising the strategies to approach them in a way that they can’t resist opting the services or buying the products. - SEO works for search engines’ robots and Digital Marketing for human’s innate behavior
SEO activities such as created backlinks, updated content, meta-titles, descriptions with keywords make the crawlers or computerized programs to identify the uniqueness & relevancy of a website on world wide web. But things that make up the digital marketing are the paid social media campaigns, search engines advertisements, video marketing, content (blogs or website content) marketing, etc. which grabs the visual attention of the human audience active on the internet. For this, digital marketers assess the stimuli-response behavior of the viewer or potential customers and accordingly create advertorial or editorial content that sells. - SEO serves different purpose than digital marketing
If an optimized website for search engines ranks top in the first page of Google search results, the purpose of an SEO specialist is fulfilled. But that is not the case with a digital marketer! Unless a digital marketer obtains 100 leads in a month and hundreds of the followers on social media or website, he cannot consider his job done well.
Not to forget that the combined efforts of digital marketing & SEO (which is a part of the whole) would help you boost the revenue of your business. These are two separate entities which function differently but ultimately yield the promising results together.