SEO inbound marketing is one of the most effective ways to bring relevant traffic to your site. And with 63,000 Google searches every second, the pair go hand in hand. But before we get into why SEO is integral to inbound marketing, it’s important to get a handle on what exactly inbound marketing is.
Skip to:
- What is inbound marketing?
- The difference between outbound and inbound marketing
- How do inbound marketing and SEO work together?
- Why does content quality matter?
- What else matters?
- Take your SEO and inbound marketing to the next level
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is a strategic approach to content marketing. At its core, inbound marketing involves:
- Attracting the right customers by providing content they perceive as valuable
- Creating useful content that also presents your offering as a viable solution to the problem(s) that a potential customer is facing
Inbound marketing is about helping those customers who are actively looking for solutions, learn how your business offering can help them. As such, inbound marketing gradually draws engaged customers into your brand’s orbit.
The difference between outbound and inbound marketing
In the section above, we mentioned that inbound marketing is about attracting the ‘right’ customers. You may be wondering what we mean by attracting the right customers.
This question provides a great opportunity to discuss the key difference between outbound and inbound marketing.
Outbound Marketing
Outbound marketing employs tactics such as advertising and other methods that ‘push’ your marketing messages to potential customers.
Although certain forms of outbound marketing can prove to be a powerful tactic, for many businesses (especially when utilised as part of a wider marketing strategy) outbound marketing can be wasteful with disappointing returns on investment.
To put it another way, outbound marketing often puts your business in front of customers who have shown little, if any, intent to engage with your brand.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing does not try and force its way in front of customers. Instead, it ‘pulls’ customers towards your brand, based on their inherent interest in what you’re offering. Inbound marketing is about building relationships with potential customers by providing valuable or timely information.
By engaging with your content of their own accord, customers are actively signalling their interest in what you offer. Thus, customers derived from inbound marketing show a higher level of intent to engage with your brand and offering.
To put it succinctly; the fundamental principle of inbound marketing is to pull motivated customers in over time, rather than pushing your messaging out over a limited time scale.
How do inbound marketing and SEO work together?
There are several ways you can increase your inbound marketing reach – chief amongst them is inbound SEO. Effective SEO is a crucial factor in determining the success of your inbound marketing efforts.
SEO in a nutshell
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the practice of improving your web content so that it appears higher up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher your content ranks in relation to people’s search queries, the more visible your website is to users.
The impact of SEO on inbound marketing
To underline the value of SEO, consider that the average Click Through Rate (CTR) of paid search ads is around 2% whereas top-ranking organic content has an average CTR of 27% – that’s a difference you can’t ignore!
SEO gets your brand in front of the people who are searching for the type of content you create (in this case, content produced for inbound channels). If you rank for appropriate search terms, then it’s highly likely that you’ll bring the right kind of customers to your website and keep them there.
To do this, you must create high-quality content that potential customers regard as valuable.
Why does content quality matter?
The extent to which a potential customer values a piece of content depends on whether or not the content satisfies their intent.
Generally speaking, valuable content is any form of content that provides useful information, expert or unique insights, answers questions, and generally solves the reader’s problem(s). Put simply, quality content is the basis for any successful content marketing campaign.
What is content marketing?
When embarking on their SEO journey, many of our clients ask: what is content marketing?
Content marketing involves creating high-quality content that is seen as valuable by your target audience. You should create content that is highly relevant to the search terms and queries that your target audience is using.
Content marketing should include blog posts that answer questions or serve as useful guides. Ideally, your content should encourage visitors to check out other pages on your website, including transactional pages or those pages that motivate the user to take some form of action.
The value of content marketing
Although the goal of content marketing is not to make a sale with every visit, it should position you as a trusted expert on your topic whilst also guiding readers/viewers/listeners along the buyer’s journey.
EAT, which stands for expertise, authority and trust, is a guiding principle that Google uses to determine the quality of a piece of content and is something you should try to achieve with yours.
By creating content that is appropriate and informative on a consistent basis, content marketing will help to increase your inbound marketing reach.
Quickfire ways to improve your inbound content strategy
‘Bee’ sure to optimise your metadata
Metadata is necessary for search engines to index your web content accurately, based on your keywords. Optimising your metadata is a crucial step that doesn’t take up much time at all, provided that you take a strategic approach to your SEO.
Meta titles and descriptions
Optimising metadata involves adding relevant keywords to the metadata, also known as meta tags. As well as including your keywords in the title tag, write an effective meta description that is both informative and interesting to users.
The meta description is the 160-character snippet that search engines include underneath the title of your page in the SERPs – and it’s the first thing users will stumble across, so it’s important that you craft them to encourage engagement with strong CTAs.
Alt tags
Any images you use should also be optimised for search. Alt tags are an attribute within HTML code that provide image descriptions for the search engine bots that index your website.
Optimise your images by adding alt tags that use relevant keywords when describing the images included on your website.
Optimising metadata is a straightforward way to increase your online reach; unfortunately, many small businesses neglect this core aspect of technical SEO.
Use social media
The consistent use of social media, especially community building within your target audience, is a good way to drive traffic to your website and generate social media signals. It’s unclear if social signals have a direct impact on SEO, but regular engagement with your audience through social media is fantastic for increasing brand awareness.
Gain backlinks
In SEO, backlinks are hyperlinks from other websites that link back to you. Backlinks can bring users to your site but, more importantly, your backlink profile (number & quality of backlinks) is seen as a vote of confidence in your content by the search engines.
Do keyword research
By researching popular (as well as long-tail) search terms and queries you learn what people are searching for. Keyword research allows you to build your understanding of the search landscape. Then it’s a case of creating the content that will rank for the exact search terms, meaning you get more of the correct traffic to your website.
Take your SEO and inbound marketing efforts to the next level
SEO is crucial to the success of your inbound marketing. Instead of taking a scattergun approach with outbound marketing, inbound marketing brings the right customers to you. Effective SEO puts your brand in front of those ideal customers more often.
Closely integrating your inbound marketing and SEO strategies is a powerful practice. Not only do you begin to attract and engage the right audience; you improve search engine visibility and drive sustainable organic traffic to your website over the long term.
To discuss your SEO inbound marketing, get in contact with us and learn how we help businesses like yours ‘bee’ found online.
