Inbound marketing and SEO are two marketing strategies that work to attract more customers by providing useful and relevant content to potential customers. Both strategies seek to provide value to your potential customers and will help you achieve this in different ways. Inbound marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) can be described as two different strategies aimed at attracting more customers to your business.
Both strategies are based on the same idea: providing useful and relevant content to potential customers. This guide will help you understand what each strategy is, how they work, and which one you should use.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a form of marketing that attracts more customers by providing them with useful content. It focuses on creating value and providing useful information to build trust and authority in your company. Inbound marketing is the opposite of outbound marketing, such as cold calling, where businesses advertise their products to people who are not actively looking for information. Inbound marketing is an effective way to generate leads, but it is also an effective way to keep customers engaged and happy.
Some examples of inbound marketing strategies include:
- Blog posts
- Social media
- SEO copy
- eBooks
- Webinars
- Content marketing
Inbound marketing is a strategy based on providing useful and relevant content to your potential customers. It’s based on the idea that the best way to attract more customers is to provide value to them.
What Role Does SEO Play in Inbound Marketing?
SEO is an important part of inbound marketing. It's the process of making your site more visible on search engine results pages.
The idea is to have your site included in the first few results that people see when they search for products and services they’re interested in. The higher your site appears in search results, the more visible you will be to people interested in your products or services. SEO also helps to drive traffic to your website because it shows search engine users that there is relevant content on your site.
SEO Strategies to Increase Inbound Leads
If you want to focus on only the most productive SEO strategies, here are some SEO strategies known to increase inbound leads:
Keyword Research & Mapping
Keyword research is an important part of SEO. It’s used to find keywords people are likely to use when they search for products and services related to your business. By using keyword research, you’ll discover the search queries related to your business and the terms they use to search for related terms.
You can use tools like Google’s Keyword Planner & SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool to help you discover keywords people are using to search for products and services related to your business. Keyword research is also used to discover what people are using to search for your competitors. By finding out what competitors are using to search for keywords, you’ll increase the chances that people will click on your site when they look for keywords related to your business.
Keyword Mapping
Keyword mapping is the process of assigning keywords to one single page - any keywords that don’t have a perfect fit should give you ideas around what new content you should potentially create.
Keyword mapping is a step most people either skip or aren’t aware they should execute & it’s extremely important to identify and eliminate keyword cannibalization issues. Keyword cannibalization occurs when multiple pages on a website are trying to rank for the same keyword - this can cause confusion amongst the SERPs around which page to rank and therefore none will rank well.
On-Page Optimizations
On-page optimizations help you rank higher on search engine results pages, as more people will click on your site when they see it listed higher on the page. On-page optimizations are the factors that affect how search engines rank your site. These include:
- Keyword optimization
- Title tags, meta descriptions, and H1 tags
- Internal linking structure
On-page optimizations will help you make sure your site ranks higher on search engine results pages. This means more people will click on your site and visit it, giving you more inbound leads.
Proper Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
Meta tags and page titles are used to help search engine robots understand the content on your site. Your meta tags and title tags should include your site’s keywords and relevant information related to your topic. This is what people will see about your article in search engine results.
Content Strategy
Your content is the most important part of your inbound marketing strategy. This includes all of the content on your website and social media posts, as well as guest posts and videos.
Your content strategies should answer questions people have about your products and services. For example, if you sell supplements, you want to make sure that your content answers questions like “What are the benefits of taking supplements?” and “Where can I find supplements that are inexpensive?”
You also want to make sure that you are creating content that focuses on solving problems for your potential customers. For example, if someone has trouble sleeping, you want your content to focus on providing solutions for this problem, like how certain supplements can help people fall asleep faster.
Some types of content to include are:
- Blogs
- Case studies
- White papers
- Downloadable content
- Video
Blogs
When it comes to your blog, it’s important to think about your overall goals and develop a strategy for creating valuable content. This includes how you will crosslink to other posts on your site to keep readers on your site and reduce your bounce rate. You can start by developing topic clusters that feature content about a specific topic that’s relevant to your audience. For longer pages called pillar content, you can link to blogs on your site with more information about a topic.
Case Studies & White Papers
Case studies are a great way to your potential customers and help solve their problems. You can use case studies to share the success stories of past customers. This will help you show your target audience exactly what they can expect from your products and services and help you create a better impression with people.
Whitepapers act in a similar way. You can feature industry research to solve a common customer problem. Allowing customers to access case studies and whitepapers by signing up for your email list is a great way to keep in touch with them, develop brand awareness, and cultivate a professional relationship for a future sale.
Downloadable Content
Downloadable content is a great way to provide value to potential customers because it allows people to learn more about your business and your products and services. If you offer downloadable content, such as ebooks, you can help your potential customers with their problems. It also positions your company as an industry expert. The unique benefit of downloadable content is the ability to gather user contact information which can be leveraged for other marketing efforts.
Video Content
Videos are a great way to make people feel more comfortable about purchasing your products and services as a part of your inbound strategy. If you have a video sharing the story of how you founded your business or how you built a product, people will understand exactly what they can expect from your products and services because they’ll know more about the company as well as how it was started. People are also just more engaged with video content.
Lead Generation Forms & User Experience
Lead generation forms and user experience are essential to a high-performing website. When someone lands on your website, their experience can be negatively impacted by poor design and confusing copy. Your lead generation forms and user experience can help your website by increasing conversion rates and reducing bounce rates over the long term. It’s important that users know what to fill out to get more information and can be intuitively guided through that process.
Link Building
When a potential customer clicks on one of your links to get to your website, it can be beneficial for you if they stay on the page and start exploring your content. You want them to read through your pages and ultimately become a customer. Link building is a great way to encourage this behavior. Essentially, you’re creating high-quality content that is valuable to your reader and then using that content to create backlinks.
Local Citations
Local citations include the mention of your company’s name, address, and telephone number. You can gain local citations by listing your company in online business directories. This can help your site show up in local searches.
Analytics & Reporting
To know if your inbound marketing and SEO efforts are working, you need a way to measure organic traffic. The top quality traffic analytics and reports tools:
Technical Site Optimizations
There are a number of technical site optimizations that you can perform to make sure your website loads quickly. Assuming your website has a good design and is easy to use, you next need to make sure that it loads quickly. Also, your website should be responsive so that it works well across different screen sizes. Your visitors will appreciate the fact that your site loads quickly and doesn’t cause any delays for them.
Increase Inbound Leads with SEO Experts
In a world where every company claims that they can help you get potential customers through digital marketing, RevPartners has the proof. We have helped our clients exceed their revenue expectations with a marketing and SEO focus. Can we help you with SEO and inbound marketing with marketing automation? Let us lead a free inbound audit on your site today.
