It’s time for business owners set their sight higher when building their brand or selling their products/services online: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should no longer be your primary focus; instead, you should aim higher: You should do Inbound Marketing. This blog post will show you why Inbound Marketing should be your focus – especially on the second half of 2013.
With all the controversies regarding Google algorithm updates, it’s easy to find small business owners’ and webmasters’ rants all over the web, frustrated with the entire situation surrounding their lackluster search engine rankings. It’s quite understandable, as Google seems not to really care about the tumbling down businesses. But pointing our fingers on Google and rest the blame on the company is unfair, honestly; let’s keep our cool and see things from Google’s side.
Google Search is one of Google’s products. It’s Google’s best interest to make the most out of their products. As Google is not a non-profit organization, “make the most” means churning more profit while keeping costs low.
As Google Search’s products is search results, again, it’s Google’s best interest to continuously refine the algorithm in such a way that it will serve users’ interest the best. So, whether you like it or not, Google will do whatever it takes to up the quality of the product. Although Google does so at the expense businesses who are trying to rank higher using tactics and strategies acceptable according to Google Terms of Services, it’s – honestly – none of Google’s business. If the changes bring more positive effects for Google, its partners and users, then mission accomplished. Our job is to respond to the changes and try to make the most out of them.
Okay, enough about Google. Why the above is relevant to a blog post which supposedly about Inbound Marketing?
Right – you see, you have some options when you are trying to work things out with a hope to gain Google algorithm’s favor. You could try to overhaul your link profile; you could try to add more quality content on your website; but quite surprisingly, too many website owners focus on the wrong things – for quite so long: They focus too much on search engine traffic.
I agree to the notion that search engine traffic brings in high-quality traffic which help in converting “passer-by” into leads. However, we often dismiss another type of search engine traffic: Referral traffic.
Referral traffic comes from other sites – social media sites, your competitors’ sites, etc. Your status updates, your shares, your guest posts, your free offers, your images, your videos, your blog comments, and so on – everything makes up a big chunk of traffic called referral traffic.
Well, let’s just say that Inbound marketing focuses on how to get such referral traffic, which may include the use of SEO tactics and techniques in achieving your goal. So, yes, to me, SEO is a subset of Inbound Marketing. This is why I mentioned early in this post that we should focus on things beyond SEO and set our eyes on Inbound Marketing.
Some Inbound Marketing stats worth knowing
These slides from Slideshare can help you a great deal in understanding the (huge) impact of Inbound Marketing:
How to focus on Inbound Marketing
It’s pretty straightforward really: You should adopt Inbound Marketing tactics and techniques. There are some resources to help you grasps on the basics of Inbound Marketing, as well as accessing researches and white papers which can give you valuable insight on basically everything which can help your business website got found online.
As an online publication and marketing company, we also want to offer you solutions which can help your website and brand getting found easier by your target audiences and customers.
Our online community development services aim to help you boost your brand from the inside by engaging your readers and encouraging them to converse and become a part of your brand’s community – and, hopefully, becoming your brand ambassadors and evangelists.
Our content creation services also heavily focus on your audiences, focusing on natural link baiting effort, instead of pleasing the search engines (because, honestly, they are not easy to please…)
Last but not least, we also own numerous websites which you can use as branding and traffic generation channels – check ’em out and see whether they can help you or not (this is Inbound Marketing in action!)
Contact us to find out how we can help you.
