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Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Increasing organic search ranking

Organic search is one of the most widely used inbound marketing channels. To organize your website for optimal SEO performance, there are three main areas of SEO to work on.

  • Technical optimization: Put simply, does your website work? Does it load? Are there speed issues? Are there mobile issues? That's what technical optimization is all about. It has to work to be ranked.
  • On-page optimization: Is the content on your website valuable? Does it get enough keywords? Are there variations in the page titles, in the headers, in the body copy, and in the image alt tags?
  • Off-page optimization: This is attracting backlinks or getting links to your site. So, are you creating the type of content that attracts quality backlinks from good websites who want to link to your website as a source of useful content?

Generally, marketers work with the people who manage and control the website to optimize it. We actually don't dig in ourselves most of the time. It wouldn't be normal where we're actually editing the code or making these kinds of changes to a website. It's more common that digital marketers might brief a web developer on this or get stuff from a content team if you're not already part of that content team.

The objective of all of this is to structure the website in such a way to make it more visible and crawlable for inclusion in the Google organic database – or index. The result of this is that your site will appear for more free organic searches. And those keywords, as you're trying to rank, will start to push and open up, reducing your need for things like paid search, although they will work together.

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Cathal Melinn

Cathal Melinn is a well-known digital marketing director, commercial analyst, and ecommerce specialist with over 15 years’ experience.

Cathal is a respected international conference speaker, course lecturer, and digital trainer. He specialises in driving complete understanding from students across a number of digital marketing disciplines including: paid and organic search (PPC and SEO), analytics, strategy and planning, social media, reporting, and optimisition.  Cathal works with digital professionals in over 80 countries and teaches at all levels of experience from beginner to advanced.

Alongside his training and course work, Cathal runs his own digital marketing agency and is considered an analytics and revenue generating guru - at enterprise level. He has extensive local and international experience working with top B2B and B2C brands across multiple industries.

Over his career, Cathal has worked client-Side, in digital marketing agencies and media owners with brands including HSBC, Amazon, Apple, Red Bull, Dell, Vodafone, Compare the Market, Aer Lingus, and Expedia.

He can be reached on LinkedIn here.

Data protection regulations affect almost all aspects of digital marketing. Therefore, DMI has produced a short course on GDPR for all of our students. If you wish to learn more about GDPR, you can do so here:

DMI Short Course: GDPR

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You can find more information and content like this on the Digital Marketing Institute's Membership Library

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    ABOUT THIS DIGITAL MARKETING MODULE

    Digital Channels
    Cathal Melinn
    Skills Expert

    This module opens with a comprehensive overview of channel planning including the challenges this presents to marketers. It covers inbound and outbound strategies, cross media planning, the digital channel mix, and mobile marketing. Next, the module dives deeper into key topics related to each of the channels, covering social media marketing and content marketing strategy, search engine marketing, SEO, conversion rate optimization, and paid search, email and affiliate marketing, and display and video advertising, including ad formats and creative.