SEO as an inbound marketing channel works for most businesses not just because it helps you generate clicks, but in fact, it helps you generate clicks from the right kind of people, the people who want your product or service.
For effective inbound marketing, a brand or a business needs to develop a good relationship with its target audience, and this can be done by creating valuable content that addresses customer needs.
That being said, even with great content, if you don’t have a good SEO strategy, people might not notice it.
In this article, we’ll talk about how to effectively incorporate SEO into your inbound marketing efforts so that your business not only reaches but resonates with the right audience.
What is SEO Inbound Marketing?
SEO inbound marketing is all about attracting customers naturally, without chasing them down with paid advertising. Mostly, it is a content-driven strategy that focuses on growing a brand or business organically.
SEO fits right into any inbound strategy because potential customers on Google are searching for solutions for their problems.
If you create content that answers their search queries, then you should be able to attract enough leads for your business to grow.
Thus, inbound marketing and SEO can go hand-in-hand, and for brands (or) businesses looking to leverage digital marketing, there couldn’t be a better marketing combination.
How To Implement SEO Inbound Marketing For Your Website
Inbound marketing strategies hugely rely on content marketing, and incorporating SEO will be no different.
If you follow these eight steps, you can develop an effective content creation strategy that will attract potential customers and keep them interested.
Each step is important to run a successful inbound marketing campaign using SEO.
1) Audience Research
Audience research is the first step of any marketing strategy because this step itself can help a business understand who its customers are and what they need.
Also, when we say audience research, it’s not just about demographics, it’s about going deep into their behaviors, preferences, and pain points.
A good place to start your audience research is by asking yourself these questions:
- What are the challenges my customers face?
- What is the most common way they find a solution?
- Who are the existing competitors that help my customers?
To refine this audience research process, you can take the help of tools, websites, paid surveys, or even get on a 1-on-1 call with your potential customers to understand them.
Here are some practical steps to guide your audience research:
- Create buyer personas: Based on real data from your research, develop ideal customer profiles of your target audience.
- Analyze customer feedback: Read competitor product reviews and go through customer experiences in the current market.
- Monitor competitors: Find out what your competitors are doing that’s working and what you can do instead to fill any gaps with your solution.
When you focus on your audience’s needs, you will create content that actually resonates with them. The more you know about your audience, the better you can serve them.
2) Choose Keywords for Content
For any SEO campaign, keywords are the foundation of success. If you go around creating content with no target keywords or no particular content in mind, then you’re wasting your efforts that could be invested elsewhere.
When choosing keywords for content, people always resort to selecting popular search terms and content ideas that are very competitive and harder for any new websites to rank.
Hence selection of keywords for your SEO should be done in a way where you stand a chance to rank and generate visitors to your content.
At PullingOffStrategies, our go-to keyword research tool is Aherfs. It’s an all-in-one SEO tool that helps with everything from keyword research to backlink opportunities.
Here’s how to use Aherfs to select a keyword for your strategy:
- Identify relevant topics and come up with seed keywords: Imagine what your customers are looking for and create a list of these ‘Top of the mind’ terms, and this list of keywords we usually call seed keywords.
- Analyze keywords based on your list: Input your list of seed keywords in Ahrefs ‘Keyword Explorer’ and come across keywords relevant to your industry.
- Use Aherfs filter to niche down topics: Instead of going after every topic under your niche, you need to choose keywords that are less competitive and easier to rank. Use Aherfs filters like Keyword difficulty (KD), Domain Rating (DR), Search Engine Results Page (SERP) analysis, etc.
- Consider search intent: Choose only those keywords that align with your inbound marketing goals, like conversions, leads, etc.
Picking the right keywords can mean all the difference in driving organic traffic to your site.
3) Plan a Content Strategy
Once the keywords are selected, you can’t just jump straight away and publish content randomly. Within your keyword list, you’ve to choose and prioritize content that you should cover first.
The reason why planning a solid content strategy is important for SEO is because it helps websites and businesses gain topical authority.
If you don’t know, topical authority is a concept in SEO that helps a website establish itself as an authority for that topic using content. Hence, by prioritizing the right kind of content, you will have a chance to establish yourself as an expert in your niche.
To do that, keyword grouping and clustering is one effective method.
Keyword grouping means putting related keywords in one cluster (or) group. Using clusters, you’ll come up with content ideas that cover one particular topic comprehensively.
Here’s how to plan your content for SEO :
- Use a tool to cluster your keywords: You can use a tool like Cluster AI to group your keywords and form clusters for each category in your niche.
- Cover each category or keyword group: Start by focusing on one category in your niche and try to plan content ideas that cover this one group entirely.
- Create pillar content: Each keyword cluster will have pillar content that’s like the main article for your entire category. For example, ‘How To Start Blogging’
- Create supporting content: From the same cluster, try to choose keywords and create content ideas that support your pillar content. For example, ‘Top Blogging Mistakes To Avoid’
With a well thought out content strategy, you will not only improve your website’s SEO, but this also improves user experience. If visitors to your website can find well-organized, relevant content, they’re more likely to stay and consume more.
4) Write Content
At PullingOffStrategies, we have ranked over 250+ articles on Google’s Page 1. So, we know a thing or two about writing high-quality content that is valuable and also ranks on Google.
According to us, there are two main parts of writing good content: Research and Outlines.
For research, you have to understand your industry because the better you know about your niche, the better you can speak to your audience. However, for research we have SOPs in place like these.
Not to mention, we have dedicated SOPs in place for creating rank-worthy outlines as well
Since our team works in synchrony, having SOPs makes sense for us to work seamlessly and write content that is both valuable and rankable.
