What is inbound marketing? It consists of creating content that is aligned with the customer’s interests and providing it to them as a resource. These efforts help build trust for your brand and can ultimately lead to delighted customers. This content might be a blog post, a video, a graphic, a new page, a micro site, etc. The content is usually focused on the earlier stages of the buying cycle in order to attract strangers to your brand.
How do people become aware of your business?
The public often relies on search results or social media to find local businesses and solutions to their problems. PEW Internet conducted a survey and found that 60 percent of adults say they receive their information about local businesses from search engines, specialty websites, and social networks. But with over a billion searches a month on Google, providing countless pieces of data for the mass public to consume, it may be hard to for your particular piece to be found. And many searchers on Google don’t make it past the first page of results, and even there the click-through rate (CTR) drops pretty drastically. Search Engine Result Position (SERP) 1 gets an estimated 53 percent CTR, and by SERP 5, the CTR has dropped to 4 percent according to a recent study by Kantar Media Compete.
What’s the point?
Achieving a good ranking for your site is essential to the success for your inbound marketing campaign. This is where an SEO can help. While employing a team of copywriters to add more and more pages to your site is great (and they are probably great at what they do), you can’t simply rely on them to write SEO-friendly content that will rank all the time. Why not? There may be a number of reasons, but in our experience, the copywriter tends to be focused on one thing, creating a piece of content, rather than keywords. It’s not that one person can’t do both—create copy and provide keyword information—but this second crucial step commonly requires a second set of eyes, or at least a round of SEO revisions by the copywriter. But don’t be afraid copywriters, the SEO is not there to destroy your piece of content-art, but rather to enhance it so that visitors will find you and your business will grow.
Here are a few ways an SEO can help:
Analyzing and researching
SEOs can provide copywriters with keyword data, trends, tracking and sharing tactics. These are all valuable ways to help strangers find your kick-ass piece of content.
Keeping your code clean
SEOs are fairly familiar with how search engines work and what meta elements they love. They can use this knowledge to work with developers and make sure your new post is crawlable, indexable, and fast-loading.
Be social
SEOs are often connected with the online community for link-building and sharing opportunities already; they can use this knowledge to share your content.
Get familiar with analytics
SEOs spend a lot of time reviewing which pages perform well and which don’t. With this information, they can tell you what your content needs are and what you should get rid of. They can then document metrics and provide you with positive or negative results. After all, all results are good because they provide an answer to a question and can help direct your next step.
Stay up to date with design trends
SEOs are familiar with which designs have worked well and which haven’t, so they can put their heads together with designers and user-experience experts to craft an experience a user won’t ever forget.
Keep in mind that building an outstanding inbound marketing team means calling on people who value each other and work well together. Designers, developers, SEOs, copywriters, and more will all play a key role in the success of your next inbound marketing campaign.