What’s the real value of SEO in inbound marketing? This was one of the questions that brought Andy and me together in our love for search engine optimization. I met Andy Crestodina, co-founder of Orbit Media, a Chicago web design company, the first time on Twitter. He wrote this great post about the visual elements on your website that bring your visitors away and not deeper into your site. And then I caught one of his live streaming shows “Content Matters” on Blab . He recognized me from my retweets and asked me to join the live show.
You know that you always should be prepared to be “live” but … I wasn’t. After few minutes I was “Blab ready” and in the show. He welcomed me with “Oh, you had to get ready first. Smile.” Absolutely! Do you work from home? Then you know, right. Not only need you to get dressed properly. While we were talking, Andy asked: “Do you want to do a Blab together? Let me know!” And that’s how the Blab show video you can check out below came to life.
Andy and I got together to do the live show on Blab below. We talk about the value of SEO in inbound marketing, and what this means for your go-to expert website. Go ahead and watch our video now! I know you’ll love it. It’s informative, funny, entertaining, and also eye opening! If you aren’t familiar with inbound marketing, here the short form of it.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
When online marketers speak about inbound marketing, they refer to activities that bring visitors to your website. Without involving marketers who have to physically go out offline or online to get their ideal clients attention.
As a result of using inbound marketing strategies
- you gain the attention of your ideal client,
- help your website to be found online easily, and
- by providing high valuable, engaging and interesting content
you bring customers right over to your website.
Search And Conversions Start With One Thing: The Human Side Of SEO In Inbound Marketing
SEO is only one element in the wide range of the inbound marketing palette. Other elements can be:
- Blog
- Content Marketing
- Social Media
- Landing Pages
- Forms
- Call-To-Action
- Customer Relationship Management
Watch the video about SEO in inbound marketing above to learn about all the gold nuggets shared during the Blab show. If you want to catch the highlights first, here they are!
Highlights from Andy’s and Dagmar’s Blab talk about SEO in Inbound Marketing
- If you want to attract an audience by publishing content, learn how to be a good teacher and to share useful information and content that ranks.
- Find the right people to listen to, follow and collaborate with them
- Love the people you serve to and be genuine in sharing information.
- Execute tasks and test them, then tweak. Nothing is perfect from the beginning.
Hustlers And Hackers
The classic start-up company has two people: The person who solves the problem which is like the hacker. And the person who connects to the market which is like the hustler.
[bctt tweet=”The two most important skills for any marketer: Empathy and Resourcefulness. @crestodina”]
The greatest skill for the hustler is empathy. The greatest skill for the service person or product person is resourcefulness. If you can learn those two things and if you are a lifetime learner, these are your two most important mindsets.
[bctt tweet=”Traffic isn’t Leads. @crestodina”]
If you work backwards you need two things: You need traffic and you need a conversion rate. Conversion rate is about great webdesign, psychology, and calls-to-action. Traffic is about ranking.
Why do you rank?
- authority (who is ranking to you and how much credibility does your website have)
- content relevance (choosing and using keywords)
What is Relevance about?
- Relevance is about relationships.
- Relationships is about networking.
- Giving before you get.
- Caring for the people in your networking.
- Networking with content creators.
SEO Sits Right In The Middle Of Inbound Marketing And Has No Meaning Unless …
People believe SEO is keywords. And that every keyword will rank. But how good is a keyword with five people a month searching for it or no profitability at all if you want to use it to attract your ideal client, the one who wants to work with you?
[bctt tweet=”Social media, SEO & conversion optimization turns a visitor into a lead.@crestodina”]
SEO has no meaning unless you attract the right traffic, the one you can convert to give you their name and email address, to work with you, to buy your products and services.
People look for something online. They have an intent when they go online. That’s exactly what the search engines want to fulfill, example: “smart content”.
[bctt tweet=”SEO Is the seed every activity and user intent start with online.”]
SEO sessions are different steps on an in-depth search. Perhaps somebody starts with searching for a summer vacation in Spain over to hot island vacations and lands on a page about Puerto Rico vacation cottages.
