SEO in Inbound Marketing: Generating Inbound Leads

Attracting the right customers to grow your business isn’t always a straightforward process and as a developing company, paid advertising might not fit into your marketing budget. Moreover, even though social media is growing in importance, search traffic remains critical to attracting new users to your website. According to data from GrowthBadger, Google drives 8 times more traffic than all social media combined. 

Digital tactics such as search engine optimization (SEO) is the most effective tool within an overarching inbound marketing strategy. When correctly aligned with your goals and other marketing efforts, effective SEO efforts can generate more inbound leads for your business. If you’re looking for a cost-efficient way to generate more prospects and customers, you won’t want to miss out on the benefits of SEO in your inbound marketing!

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a strategy used to attract, engage, and delight customers to your business. If you want more inbound leads, it is crucial that you draw in the right people with valuable content and conversations that establish you as a trusted confidant with whom they want to engage. In addition, providing solutions and insights that align with customer needs and goals as well as supporting them in finding success with their purchase will further drive your business and inbound leads forward. 

Ultimately, when customers find success within your business, they will share that success with others, attracting new customers to your business and creating a self-sufficient loop. In the end, the goal of inbound marketing is to create experiences that are beneficial to your leads and target audience. Then, throughout their time on your site, providing helpful material and engaging with them with conversational features is sure to keep them and their associates coming back. This, in turn, generates even more inbound leads.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO), is the process of improving your site’s ranking and increasing its page’s visibility when people use search engines such as Google or Bing to search for products or services that may be related to your business. SEO works through the use of bots that crawl pages on the web. These bots go from site to site and collect information about all pages crawled while simultaneously putting those pages in an index. This index allows the bots to pull up web pages that help you find exactly what you are looking for on the internet. Next, algorithms analyze the pages in the index while taking into consideration ranking factors that determine the order in which pages should appear in the search results for a given entry. 

Unlike paid advertising, you can’t pay search engines to improve your site’s visibility. Therefore, if you want to increase inbound leads, there are several considerations to take into account to optimize your site for search engines. Being descriptive in your pages, providing a complete description of what your business offers, remaining topical with your content, and keeping your site up to date are just a few of the ways that can help search engines understand your site and help the right people find it. At face value, SEO may seem to be a rather complex service or skill. However, it can serve as a vital function for businesses both big and small and their success. So what kinds of SEO tactics help generate inbound leads?

SEO Tactics to Generate Inbound Leads

1. Keywords: SEO keywords are terms that are added to online content in order to boost their search engine rankings. Backlinko suggests that the majority of keywords are discovered through the process of keyword research and selected based on a combination of search volume, commercial intent, and competition. Keywords are important to SEO because when you optimize your site around context that speaks to your personas pain points, challenges, and goals, you can rank higher in organic search results. 

   Needless to say, when you rank higher on the search engine results page, your site will drive more traffic. This is why finding relevant keywords that people will actually search for is the first step of any SEO campaign. In addition, semantic keywords, or keywords related to the original keyword are important to your SEO strategy since they provide the search engine crawlers with greater insight in regard to the topics and depth of your website’s content. 
   
   
2.  Content Creation: Simply put, SEO content is any content that is created to attract people through search engines. When you create content for your website, you compile knowledge and share it with your audience typically written or visually. The material allows you to present yourself as an authority in your field which in turn leads to people trusting your business more and coming to you for goods and services. Essentially, creating informative and authoritative content for your audience helps boost your website’s ranking in search engines. SEO content comes in many forms with the most popular being product pages, videos, infographics, blogs posts, and guides. 
   
   If you want to write SEO content that drives inbound leads for your business, consider defining your website goals to create a more efficient content plan or creating a content calendar to stay organized. In addition, be sure to format content that is easily readable and relevant to your audience when it comes to keywords that they are searching for. Ultimately, well-strategized content strategies generate leads which convert and the higher your conversion rates are, the higher your ROI will be.
   
   
3. Link Building: Link building is a term used to describe measures taken to increase the amount and quality of inbound links to a webpage to improve the page’s or website’s search engine results. This involves reaching out to directories and relevant, authoritative sites to build backlinks which in turn will result in higher authority rankings from search engines such as Google. Link building can be hard and takes time and effort but is still important.
   
   Placing a strong focus on link building will not only help your site rank higher on search engines, but new pages will be found faster on your site, your business will see an increase in credibility and trustworthiness, and you can benefit from targeted referral traffic. Despite the difficulty of link building, proven successes will lead to more inbound leads and can make your site all the more valuable. 
   
   
4. Social Media: Combining your SEO and social media strategy can also maximize inbound leads and success. Although social media does not directly contribute to SEO ranking, the links you share across social platforms can increase brand exposure. The links you post back to your website on social media add up and influence SEO in six directions. These include increasing brand recognition, enhancing brand reputation, improving online visibility and organic traffic, boosting local search engine optimization, extensive content distribution, and longer post lifespan.
   
   Despite the fact that shares across social media have no factor in SEO rankings, they can still be useful. More people sharing your content on social media produces social signals which indicates that your material is relevant to your target audience. 

How Inbound Marketing and SEO Align to Achieve Results

The terms inbound marketing and SEO are not interchangeable, although they work together to achieve the common goal of attracting, engaging, and delighting customers. Nonetheless, SEO is a critical component of your inbound marketing strategy and quite frankly a necessity. When you correctly align SEO with inbound marketing, the result generates inbound leads. SEO attracts visitors to your website, where they can enjoy the great content and user experience that your inbound program provides. Inbound strategies such as your content offerings, lead generation forms, and email marketing kick in after that. Two specific ways that SEO and inbound marketing align to generate inbound leads include driving traffic and creating quality content. 

For one, attracting visitors to your site is the first step in the inbound marketing process and SEO is responsible for this. If your site isn’t driving traffic, users won’t be able to experience the optimized conversion paths, user experience, and great content that inbound marketing provides. Let’s not forget, content is at the heart of all inbound marketing strategies, and SEO relies on it. SEO can still exist without inbound marketing, but not without content. Therefore, it is essential for any SEO plan to focus on high-quality content because it is what today’s users want and search engines such as Google continue to favor users. All in all, one could say that without SEO, inbound marketing would be nearly impossible if you want to generate inbound leads and results. 

There you have it! Employing a well implemented SEO strategy within your inbound marketing plan will ensure that the customers you target are finding exactly what they need on your site and generate more inbound leads. Ready to begin collecting inbound leads? Our inbound success plan is the place to start!