Effective inbound marketing is invaluable to a company’s success in today’s digital world. By focusing on attracting customers through relevant, helpful content that adds value to every stage of a customer purchasing path, a company can successfully increase conversions on their e-commerce site.
With strong SEO strategies, a website has the opportunity to become more visible to potential customers or clients. Effective search engine optimization brings visibility and potential customers to your site. Below are the top five methods to boost SEO and construct a beneficial inbound marketing plan:
1. Blog Content
Any successful SEO endeavors a company takes must begin with an active blog on their website. This part of a site not only provides customers deeper insight into the company, it also keeps consumers and prospective customers engaged in what you have to say.
When blogging, choosing specific keywords can be invaluable. There are several ways to identify the appropriate ones. SEMRush, an SEO company provides data on specific keywords and rankings. This allows users to see what keywords are relevant to their company or industry. SEMRush also shows a user what keywords their company is ranking for, what their position is in the search, and the traffic they have gained from specific keywords.
Keep in mind that Google’s algorithm changes constantly, giving your site and product a chance to increase or decrease rankings. By paying attention to the Google algorithm changes, you can create evergreen SEO content that is highly optimized and easily shareable. How often you are able to publish blog posts will depend on how many people you have available in your organization. However, aiming to provide google with a new and optimized content regularly is important to the success of your SEO campaign.
2. Site Optimization
A user’s experience on a website is equally as important as the product it sells. An effectively optimized site will load quickly no matter what device it is being accessed on. A main-page website — and all the affiliated pages — needs to load at an appropriate rate, which is typically 5 seconds. If your site is loading slower than this, you need to optimize it to avoid consumers bouncing before it loads.
Recently, over 50 percent of all searches happen on a mobile device. Google has gone as far as to stop ranking sites that are not responsive on alternative devices. If your site does not render correctly or efficiently on a phone, your company will not come up in a search result. Creating a page that is optimized for all devices is imperative.
The best sites define each of their categories clearly. For example, each page on the site should be easily accessible from anywhere on the website. Visitors should be able to find the information they are looking for on your site, so make sure it’s easy for users to navigate the site with a search bar. If a visitor is looking for something specific, most likely they will choose to search for it with a text bar. A beneficial search function should make up for misspellings or show related words and products.
3. Link Earning
Blogging and link building can typically go hand in hand. To effectively build links, a site must have linkable content. Over the years, link building has gotten a bad reputation, but the truth is link building is vital to the success of any SEO endeavor.
Earned links drive more traffic by proving the site more valuable to Google crawlers. For example, if an organization is mentioned in a Huffington Post article, chances are a consumer will trust the integrity of the company and click the link. The authoritative figure that links back to a company can help increase the SEO ranking of an organization.
Internal links are valuable to aim for as well. Linking to other pages or articles on your website helps Google’s crawlers reach your site and create a more thorough topography of your web pages. This practice also helps your audience find more of your company’s content. Internal linking keeps potential customers on your site longer, increasing the potential for conversion.
Analyze the success of your hard work with Google Analytics. Keeping an eye on your rank is a great way to judge the success of your hard work. While you may not be able to analyze the entirety of your ROI with SEO, you can follow the change in your site ranking and adjust your tactics accordingly.
4. Social Media Platforms
Social media is a great and effective inbound marketing strategy because both SEO and social media initiatives rely significantly on a company’s available content. Most marketing agencies agree that social media has an impact in overall SEO success.
Social media can be used as a platform to share already curated website content, or it can be utilized to have an entirely different type of content still relevant to the company. By expanding external links and backlinking to a specific company’s content, there are external links adding into the interweb for google to follow. For example, sharing a blog post on Facebook can help increase the chances of a consumer seeing your link and ultimately your company.
Social media helps grow your overall company following. If a specific user is searching for a topic on social media and one account has 200 followers and another as 20,000, the account with the most followers will rank higher in the SERPs. This is why you must be proactive on social media. Not only do you want to use it as a way to share content, potentially reeling in a new customer, you also want to engage with your followers.
Google and other search engines check social media as well, looking for content that is being shared, commented about, or clicked through. They take these social media signals and use them to rank quality content higher. Keeping your social media strategy aligned with your company’s content, website, and search strategy can help keep you ranking higher for longer. Applications like Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, etc. can help you schedule and manage your social media content.
5. Video Content
YouTube is the 2nd most-used search engine in the world, after Google, of course. So as a company, factoring video into an SEO campaign strategy is becoming essential. Videos themselves can be shared across the interweb- connecting potential customers to the message you are pushing.
While text is the primary way to increase search rankings, video is beginning to have more of an impact in a company’s marketing campaigns and SEO success rate as well. Video is infinitely more shareable than text content on social media because it can keep a whole host of different people engaged.
The total number of views, shares, etc, a video has can have an impact on the overall SEO ranking of a company. When a user watches a video on a webpage, it requires a user to stay on a site longer. The longer customers stay on a site, the better a company’s overall SEO ranking is.
Having a comprehensive and effective SEO strategy can help a company rank on the first page of a search result. With a little time and knowledge, a successful inbound marketing campaign can increase net profits and pull in lifetime consumers. Are there any effective SEO practices you have found to be helpful with your own inbound marketing tactics? Leave them below!
This is a guest post by Avril Philips.