Marketing Automation Excuse: We Need an SEO Strategy First

You’ve probably studied numerous search engine optimization tactics which assist your business in saving money normally spent on marketing efforts.  The general consensus states you’ve probably read how inbound marketing tactics will grow your business by producing enticing content which organically ranks.  Combining both SEO tactics and inbound marketing efforts into one sweet package, however, is an area we’ll implore your astute business sense in today, providing specific steps on how progressive SEO tactics which define inbound marketing can redefine your business presence online.  Content is great, keywords are necessary and meta data definitely needs accuracy.  We’ll stretch well beyond those ideologies today, however, and bring your link efforts to light by introducing better content strategies.

Solving The Keyword Puzzle

It may seem trivial to many businesses; however, when businesses begin their online explorations they need to clearly define keywords before opening their doors, yet you’d be surprised how inaccurately this is done.  Many people use the Google Keyword Research Tool to find their highly relevant and widely searched keywords, hoping to vault immediately ahead of competition.  Sure, it works to a point.  What would be even better is employing keyword co-occurrence, otherwise called semantic connectivity.  Since recent updates to algorithmic patterns mean content is under fire, choosing words which naturally have similar meaning or belong with each other will make your keyword selection seem less forceful.  For example, let’s say you operate a music website; here is the old way and new way.

• Older way to choose keywords: music, musical, a music, music a, music store
• Newer way to choose keywords: audio, melodies, tunes, sounds, beats, songs

As you can see, we’re using synonyms of these keywords as our main website meta data.  We’ll then write content which blends these terms into something which naturally looks like it belongs.  Why is this relevant to inbound marketing? The more natural your content is written without forcing keywords, the greater relevance Google will find in your content which organically raises your position in search results.

Buddy Up With Blogs

Next phase of inbound SEO is how Google will adjudicate relationships you’ve formed with similar niche sites.  To increase your site’s worth, the evolution of guest blogging has now become hotter than ever, and for perfect reasons.  Instead of comment spamming to get relevant links, we’ll need to locate blogs related to your business and write for them with only one relevant deep site link in either your author bio or within content (depending on site rules).  How do we find guest blogs?  Here are some specific ways we can do this:

Once you’ve found relevant blogs where your content can reside, and upon approval of your post, you can write another post on your site with the title of your recently approved guest post as a themed link. This gives you both juice and makes people want to follow your other stories.

Why is this relevant to inbound marketing? Simply put, Google wants your content to contain inbound and outbound links to content which is similar to your own instead of boring contextual links parked in your link section.  The more you guest post and share your ideas with others, the more others will be drawn back to your content.

Making Internal Connections

Equally important to inbound marketing is tactically linking content together within your website to tell Google that everything you’re writing about or selling is relevant to each other, and keywords which you’ve chosen to target.  This is great for not only getting better page ranks, but also perfect for targeting search traffic to generate customer traffic specifically targeted to your businesses.  Making sure to link each keyword to specific keywords which belong together between content will greatly improve your inbound marketing efforts.

Ideas To Increase Content Readability

Since the greatest inbound marketing tactic which professional SEO companies will not tell you is organic rankings are golden, your efforts all begin with providing readable content your readers can relate to.  These readers will naturally find you if your content doesn’t appear to be repetitious, and avoiding repetition means coming up with well-discovered content from your own expertise and not copied from other sources.  Let’s look at several ways that naturally relevant content can create organic SEO opportunities which directly feed into the definition of inbound marketing.

The Main Inbound Marketing SEO Tactic Is Content

If you list every possible search engine optimization method known to man, many relate to outbound marketing.  Link building, social sharing, PPC and other major forms of generating mass traffic are all relevant to shouting at customers instead of letting them find you.  Content creation, both through guest blogging and self-published works, is the best and only effective mannerism which inbound marketing truly comes to form.  Content may not be ‘king’ in the books of many SEO professionals, yet Google is proving through recent changes that more brownie points are given to websites which have useful, well-researched and deeply linked content as opposed to those who have millions of irrelevant links or multitudes of social media followings.