What’s in a Name? Online Marketing Acronyms De-Mystified
Far be it from us to call this a “Dummies” guide, but if you’ve ever found yourself confused by any acronyms surrounding the small business online marketing community, you’ll find some of the following definitions helpful.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization. When you’re starting an online marketing campaign, this is the first step in the process of getting your web presence noticed by Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. In this process, the website is stripped of all code that hinders web crawlers from finding essential website information, and enhanced with search engine positive elements, like site maps, META data, and blogs. The “optimization” in search engine optimization comes from striking a balance between a seamless user experience and a website structure as accessible to search engines as possible.
SEM – Search Engine Marketing. Many people confuse this with SEO, but these terms refer to two distinct aspects of online marketing. The SEO is performed based on the planning of the SEM. Think of SEO as the tune-up, and SEM as the road trip. SEM encompasses the online marketing strategy specifically dealing with search engines. This stage deals with researching and selecting keywords or keyphrases that your website will be optimized for, building quality incoming links to your website, blog posts, and other methods that strengthen your website’s online visibility for the keywords and phrases for which it is optimized.
ROI – Return on Investment (or Rate of Return). The ROI is the ratio of money gained or lost (whether realized or unrealized) on an investment relative to the amount of money invested. Why is ROI so important for you? Because, it is a metric of what works and what doesn’t. If your ROI is poor for a certain online marketing campaign, then you need to re-evaluate your strategy. Carefully and constantly analyzing the performance of your keywords and key phrases will allow you to adjust your strategy as necessary to ensure that you’re investing your marketing capital in the avenues with the greatest ROI.
CMS – Content Management System. Content Management Systems are programs that make managing a website easier. A web developer can create a website with a CMS so that if a business owner needs to add content later on, they can do so through an intuitive administrative interface. It eliminates the need for knowing how to code websites, and puts the control back in the website owner’s hands. Website owners can use this to tweak their content as they see fit. Many popular CMS programs come with SEO minded plug-ins that turn simple websites into true online marketing hubs.
All of these aspects of small business online marketing have spectacular synergy. Business owners and online marketing specialists collaborate to research an effective search engine marketing campaign. The web developers create a website within a content management system that is dynamic enough to react to adjustments within the search engine marketing campaign, but also search engine optimized for maximum online visibility.
Still confused? That’s okay, because we’re not. Even the most minute details are noticed by search engines that crawl the web 24/7, and we know how to leverage online marketing strategies to their maximum potential potential.