SEO and Inbound Marketing: What’s the Relationship?
SEO, or search engine optimization, and inbound marketing might seem like separate strategies for driving more traffic to your website and converting more visitors into leads. The truth is that you can try to separate them, but you'll only come to this conclusion: SEO is simply just one component of the larger strategy that is inbound marketing.
SEO is Essential to Inbound
When you are working on boosting your site's SEO, keyword research and optimization are some of the first steps you take. You have to think about what potential customers are searching for and what they need. This, of course, will give you valuable insights as to what content they want to see so you can begin building a catalog of topics to cover.
In other words, building an SEO strategy will help inbound marketers to do their jobs better by gathering detailed information about who your potential customers are, what problems they need to solve, and what language they use to describe their problems and search for solutions. Rather than being separate strategies, both work together to understand your customers and their behavior on the web.
Links Need a Destination
Link building is a big part of SEO. When your website has a solid links pointing to it, the search engines get the signal that you have valuable information to share and will start to bump your website up in the search results. Of course, links that go to unrelated or unexpected content are useless. Inbound marketing will provide relevant content and make sure it is useful and engaging so nobody is sorry that they clicked.
Great content is a fundamental aspect of inbound marketing, but this content will also provide a natural source of links that will boost your site's SEO. As other industry professionals come across your content, they will want to link to it without any other work from you. Links and content go hand in hand; you can't have one without the other.
Setting the Stage
SEO and inbound marketing both share the common goal of bringing more people to your website. SEO strategies will make sure your pages are well formatted and easy to read, and that your website is easy to navigate. It also gets your web pages in front of more people when they search for information on sites like Google. Inbound marketing pitches in by having exactly the right information handy when someone has a problem to solve. When you have a good SEO foundation built to bring in more traffic, a successful inbound campaign can then be built on top of it to successfully convert those visitors into leads and paying customers.
