Blockchain technology presents a ton of possibilities with its ability to provide greater transparency and tighter security on a wide range of industries and transactions and online marketing, it’s not surprising you will be hearing more about it as the applications are dynamic.
Blockchain technology will currently make its biggest impact today by shaking up online marketing as we know it especially since click fraud with display advertising and PPC has become a major concern for online marketers and site owners and that’s the beginning where blockchain has potential applications.
According to clickcease, approximately 40% of internet traffic is bot traffic and nonhuman. Did you know some click bots are designed to execute just PPC fraud? Did you know competitors and click farms are out there just to destroy your budget? This is where the genius of Blockchain comes in.
Blockchain’s fraud-busting capabilities may just be what online advertisers are looking for to help regain confidence in this thriving industry and more importantly, save money through click fraud prevention.
How Will Blockchain influence SEO?
For Organic SEO we know that blockchain cryptocurrency proves and verifies ownership or that a transaction is human by giving an in depth ledger system with multiple copies in a database controlled by multiple users as a check and balance system with bar none accuracy. With this increased transparency much like an SSL certificate, you can build additional trust and credibility with online consumers in applications such as e-commerce, emails and pay per click marketing. As for SEO, the impact comes into play when webmasters will have to implement coding although not yet in practice the possible new addition to schema markup codes for structured data that search engines use to identify what a page or article is about via HTML code.
Because PPC and SEO are directly related as in sources of traffic with blockchain we can reduce the cost of PPC because you can prevent click fraud and help recuperate fraudulent clicks, in essence, do you really know what your paying for? are bots clicking on your ads? are they really human? PPC is expensive and requires a click but how do we know that click is human. What is the verification of that? Blockchain solves this problem.
As you know Google and Facebook are not just social sites and search engines they are advertising companies giving you the platform to run campaigns that will not only extend your reach but also increase your profits, there’s no doubt that SEO providers and webmasters spend a great amount of time strategizing paid campaigns and tracking their effectiveness by click through rates and the number of clicks you received among others which gives you enough information to understand your target audience’s behavior.
With your campaign’s effectivity, now put into question blockchain is about to disrupt the whole industry. Blockchain is indeed disrupting these digital advertising authorities and in a few years, may even become its biggest threat to the level of transparency it provides its users. Before we dive into it further, it will be best to understand what blockchain is and what it does first and the potential to impact to search engine marketing.
What Is Blockchain?
A blockchain is an incorruptible decentralized and distributed digital ledger developed by Satoshi Nakamoto that continuously records transactions across a network of computers not only of the financial kind but everything that’s of value (money, goods, property, etc.). It’s the same technology used to manage cryptocurrency transactions like Bitcoin (which was developed by Nakamoto as well).
This format allows people in the network to verify and audit transactions but not edit or tamper with it. This makes each block immutable and “unhackable” so to speak.
You can think of blockchain as a kind of ledger where all your transactions are recorded. Say, for example, you purchased a car and paid for the down payment in 2017. This transaction goes directly to the ledger and is assigned a key to protecting it from tampering.
So if you pay the initial monthly amortization for that car, that transaction gets added to the initial transaction above and will continue to get updated each time you make payments. These transactions will all belong to a single block that everyone in the network sees but no one can edit.
Another example is if you want to send money to a relative in another country. The transaction is represented online as a block and becomes visible to everyone in the network. Once everyone in the network approves and validates this transaction, this block gets added to the chain and your relative receives the money. No need for middlemen like banks to approve such transaction, making things easier and faster. That’s how cryptocurrencies work such as bitcoin.
Image credit: Maropost and Blockgeeks
What Other Businesses can benefit from Blockchain?
Blockchain is not limited to online transactions. In fact, blockchain can impact other industries like voting, ridesharing, car sales, insurance and hell, even driverless cars!
Take voting for example. We all know that every election, reports of rigging and fraud is always expected to come immediately after but with voter registration and verification as well as vote counting was done using blockchain, we can be assured to have a clean and honest election because each vote is tamper-proof.
The same goes for real estate. With all the complaints about inaccurate public records, lack of transparency and fraud, using blockchain can help speed up the process by eliminating the need for paper-based transactions. It can also help with tracking, ownership verification, and transferring of deeds.
As you can see, blockchain can be used pretty much on everything. With blockchain, we are assured that data is accurate and fully transparent because there’s no middleman controlling policies. Records can easily be tracked and acquitted because you don’t need to go through intermediaries to get permission to access such.
How Will Blockchain Impact Search Marketing?
One of the ways to expand a brand’s reach is to get more eyes on it through paid marketing. By appearing on the top paid non organic results of search results a brand or online business can increase its exposure and gain additional traffic to their sites and more business.
While search engines provide the platform for these advertisements as well as other online advertising networks via ads and display networks to expose these brands to target audiences, the fact remains that the reporting can use a little more transparency in terms of the number of impressions the ads actually get based on the targeting you set for your campaign.
Click fraud is one of the biggest problems SEO providers and ads specialist are facing today. There’s just no way of telling which of those clicks were made by “real people” and which ones were done by bots resulting in profit loss because your budget is wasted on clicks that were not actually done by a potential buyer.
Blockchain can eliminate all these because it will only allow clicks from registered users helping you get rid of bots or competitors wasting your budget with low quality clicks. With this level of transparency and security, you’ll be able to maximize your budget and profit because you’re only going to get clicks from valid users.
In his article for Search Engine Land, contributor Tony Edward describes the dramatic impact blockchain has on digital marketing and advertising. You can read the entire article here.
With blockchain, you won’t be needing Facebook or Google to tell you which clicks are valid and which once are not. The correspondence is limited to that of the website owner and the advertiser which assures the validity of clicks, reduced online fraud, and increased transparency without giving away any personal details.
It also eliminates additional fees going to these marketing authorities or middlemen, helping you maximize every dollar.
The Wrap Up And Final Thoughts
Blockchain is definitely something to look forward to because just like the internet, it’s going to be the wave of the future and understanding what it does and how it impacts your business will give you a huge advantage.
It’s not surprising that everyone’s talking about it so if you haven’t had the time to look into it and understand its great power, now is the time.
My approach to search engine optimization is called Organic SEO and most people call me the “Authority Detective.”
What I do is investigate your entire visitor and search engine experience and find opportunities for quick wins with a verifiable return on investment.
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My experience started 25 years ago with corporate marketing, in-depth psychological consumer-based market research, branding, and product design; working with major companies such as Ford, Pepsi, RJ Reynolds, and Tommy Hilfiger. For the past 10 years, I have applied my background of consumer psychology and branding and WordPress design to online presence management and Organic SEO.
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