Cue the cheesy intro music!
Businesses have always needed to find a way to reach their target audiences.
In the modern world, SEO is virtual magic. In the 90s the only magic we had was courtesy of a certain teenage witch.
Sabrina’s magic couldn’t always help with good business acumen, however.
It would have taken pure witchcraft in the 90s to get the kind of results that we can get now.
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The 90’s Was Better For Everything
It might have been true for The Simpsons, but believe or not, not everything was better in the golden age of teen television.
Unlike today, businesses depended on word of mouth and a physical existence on the high street.
SEO is only a recent phenomenon with the rise of Google and search engine optimisation. The big thing about SEO? It makes it easier for people to find and use your business.
If you’ve not been here before you’re probably wondering, what exactly is SEO?
Well if you’re not sure by now, here’s the lowdown:
Search Engine Optimisation is the process of improving a webpage’s technical elements in line with a search engine’s guidelines.
Optimisation means gearing your content towards your target audience and pleasing our search engine overlords (here’s looking at you Google).
The better optimized, and more relevant to popular search trends, the higher up you’ll appear in the search rankings.
But we know you came here for business talk – so enough about SEO (…for now that is).
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The kind of marketing we rely on today is through social media, blog writing, and features on other popular sites.
Prince would be proud, as 1999 was the start of SEO as we know it. Yet, it was rife with ‘black hat tactics’ (even if it took a few years for bad SEO practices to be fully realized), including keyword stuffing, excessive tagging and spam backlinks.
Before 1999 and the birth of search engine optimization, webpages were over cluttered and littered with gifs, eye-bursting color contrasts, and 3D writing. Also, it wouldn’t be a 90s website without flash somewhere or other.
These aspects were once a novelty and – dare we say – ‘cutting edge’. Things move forward, though.
Conversions once came in the form of signup sheets for exclusive access to certain features. Repeated, invasive advertisements were littered across all different kinds of websites.
Ad spam was a popular method of being noticed on the online frontier. Now this is considered a black hat tactic, and will get you slapped with penalties from the likes of Google and Bing.
Businesses in the 90’s hadn’t taken full advantage of the wonders of SEO (considering Google wasn’t even founded until 1998 and didn’t really exist yet, so who can blame them?) but they did have flashy ads, banners and even games.
Marketing The Way It Should Be
Unlike the online marketing phenomenon that came along with Stranger Things, hit 90s shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer couldn’t utilize the full potential of the internet like we can today.
At first marketing emails were a great way to reach your desired audience, and sure enough it worked.
But marketing tactics have been revolutionized since the days of email chains.
That’s not to say that mailing lists aren’t still useful.
A mailing list is a great way to make sure that your audience base (and biggest fans) are kept up to date and in-the-loop.
Keeping your mailing list up to date is much easier than it used to be, and a whole lot easier than trying to babysit the Rugrats.
The new kid on the block (well, relatively new) social media has taken the internet by storm.
Social media is the new Kelly, (see Saved By The Bell for reference) the popular girl in school.
Everyone uses it, and it’s the perfect way to reach a wider audience. Just remember that you’ll need a marketing plan before you start.
Keeping with viral trends and current events means your web pages will be more up to date, but it also means you’ll be benefitting from SEO.
From 90’s Hit To Timeless Classic
The internet isn’t going away anytime soon, so burying your head in the sand and hoping that it’s just a flash-in-the-pan just won’t cut it.
‘In-Real-Life’ (IRL) marketing is the way of the past.
It doesn’t mean that posters and billboards aren’t effective, they just aren’t the best way to maximize your reach.
People tend to tune out posters and physical marketing just like TV static. General advertising is everywhere in the contemporary world, and we can all become numb to it.
Nowadays, the place to reach people is in the virtual world.
SEO is the best way to reach your audience organically. That means making relevant content to reach the right kind of people.
Creating interesting content keeps your audience engaged and means you’ll have people coming back time again.
Online adverts are another way of reaching people through the digital world.
Although they seem relatively cheap for what you’re getting, they’re not the most effective way of reaching your target audience.
It’s best to think about online advertising as an advancement of posters or billboards. And in a similar way, it’s easy to scroll past these and ignore them.
Cold emailing is often dismissed as spam and should be avoided just like a Dick Dastardly scheme.
How Digital Marketing Is The New Craze
If you thought the Macarena was cool, we’re about to blow your minds with SEO and digital marketing.
It might not have a catchy tune to go with it (just yet,) but it’s definitely taking the world by storm.
So why is SEO any better than the marketing that we had in the 90’s?
- It’s incredibly cost-effective compared to other forms of marketing
- You can engage with your audience at every stage of the marketing process
- It’s completely measurable using statistics
- More cost-effective than cost per click marketing and other outbound methods
- Less invasive than other forms of marketing
- It allows you to compete with much bigger organizations in a much more level way
- Online marketing plans are easily adaptable in case of any emergencies
- You can reach your audience on multiple platforms at any time of day
SEO combines all the best elements of online presence with marketing. It’s like the equivalent to a marketing Voltron.
Because SEO helps to improve search rankings, and isn’t easily tuned out like adverts can be, it means it can be a lot more effective.
It’s Your Business To Know Marketing
Getting creative was the way that they did it in the 90’s, and today the 2020s are no different.
Everyone remembers the Coca Cola truck, a symbol now synonymous with Christmas.
Despite the same methods still being used today, advertising has changed its form.
Marketing online doesn’t give a lot of opportunities for full videos to play, also we don’t really have the attention-span anymore for traditional forms of advertising.
Creativity with online ads has seen the rise of integrated adverts, SEO and influencer culture.
Whether you hate it or love it, modern advertising has permeated every corner of the internet including all of our social media feeds.
The invasive nature of social media advertising and influencing can become extremely frustrating and tends to be drowned out in the constant stream of social media.
If only we could go back to the days of Tamagotchis, Moon Boots, and Furbies; interspaced with our favorite Sunday afternoon cartoons.
SEO isn’t invasive, instead it’s a way to give genuine information and increase visibility for your brand by pleasing the algorithm.
Brand Building
Building a brand is completely different to how it used to be.
Traditional advertising through TV, product placement and celebrity endorsement was commonplace in the 90s.
This kind of advertising has followed us into the 21st century and is still commonplace today.
Nothing can beat the taste of Pepsi Crystal, or is it Sprite? Maybe even Doritos 3D? Who knows…
The point is that branding has changed and these forms of marketing used to be enough to get a brand recognised.
That was until the SEO and digital marketing boom!
Move over Polly Pocket with your annoying TV ads and your simple – yet addictive – jingle.
Brand building nowadays is about generating authority.
Building authority relies on quality web content and the generation of backlinks.
You might be asking what are backlinks?
Backlinks are links through to your website from other people’s webpages, this funnels traffic to your site from the user’s entry point.
It’s important to monitor the sites that are linking back to you, as it will affect your authority score and more importantly how your audience views your site.
If there are a whole load of spam web pages linking to your site your authority score will tank and it will send your rankings plummeting.
On the other hand, a backlink from a site with a good authority score, one with high quality content (or even government sites) will be beneficial for gaining a high quality audience.
Should I Care About The Changes In Marketing?
Just like the algorithm, marketing techniques are always changing and evolving.
To keep up with Google and other search engine’s extremely frequent algorithmic updates, it’s important to stay up to date by adapting your marketing style regularly.
Marketing and SEO aren’t going to fall out of fashion, so it’s important to know how and when to adapt.
If you need help with your web design, or don’t know where to start with SEO get in touch with us now.
Johnathan Elliott
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