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Digital marketing guides, explained plainly
Guides to the questions business owners ask us most. No sales pitch, and nothing you need a marketing degree to follow.
Strategy guides
Integrated marketing is planning all of your marketing channels against the same objective and message, so that each supports the others. The website, search, advertising, social media and email are treated as one campaign, not as separate projects.
Digital marketing is the promotion of a business through online channels: its website, search engines, paid advertising, social media and email. What sets it apart from older forms of marketing is that much of it can be measured.
A marketing strategy is the reasoning behind your marketing: who you want to reach, what you want them to do, why they should choose you and how you will know it is working. It comes before any decision about channels or budgets.
SEO guides
An SEO audit is a structured review of how well a website is set up to be found in search. It checks the technical health of the site, the content on its pages and how the business appears elsewhere online, then sets out what to fix in order of priority.
A backlink is a link on someone else’s website that points to yours. Search engines treat it as a sign that another site found your page worth referring to, which is why backlinks have long been one of the signals used to rank pages.
On-page SEO is the work done on the pages of your own website to help them appear in search: the words, the headings, the titles and the links between pages. It sits alongside off-page SEO and technical SEO, and a site needs all three.
AI search guides
SEO helps your website rank in search results. AEO helps you become the direct answer to a question. GEO helps AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google’s AI results find and recommend you. They overlap heavily, and good SEO is the foundation of the other two.
Schema markup is code added to a web page that labels what the content means, using a shared vocabulary from schema.org. It tells a search engine that a string of numbers is a phone number, that a name is a business, and that a paragraph is the answer to a question.
Google AI Mode is a part of Google Search that answers a question with an AI-written response in place of a list of links, and lets you ask follow-up questions in the same conversation. It runs on Google’s Gemini models and can be opened from its own tab or from a search result.
Google Ads guides
PPC stands for pay-per-click. It is a form of online advertising where you pay each time someone clicks your advert, not each time it is shown. The best known example is Google Ads, where adverts appear above the normal search results.
Cost per click, or CPC, is the amount an advertiser pays each time someone clicks their advert. It is the pricing model behind most search advertising, where you pay for the visit and not for the advert being shown.
A landing page is the page a visitor arrives on after clicking an advert, an email or a search result. In marketing the term usually means a page built for one purpose: to turn that visitor into an enquiry or a sale.
Websites guides
Conversion rate optimisation, or CRO, is the practice of increasing the share of website visitors who take the action you want, such as making an enquiry, calling or buying. It gets more from the visitors you already have, without paying for more of them.
A wireframe is a simple outline of a web page that shows what goes where, without colour, photography or finished wording. It is to a website what a floor plan is to a house: the layout is agreed before anyone chooses the paint.
A 301 redirect is an instruction that permanently sends visitors and search engines from one web address to another. It is how a page can move without breaking the links, bookmarks and search results that point to the old address.
Social media guides
Social media management is the ongoing work of running a business’s social media accounts: planning what to post, creating it, publishing it, replying to people and reporting on the results. It is the routine that keeps an account active and useful.
Email marketing guides
Email marketing is sending messages to people who have agreed to hear from you, in order to keep in touch, share something useful and encourage them to buy or enquire again. It reaches people who already know you.
Klaviyo is an email and SMS marketing platform, used mostly by businesses that sell online. It connects to a shop’s order data, so emails can be sent according to what each customer has bought, browsed or left in their basket.