SEO and inbound marketing

Search engines can become your best friends

Today, we all search the internet to find answers to many of the challenges and questions we face in our everyday lives. This applies to both our personal and professional lives. In fact, most people would find it hard to imagine a working day today without using the internet and search engines to help us learn more about specific areas. Even though the paid searches in Google and other search engines are pulled up to the top and fight intensely for your attention, it’s still the organic results that people trust the most and that provide the highest quality of visits. It is therefore important to stay on good terms with the search engines so that they reciprocate with a favorable ranking of your content.

There is a wide range of SEO efforts that contribute to good search engine rankings.

These include, but are not limited to:

Optimized content
Website accessibility (crawlability of the site)
Site speed
Technical SEO
Links
Mobile friendliness
Domain authority
Ease of use
Social media activity
Etc.

Do a quick test of your website. Here you can get a quick analysis of the website and where you can improve it.

Many small streams...

In search engine optimization, the principle of “many small streams make a big river” applies, and you can never be sure which “river” has the biggest impact right now. Today, an entire industry has been built around being the best at figuring out Google’s algorithms. With many updates in recent years, there are no easy paths to good rankings today.

It takes a lot of work to create lasting results and it needs to be continuously adjusted to maintain rankings. However, the hard work will be rewarded with quality traffic if you put in the effort. One of the areas that never goes out of style in SEO is on-page optimized texts, and this is where it becomes particularly interesting in relation to inbound marketing.

The technical approach of search engines

Ranking content on websites consists of three phases. The first phase is the discovery phase. This is where the search engines crawl your website and register the content. It helps if your content is updated regularly – otherwise it will take a long time between visits by the robots. It also helps, for example, if there are many links to your site – this makes the robots more aware that your content exists.

In the next phase, the content is indexed to understand what the pages are about. The search engine analyzes the content on the page, catalogs images and video files – all to learn more about the page. In the final stage, the content is assessed for relevance and authority so that the search engine can best display the results of what you are searching for. They try to find the answers that have the highest quality and provide the best user experience.

SEO texts are essential in inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is all about attracting visitors, converting them into leads, turning them into customers and ultimately ambassadors for the company. All by offering relevant content that helps them through the buying journey. Inbound Marketing includes a wide range of efforts such as:

Content strategy
Landing pages
Blogging
Marketing automation
Lead management
Email marketing
Social media marketing
Etc.

Under the Content strategy lies the development of website texts that target people (or in inbound marketing, buyer personas), but which are also optimized for search engines. SEO and Inbound Marketing are therefore so closely related that it makes sense to think about them in parallel when creating content for the website.

How to do SEO and inbound marketing

This means that you should use onpage SEO tactics every time you create new website pages, blog posts, landing pages, videos or other content. Keywords and phrases to focus on must be in place before the texts are created, page name and title contain the keyword, keywords and phrases in the basic text, filling in the meta title and meta description, links, image captions, etc. In other words, you need to be in control of SEO in order to take advantage of inbound marketing opportunities.

SEO efforts and SEO optimized text always start with a keyword analysis. In fact, keyword analysis is one of the most important elements. Otherwise, you’re not focusing on the right words and phrases – and risk wasting your efforts.

You can use different tools to perform a traditional keyword analysis to find the keywords that are beneficial to include in your text. For example, the Google Ads keyword tool or Ubersuggest, both of which are free tools. You can also use paid tools such as Ahrefs or Moz, which make keyword research easier and more accurate.

The keyword tools each have their own strengths, which is why they are good to combine when you need to find the words to implement in the text. Keywords are not static. The words that are effective to use change over time. For this reason, if you want to maintain your good friendship with the search engines, you need to perform keyword analysis on a regular basis. Updating and optimizing text content is rewarded by search engines and builds on the authority of your website.

Topic clusters and pillar pages have become important

Significant updates in Google (especially Hummingbird and Google RankBrain) have made the search engine and results increasingly better. The focus on people and increased usability (making sure people find what they are really looking for!) has changed the focus of SEO from traditional keywords to actual “topic clusters” of keywords. A topic cluster is based on a core topic that is built into a pillar page. Pillar pages cover the topic both broadly and deeply, and then there are links to a number of sub-topic pages to effectively get around the main topic – almost like a spider web.

By developing this kind of website structure, search engines have a better chance of understanding your content and thus ranking your text higher in search results. Below you can see an example of what this could look like in HubSpot.

A pillar page and the underlying content pages are basically never finished. You need to keep actively working on the pages to ensure that quality traffic continues to come to the website. This is not something you can do in an afternoon. It takes a somewhat longer effort to reach your organic traffic goals. But with a systematic effort and done right, you will get a much better quality of visitors, which will increase the conversion rates on your website.

The video by HubSpot above explains Topic Clusters a bit more in detail.

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