What Is Digital Asset Optimization?

Author: Kaitlyn Partington Category: Digital & Social Media, Marketing Date: January 4, 2021

You’ve heard of search engine optimization, but what about digital asset optimization? While the concepts are not entirely the same, they are very similar. And together, they are powerful tools to have in your marketing toolbox. So, what is digital asset optimization?  And what examples of digital assets will best suit your marketing strategy?

We’ll get to that. But first, a quick recap of SEO. Simply, search engine optimization is the process of improving the quality and quantity of traffic to your website from Google or other similar search engines. Typically, it requires the use of certain keywords and phrases (related to your business) throughout your site so that when an individual searches for those terms, Google is able to recognize your site as a relevant search result.

What is digital asset optimization?

We used to get asked all the time, what is search engine optimization? But now that SEO is well on its way to becoming a household term, the next question has become, what is digital asset optimization?

Like SEO, it’s all about searchability, or making it easier for search engines to find, index and sort your content. But whereas SEO focuses on getting your site – or a particular page on your site – found, the goal of digital asset optimization is to get specific assets on your site found.

Digital assets can come in various forms. Some examples of these types of digital assets may include images, videos and audio files (like podcasts). They can also include things like RSS, Microsoft Office files, Flash and PDFs.

To achieve digital asset optimization, it’s important to do your research and identify exactly which keywords and phrases your audience is typing into the search bar when looking for assets like yours. From there, you can optimize your content by changing filenames, metadata, captions, titles, URLs and tags to include those same keywords for Google to crawl.

What is digital asset management?

Once you have identified your digital assets, it’s important to properly manage them towards your brand. Digital asset management (DAM) helps organize, store and share your company’s digital assets in a central location. It boosts the various files, images, videos and other media while keeping the content up to date and relevant to your site. You may ask, why is digital asset management important? Well, it sets a standard of productivity and helps your company focus on creativity instead of manually managing assets.

Why are digital assets important?

Your digital assets, by default, tend to be more dynamic in nature than a web page full of text; and often, those dynamic assets are what compels customers to engage, respond and convert. Plus, Google knows this, and has set up its search results to include not only standard web pages, but separate lists for news stories, images, videos, and shopping items as well.

Therefore, when you focus only on SEO and not DAO, you limit the scope of your searchability potential within Google, and you give your competitors a chance to swoop in and attract your would-be customers with their own digital assets.

For more information on what is digital asset optimization, or for help on how to optimize your own content, contact us today, and one of our SEO/DAO specialists will be in touch.