When Digital Marketing Started
Updated: Oct 31, 2022
Digital marketing was established in the '90s and it has grown exponentially ever since. Back in the '90s, black-hat practices like keyword stuffing and duplicate content were common especially when Google opened its doors in '98. In 1990, Archie, the first search engine tool, was released. This gave users the option to have search queries that were answered by a search engine. Archie was merely a file finding tool although a legacy server still remains active that contains Archie.
What is digital marketing and PPC
Digital marketing is online advertising and marketing. When you pay for ads through Google, you set up an ad campaign with keywords and other criteria to ensure that your ad reaches the right audience and you receive clicks every month. You don't pay for impressions, you pay for clicks. This task can be very intricate though, and a lot of things need to be done to ensure it gets optimized to perfection. You have to watch for small changes here and there and adjust your strategy along the way. Often times landing pages are used to help facilitate traffic. A landing page is a fast loading web page that goes right into the relevant information (phone number, email, form, services). PPC does not help search engine optimization and SEO needs to be differentiated from PPC
By utilizing websites, email campaigns, social media and search engines, a digital marketer can market certain products, websites and services. Web marketing efforts are in demand and can greatly benefit a business which leverages the power of the internet and all its traffic.
​​
What do digital marketers do
Digital marketers create solutions for companies' online marketing needs through advertising and optimization efforts.
​Type of advertising | Aspects |
Pay Per Click (PPC) | keyword research, get charged per click, track impression to click ratio, target audience research |
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | long tail keywords, tail keywords, head keywords, html tags such as <h1>, meta data, spiders, SERPs |
I won't bore you with the details but in a nutshell, PPC does not help SEO. But it doesn't hurt it either. PPC requires an ad budget (how much you are willing to spend on ads each month), a fee for setting up the campaign (if you use a digital marketing agency or a freelance digital marketer) and optimization charges (that sometimes include call reporting and continuous optimization). Some web marketing agencies offer consultations each month. Click here to learn more about my services.
SEO is the process of optimizing your webpage for search engines both through on-site efforts and off-site efforts. It can be technical if implementing advanced SEO and beginning to alter the HTML code of a website and add tags such as alt tags. I don't recommend doing it in house if you don't have a seasoned professional at hand. It usually takes a few weeks to start ranking but completed SEO efforts typically take up to 4-6 months.