Look at companies like Dropbox, MailChimp…. they grew without having a sales team, or colossal ad campaigns.
Email Marketing, Social Media, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Video/Audio, and content marketing – Inbound Marketing drove sales:
The Basic
Marketing today allows you the opportunity to deliver personal and relevant information to people who need them or don’t know they need them!
Steve Jobs said, “our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. He added, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
There is so much truth to Steve Jobs’s statement. How will we know if we need something until we see or experience using it?
Letting people know about “it” your product or services becomes much more affordable and straightforward. And you can create awareness in more ways than was ever possible.
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- Over 293 billion emails sent each day. Is this what makes Email marketing valuable?
- 2 billion people are on social media for more than 100 minutes a day. That presents an opportunity no business experienced 20 years ago.
- 5 billion people search on Google and Microsoft every day. They are available to grab.
Out of all the channels, Search engine optimization, known as SEO, is a crucial Inbound marketing channel.
SEO traffic comes with a significant gift:
Users are pre-qualified;
A user search is a sign of a need. Email marketing, social media, and traditional media will create awareness, and that familiarity will speed the closing.
Your, my, his, her audience are on search engines. But you must convince the search engine algorithm to rank and push you to the top of the organic search.
How you convince the search engine?
You demonstrate superiority in the subject and people’s interest in what you are providing.
To support your case in front of the search engine algorithm, you include Social Media, Email Marketing, and video marketing.
In this article, I’ll show you
- How to create an SEO strategy that works with the algorithm.
- How to create additional SEO hub
- How to use Email Marketing
- How to use social media and merge it all.
To succeed in SEO we need to define and plan the role of SEO in your overall business strategy. Then, we’ll look at content that will support the plan.
Customer’s Journey- What is the Role of SEO
The first step in SEO strategy is understanding the purpose of your website and the role of SEO.
The website, is it a lead generation or a sales driver? If you are a service business, most likely, the website job is to collect leads or promote a call to the office. If you sell products, rent equipment, or book restaurant tables, then the booking is the ultimate goal.
For example, Gobiggi is a B2B company that reinforces the company’s SEO by providing an umbrella for prospect and customer communication. That means your Paperless Business Card, Review Page, Online Appointment schedules are on one root location, creating additional substantial online high traffic assets.
Part of Gobiggi’s website offers a demo. The other side sales products. For one product, the SEO design to sale and the other side to deliver a lead.
On the other hand, we have a brand like Mercedes Benz. Benz website is a user destination site. Therefore, users arriving at the site, not as a result of a search.
The lead us to conclusion number 1.
Building a local name delivers traffic that does not depend on SEO.
How you create a local brand
- Customer’s Reviews
- Social media
- Email Marketing
- ‘How To’ Video marketing
At any rate, once you determine the role of SEO in your company, define its role in the sales process and the buyer’s journey.
There are three stages in a buyer journey
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- Awareness – realizing a need or a problem
- Consideration – looking at various solutions
- Purchase – deciding to buy
When the website and SEO are assisting sales, you show visitors how your solution will deliver on the need. Try to do it fast and use people’s love to buy. Small note: Curiosity and instinct push prospects and buyers to clicks on interactive business card links. That click plays a significant part in convincing the search engine algorithm.
Most of your content developed need to be structured, explaining how the product works, customer case studies, whitepapers, and e-books.
When driving sales, the website and SEO needs to drive user acquisition. In this case, we develop awareness content, show the audience’s how your product will make life easy, profitable, pleasurable, and then make it as easy as possible to buy it.
You must know the biggest rule in sales:
Emotions sell. A smile will speed the transaction. No Details.
How your service or product will help me?
The Authority
1. SEO addresses search results,
2. Results are a response to the user search query.
Before creating content, you must identify the keywords or search terms that will deliver the right prospects.
Let’s take Gobiggi’s as an example. www.gobiggi.com ranks for brand keywords, like “Gobiggi,” “Gobiggi login,” and “Gobiggi pricing.” Google gives brands who index their site well a bonus to rank for their names.
How do we find the “best for me” search query/keywords?
- There is google “keywords search.”
- We place ads for 14 days on Google and Microsoft. We then collect all the search and keywords terms that drove traffic to our site.
- We develop content that will replay to user search terms.
There are High demand keywords like
“Digital Business Card”, “Paperless Business-Card” and “Business Card that delivers” “online Meeting scheduler software,” that are competitive and harder to rank for. Yet, those are the words that drive awareness.
That’s where the money!
Ranking high for such terms drives new businesses and creates brand awareness.
When you do it based on location, it is doable and very profitable.
Conclusion number two:
Fight for the top keywords and start with a specific location.
The middle of the keywords funnel, keywords that are not on the top searches is a smart start. This strategy focuses on topics instead of keywords. A theme contains a set of relevant keywords.