No matter what search term they typed into the search bar, their seed or original intent could just simply be looking for a “summer vacation somewhere”.
There is a difference between “question mark” keywords and “dollar sign” keywords.
- question mark keywords: you’re intent: doing research, like vacation packaging list, top rated beach sandals. Great for blog posts.
- dollar sign keywords: you’re intent: ready to take action, like Puerto Rico beach vacations. Great for sales pages.
[bctt tweet=”75% of website traffic are researchers, 25% are shoppers or buyers.”]
The search phrase indicates if somebody is ready to spend money or just researching and looking around.
[bctt tweet=”Every outcome for a search optimized page is to win a lead, customer, or subscriber.@crestodina”]
How Can You Rank Number One In A Highly Competitive Market Online?
If you want to rank for the dollar sign phrases and attract valuable buyers, you need to
- create a giant amount of content,
- build a library of awesome content people all over in the world want to link to as a resource, and
- surround yourself with a supportive network willing to share your content.
[bctt tweet=”You cannot win ranking for a million dollar phrase without building a mini Wikipedia.@crestodina”]
What Happens When You Have A Lot Of Online Visitors, Researching for Information Only, Come To Your Website?
The more online visitors you have who find your information valuable enough to share and linked to, the more your domain authority increases and helps you to rank for the money phrase.
[bctt tweet=”Traffic interested in content increases domain authority which equals better leads.@crestodina”]
You cannot get the leads without doing the work and building the resource first!
[bctt tweet=”Your content is the gift you share with the world. Create is wisely. “]
There are hundreds of tiny actions you take that help you indirectly to rank for a big money phrase and to build authority online.
What Is A Lead And Where Are Limitations For Lead Generation?
Not every performed submission is a lead. There are good leads and bad leads.
You can create leads by going to networking events and take on speaking engagements. But then, lead generation is limited to the time you invest in going out and looking for leads. Andy’s shared that his company could get over the $1 mio sales step by building his giant resource website. Through this he could create quality leads more passively through content marketing which helped to increase his sales to $5 mio. He explains that now they are hitting the ceiling with local search.
Compared to local search, topic related search and global niche search terms provide unlimited growth. Because the search engines can find in the word patterns of keyword focused topic and niche related content an unlimited amount of search queries.
Would You Use Keywords In Email Marketing Subject Lines?
The goal of email marketing is to get the visitors to open the email, then to click the link in the email.
[bctt tweet=”Subject lines in email send-outs: 100% psychology, 0% keyword focus.@crestodina”]
Unless the keyword is an important part of psychology. Research can lead you to use jargon or the most common phrase. It can lead you to the most popular word for the topic. Maybe in the future, we’ll rank algorithm for our inboxes. Right now, avoid spam words and maximize the human psychology impact.
Blog Post Headline Formula:
Keyword plus colon plus number …. Web Content Checklist: 21 Ways to Publish Better Content.
Social Media and SEO Hashtags
There is no hashtags on data because we don’t see the click through rate. But using hashtags can be good or bad.
[bctt tweet=”Increase in hashtag keywords visibility outways decrease in hashtag click-thru-rate.@crestodina”]
- Use specific hashtags to connect with new audiences.
- Use hashtags when you do in-person events.
- Use keyword related hashtags when you want to attract researchers or blogs that analyze hashtags.
- If you want more visibility in your tweets, add Twitter handles to it.
- To find super targeted people on Twitter, use the hashtag for your target audience (people who love zombies for example) and the hashtag for the topic you wrote about (like content marketing).
- Find the overlap between the topic and the theme or between two topics like “social media” and “SEO” and use these hashtags in your tweet.
While I am writing these gold nuggets down for you and listening to the Blab recording again to capture everything, I am still very inspired by Andy’s wisdom and kindness. Looking forward to do another Blab show with him in the future!
I am curious to hear about your thoughts and experiences with the value of SEO in inbound marketing. Looking forward to reading them below and learning from you!