That being said, if you don’t know how to write good content, then we would suggest you follow these writing guidelines for starters:
- Nail your introduction: Your introduction is most likely to decide whether or not your visitors want to read the whole article. Our best advice is to address their pain point at the start and promise them a solution if they read along.
- Use formatting: Your content should have proper headings, sub-headings, bullet points, and even proper spacing to make it easy to consume.
- Build storytelling angles: Develop a habit of including your personal stories (or) using a story that your potential audience can resonate with.
- Use simple language for content: Don’t use jargon. If you understand your industry nuances, then including those in the content is way better than using irrelevant jargon.
- Incorporate visuals in your content: Using relevant images, screenshots, videos, and GIFs can make your content easy to understand and engaging.
- Write actionable conclusions: If someone reads your whole article and they’re your potential customer, then you can’t leave them hanging without attaching a proper CTA for them to take action.
Writing good content is something that you become good at by only ‘Writing.’ So, the more you write, the better you will get at writing.
5) Optimize Content
To make sure your content ranks well in search engines and reaches your audience, you have to optimize it first. Don’t expect to publish raw content that you wrote to rank on Google.
Here are some basic on-page SEO optimizations:
- Content Optimization: Using tools like NeuronWriter, you can come across terms that you can include in your content to optimize it further
- URL Optimization: Have your main keyword in the URL of your blog post (or) landing page
- Meta title & Meta Description: These are the titles and descriptions that show up on SERPs, and including keywords in a click-worthy way to entice clicks
- Image optimization: Use compressed images with relevant alt text, including your keywords
- Internal linking: Use relevant links that help both search engines and users understand where to navigate and what’s the most important page on your website
- Heading structure: Use proper H1, H2, and H3 tags
At our agency, we helped one of our clients add an additional 10k+ visitors to their website by optimizing their content. So you can’t neglect this step for good SEO
6) Do a Technical Site Audit
A technical site audit is a must to optimize your website’s performance and make sure search engines can crawl and index your pages. We see very often that websites with good content ignore technical SEO and tank their rankings.
Hence, to avoid that, you need to conduct technical SEO audits regularly.
To conduct a through SEO audit, you should be using tools like Screaming Frog, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs in combination. Here are things to keep in mind for your technical SEO audit:
- Page speed: Make sure your web pages are loading within 3-4 seconds. If they’re taking any longer, then get into the crux of the situation.
- Mobile responsiveness: Have webpage designs that are adaptive on mobile devices and make sure the navigation is smooth
- Broken links: If you find any broken links (or) 404 pages in your audit, then set proper 301 redirects
- Duplicate content: If you have duplicate content on your website, then either delete those duplicate pages or consolidate the pages
- XML Sitemap: Create a sitemap that is SEO-friendly for crawling and indexing
- Robots.txt file: Create a robots txt file that addresses exactly what to crawl and index
7) Build Backlinks
Over the years, backlinks have been the top-ranking factor for websites to show up at the Top of Google. Even though Google says otherwise, we have enough evidence to say backlinks are more so relevant and important for any website’s rankings.
At our agency, we use some advanced link-building strategies that have generated results for our clients, and here are some of those strategies:
a) Guest Posts
Guest posting is all about writing articles for other websites in your niche. Not only does this give you valuable backlinks, but it also helps with your visibility.
By sharing your niche expertise on someone else’s website, you prove your credibility and will attract newer audiences along the way
b) Niche Edits
Niche edits are a way to add your links to existing content of other websites. This type of backlinks is often easier and quicker to acquire than guest posts.
Not to mention, you can benefit similar increase in authority and traffic by leveraging existing articles online.
c) Qwoted
Previously, it used to be HARO for us, but ever since, HARO closed down. We have shifted our link-building efforts towards Qwoted.
Qwoted, for those who don’t know, is a platform where journalists can connect with experts like you to get insights for their stories, and in return, you can expect a backlink from them.
Usually, these journalists publish in top media publications and thus, you can get free media exposure to your brand.
d) Digital PR
Digital PR is often a long-term strategy that can take anywhere from weeks to months to implement.
Usually, here, you have to create newsworthy content, and this story has to be shared/pitched to relevant journalists. If they like your story, then you’re going to get published in top publications, and not to mention you will benefit from a high-authority backlink from this.
Recently, we helped this SaaS brand get a mention in Entrepreneur and Forbes magazine by running a digital PR campaign.
8) Performance Tracking Your SEO
To know what’s working and what’s not, you need to track the performance of your SEO campaigns. Before the start of a 3-month SEO plan, (or) any long-term SEO campaign, you need to know what key metrics to track throughout to make informed decisions.
Measuring what kind of metrics will differ from business to business depending on their goals. However, for SEO marketing, these are the most used metrics to track performance:
- Keyword Rankings: Have a list of our keywords and track your position for each keyword
- Average CTR: Analyze what is click through rates (CTRs) of the content that is ranking at the Top of Google
- Organic Traffic: Check how much organic traffic you’re generating every month and what keywords are responsible for it
- Bounce Rates: Check the percentage of people/visitors bouncing off from your website
- Conversion Rates: Track the conversion rates of your main pages that are responsible for leads and sales
You can use a combination of tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs to gather data about your SEO performance. The thing with performance tracking is that it has to be done regularly to make the right decisions for your growth.
Wrap Up
These days, businesses are using social media marketing along with SEO to improve their brand presence and visibility. That is something you should be already doing.
To use inbound marketing effectively, SEO helps a lot for any business who are operating online and is looking for leads that are interested in their products or services.
If you want to run a effective SEO campaign for your business, please book a free call with us to get started