We wanted to rank “affordable dental Near Me Website for Affordable Dental Miami, and we did it using content that includes relevant sentences within sentences that describe a particular affordable dental Miami service. We also used Sub-topics like “What makes Affordable Dental in Miami your best place for dental implants” or “how Affordable Dental in Miami customizes your dental treatment for less” All relevant topics to the local users. To each topic, we added a video that pushed traffic from social media.
Video: You can feed an article URL to a video making software like “lumen5” and get a video done fast.
The topic-centered approach establishes yourself as a thought leader to users and search engines.
Recently Google adds E-A-T:
“Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.”
This is Google’s new Quality Rater Guidelines. With the help of machine learning, Google determines how “deep” a topic is covered.
“Topic Clusters” will facilitate E-A-T. The concept asks to create one big long content page for a short ‘head keyword’ of a “pillar” topic and then other articles called “clusters” that zoom in on the details and link all the Clusters and pillar article and create a giant multi-page story.
Let’s run through an example. Say you’re a SaaS company that sales ‘Book-It‘- an online booking and meeting scheduler software, and you want to rank for the keyword “online meeting software.” You start by creating one long article for online meeting software. Then, we develop materials “clusters” that zoom in on specifics of the topics.
The cluster content will address
- The purpose of the online meeting scheduler
- How and why to connect there ‘Book-It to the Paperless Business Card?
- How to provide Social Media User way to book a restaurant table from social media
- How to book a support call
- How to rent equipment using book-it?
- How to avoid double-booking
We don’t need to cover every keyword – We need to create a content hub, just like Gobiggi did with the prospect and client communication hub. This communication hub is a one-stop vendor-user communication, and the content hub is a cluster of content that addresses each one of the user’s needs and connects to the pillar article and call to action page.
One of the cluster pages needs to be a landing page.
Allow the visitors to sign up for a service or but the product.
One topic cluster at a time is a good strategy. Experts’ guest post will help, a quote, or co-authorship: The more relevant the topic cluster is, the more you benefit over the long-term.
One great example of this comes from affordable dental near me. The pillar article is, “We made dental affordable” The topic has excellent value to America’s Dental patient situation. Patient and user visit the main page or one of the cluster relevant articles on
Affordable Implants Near Me — or Affordable Dentures near me.
User Intent Search
In the last few years, Google points its algorithm towards user search intent as a prerequisite in the organic user search. If you search for “American” Google will bring up American express or Bank of America to American airline, not the Country. Google Artificial Intelligent (AI) help the search algorithm understands what people want.
Also, by default, Google ranks leading brand high to accommodate the user’s requests fast.
Let’s look at the search results for “Paperless Business Card.“
The first thing that jumps out on Google’s first page is a list of articles. That indicates that users searching for this keyword want to justify their decision to move from paper business cards to paperless interactive business cards. They realized that Paperless Busines Card fits today’s digital dependency. Most people agree that paper business card ends in the trash, (research show about 88% end in the garbage) but we are all attached to the long tradition of sharing a paper business card. Leaving it is a behavior change, and that takes a hard and smart decision.
When we look at google second pages, we find providers of Paperless Business Card. That is an indicator that users are looking for a solution seriously. And we are the best to know that the movement it’s on the way.
So, when you plan your content, find the user intent first. It also indicates the content format most useful for the query:
- Pillar article
- Comparison (table)
- List
- Video
- Infographic
- Widget
We’ve established that for the keyword “Paperless Business Card,“
Rank your website and, therefore, your services or products for any keyword, make the information as straightforward as possible. Add a comparison table or widget, allowing users to filter their preferences. Match your content to user intent.
Support all your efforts with Social Media content sharing, Email, and video marketing.
How to Measure SEO Success?
Measure your SEO efforts with a set of metrics. Traffic coming through SEO is excellent, but we need targeted quality traffic. The quality of your content will be measured by how people interact with it. Measure the growth impact.
Let me give you a couple of suggestions.
KPIs – key performance indicators.
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- Organic traffic
- Clicks on organic search results
- How many keyword rankings in the top 10
Business impact:
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- MQL- Marketing Qualified Leads from SEO
- Sales from SEO
Engagement:
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- Social likes and shares
- The Times pend on site
- Number of Pages per visit
Look for one metric for each class weekly. Let your team have access to the information.
Bounce Rate doesn’t say whether your content is helpful to a user or not. Many visitors are looking for a piece of information and leave.
Summarizing – Good SEO Strategy
A sophisticated SEO strategy fulfills three primary purposes:
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- It reinforces the brand and creates the right perception around the business.
- It produces qualified leads.
- It provides prospects answers to questions before they asked and shortens the sales cycles by
Place your strategy to play a role in the sales process. It will define the right amount of investment. Make your content your most potent weapon. Find topic clusters that spin around user intent and your main topic.
Good Luck!