Why SEO Matters For Inbound Marketing
To get the best out of your business, you want to attract customers by offering them valuable content and experiences that actually solve their problems. This is what inbound marketing is all about. Outbound marketing on the other hand, just interrupts customers’ experiences with content that is irrelevant to them. Inbound marketing has been proven time and time again to be much more effective than outbound marketing.
To get the best out of your website, you want your site to be at the very top of search engine result pages (SERP). This is because there’s almost a 45% click-through rate (CTR) for websites that are ranked at the very highest SERP positions. The good thing about the kind of traffic gotten form a high position on search results is you don’t have to pay the search engines for it. All you need to do is make use of some strategies on your website which will make the search engines consider you worthy enough to be ranked highly. This is what search engine optimization (SEO) is basically about.
It is a common misconception that SEO is the singular panacea for all online traffic and SERP positioning related issues. Truly, SEO definitely plays an important role in influencing traffic and positioning, but only when it is combined with a strong inbound marketing strategy can you truly tap into its full potentials. The same can be said for inbound marketing – you must connect it strategically with SEO techniques for you to fully maximize its impact on sales. Everything you do on-page and off-page (keywords, content creating, link building, email marketing, social media interaction, etc.) should be done with SEO in mind.
Search engine optimization techniques like keyword research, monitoring competition, analyzing your site’s overall user experience and so on, are very important in that, the results obtained from gathering these data will drive you to create better content that your customers actually need. What is the point of creating awesome content that your customers do not need? With SEO principles to support your inbound marketing plan, you will achieve better conversion rates because they will help you discover exactly what your customers need and you can give it to them.
What’s more? The effect of creating relevant and more valuable content as a result of using SEO techniques will not only boost your inbound marketing results but will also improve your SERP rankings because your users’ experiences count in search engine rankings. In essence, SEO helps inbound marketing and inbound marketing helps SEO in return. In fact, you can say that SEO is an inbound marketing strategy and inbound marketing is an SEO strategy.
Now that you know that SEO can greatly improve your inbound marketing strategy, let’s look at some ways in which both principles can work hand in hand.
Customer intent: Keyword density in content doesn’t have as much power as it used to in SERP rankings. Now, user behavior has much more power in determining positioning in search engine results. Before using keywords to build your content strategy, you should understand your customers’ intents and personas by knowing certain things about them, like: what questions they are asking on Google (or other search engines); what products or services they are using or have used; what their pain points are; and what topics they want to know about. Google has provided tools like Google Analytics and Google Trends to help you discover search queries, search trends and site flow – all of which help better understand intent.
After you have used SEO tools to know what your customers really want, then you can provide the exact solutions they need.
Blogging: Studies suggest that for the average website that posts constant blogs, they have 55% more visitors; 97% more inbound links; 126% more prospects; and 434% more indexed pages on search engines than a website that doesn’t blog. Knowing this, always endeavor to incorporate SEO strategies (like using appropriate keywords, etc.) into your blog posts.
Social media: When businesses post great content on their social media accounts, other people share these content as well. And when these content are linked to the content on the company’s website, that’s a great SEO strategy (called link building) hidden in a social media post.
At the end of the day, it can be safely concluded that SEO strategies are difficult to separate from a truly effective inbound marketing plan. SEO is not just a topping you add to inbound marketing – SEO should actually permeate every aspect of it.
