How To Combine SEO With Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

SEO is probably the most important aspect of your inbound marketing marketing strategy — learn how to combine SEO effectively.

How To Combine SEO With Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

Search engine optimization or otherwise known as SEO is a term created for all of the actions you need to perform to get a good ranking on the Google search engine. The rules have changed over the years but people still do it, improve their techniques and find better ones for reaching that coveted top position. The traffic that comes from search engines is ‘free traffic’ that a website has garnered through quality content and useful topics.

 

This is an important part of any inbound marketing strategy because this is where it all starts. This is how people can find you and then share your content.

 

Here are some key tactics that you can use to combine your inbound marketing strategy and SEO.

 

1. Blog

 

One of the best things you can have is a blog.

 

“This is an active section of your website and in addition to being great for providing insight and information to your customers and prospects, it can be a serious SEO booster because of the sheer amount of content and different keywords that can be there,” says Zoe Bell, a marketer at Britstudent.com and Nextcoursework.com.

 

Here’s how to make it work for those purposes:

 

  • Write for people – Before digging into keywords and SEO, you need to make sure that you are writing for people that are going to read that. You can’t stuff your content with keywords and expect to win at SEO. The important part is to help the readers learn something and give them something useful. Then you can use keywords where it makes sense.
  • Make your headings a priority – These are important because they let people know what the posts are about and they are the prime spots to include keywords. Get keywords in your headings but make it look good and it needs to make sense.
  • Answer questions – You need to find which questions your readers have and then answer them in your blog posts. This will tell you which keywords to use.
  • Use plugins – Yoast, for example, is the great plugin that can help you optimize your posts without much guesswork on your part. It can also help you remember everything that you need to do to make your posts optimized.
  • Post often – One of the best things you can do with your blog is to write frequently and to post consistently. This is very important because it provides your readers and Google with fresh and useful content on a regular basis.
  • Write longer posts – Short posts don’t work anymore. Anything below 500 words is not good enough. Longer blog posts usually get better rating and people share them more as well.

 

2. Intent and optimization

Good SEO practices have move far beyond simply throwing up a bit of useless content with some keywords. Google algorithms have improved and now it’s not enough to write a short, uninformative article with a bunch of keywords and no meaning. You have to consider your audience and provide content that truly answers questions they may have. Solve a problem they might have.

 

What’s better is catering to your audience and the ratings will follow. Optimizing for the reader often aligns with optimizing for the search engines nowadays too.

 

Google bots are still getting better with their understanding of users, but the intent is very important. What was considered imperative like keyword density is no longer as powerful as it used to be. Rather, the behaviour is one of the most important things and it’s guiding the search engine ranking pages or SERPs.

 

Before you start a content strategy around keywords, you need to take a step back and understand your used. You need to focus on your personas and intent.

 

Ask some questions like:

 

  • What products do they use? What have they used in the past? What services do they use?
  • What kind of questions do they have?
  • What do they want to know more about?
  • What pain points do they have?

 

A good idea is also to use Google trends to understand all of this a lot better. Google analytics helps a lot too. It can help you understand search queries, trends, flow and so on. All of this gives you a better understanding of what intent is and what your users are looking for in a website.

 

When someone googles something, it’s usually a question and companies like you need to answer these questions and it needs to be in the form of their homepage, product pages, blog or anything similar. Providing value is the most important thing.

 

3. Social Media 

 

SEO services and social media are both parts of the inbound strategy and they have many similarities.. Both of them put great content in the first place and they need great content to make something popular.

“Most marketers say that social media has an impact on the overall SEO effectiveness, many people refuse to give more details,” says Alex Brown, a business blogger at Australia2write.com and Writemyx.com.

 

Here are some ways you can combine SEO and Social media for your own benefit:

 

  • External link expansion – When someone shares great content, like companies, for example, people often share it too. This counts as a link back to the content on the website of the company and then a company has a new external link which Google actually loves. This is a sign that your content is high quality and you can get there through influencers and hashtags.
  • Increase the number of your followers – If someone is looking for a topic and there are many accounts with that specific information, the user will most likely see the one with the most followers first. This is the fact, accounts with more followers always appear higher in the search engines. Companies that share useful content start the conversation and then your audience can grow organically from there.
  • Use local optimization – Google puts a heavy accent on local searches and social media is a great way to get involved with local communities. You can update people about events in your area and follow other local businesses and so on. Google still needs to advance in this area but local SEO is one of the best things you can get involved in for success.