An inbound marketing strategy is a marketing strategy that consists of attracting customers to oneself, rather than canvassing them. The first step of inbound marketing is to attract prospects to your website, to transform them into leads, and then later into customers. To carry out this inbound strategy, it will be necessary to focus on the development of a content strategy, in which SEO will have a prominent place. The SEO will aim to position your site among the first natural results in the search engine., on your high business value keywords. Thus, once well positioned, your site will become very visible to your potential buyers, who carry out searches related to their needs. Therefore, any company has a strong interest in integrating SEO into its inbound marketing strategy.
Technically optimize your website in an SEO-friendly way
Structure the site as a whole
Start first with the basics, the structuring of your site itself. Its internal structuring is indeed very important in your SEO strategy. First of all, the tree structure of the site must be carefully thought out for several reasons. A structured site will provide a better user experience, making it logical to navigate from one page to another. In addition, the clearer the structure, the further the Google bot will be able to go and index as much content as possible. Finally, a well-structured site will see its bounce rate drop. Indeed, we will leave a site that seems confusing much more quickly. It would therefore be a shame to lose a visitor before he has even been able to enjoy your content!
Download speed
Another key point that can impact your natural referencing: is download speed. This corresponds to the time that a page of your site will take to be displayed in its entirety on the screen of your visitor. Why is this an important point? A page that would take too long to open may annoy the visitor and therefore discourage him from consulting your site. This can therefore have a very negative impact on your popularity. How does this point fit into an SEO strategy? Google takes into account the opening speed of each site and will classify better those whose speed is very short and less well those whose it exceeds the average. The issue is therefore major. To remedy this problem, some software allows you to measure this loading speed and help you to optimize this duration. We think for example of PageSpeedInsight, offered by Google itself, Dareboost, WebPageTest, or Pingdom.
Your site must be responsive
Finally, to have a technically optimal website for SEO, you must think responsive. This means that your site must display correctly whether it is viewed on a computer, smartphone, tablet, etc.
The importance of keywords in an SEO strategy
First step: define your keywords
The first step in developing a successful SEO strategy is to define your strategic keywords, those that generate traffic and business value. An essential rule to apply to any type of content is to have the main target keyword per page that corresponds to a specific SEO objective. Thus, each page will deal with a well-defined theme which will be to the advantage of your site. Before even starting to write your content, you must ask yourself if you want to write content whose keyword will generate traffic or if it will generate significant business value. Then, adopting a monothematic strategy for each of your pages will allow you to develop your subject in-depth, and therefore to use your keyword a certain number of times. This will then send a positive message to Google robots who will judge your quality content and rank it among the first search results. This will also indirectly allow you to develop a long-tail strategy, very interesting for SEO and your inbound strategy.
Opt for a so-called long-tail SEO strategy
The long-tail strategy consists of positioning yourself on terms that are little typed in Google, but which represent a significant volume of conversion. The interest of a mono-thematic page, therefore, is that you use several peripheral terms to your main keyword so as not to repeat yourself too much to be readable by the reader. Each of these peripheral terms taken independently represents only a small volume of visits. On the other hand, taken all together, they can even exceed your potentially very competitive main keyword and therefore be used by many other sites.
Structure your pages from an SEO point of view
The choice of URLs
Your page URL is very important for your SEO ranking. This point is however often neglected, wrongly. It is first of all necessary to insert in the URL the main keyword on which you wish to position yourself. Another important point, work on your URLs to position your pages near the root.
Title Tag and Hn Tag
Once your site has been structured optimally from an SEO point of view, you can focus on improving each page individually. We do not write content (including blogs) without structuring or prioritization. Each page must therefore have a general title, then subtitles and paragraphs. This structuring will then send the information to the Google algorithm that your content is rich, of quality, structured, and therefore can be well referenced. In addition, positioning your main keywords in your titles increases your chances of being well-placed. The main keyword must notably be found in your title tag, your H1, and at least one of your H2s.
Image tags
Working on your Alt tags on your images is also very interesting to improve your SEO and therefore your SEO strategy. An Alt tag is an optional HTML coding field attached to your image, which will display specific text if your image is not displayed on the screen. The interest in optimizing the Alt tags of your images is multiple. First of all, this will allow you to define the main keywords that the image deals with. This information will be used by Google robots who can then further specify the theme of your content. These tags will also optimize your SEO because you will be referenced in Google images. Indeed, the more content is varied and referenced on the appropriate pages (images, videos, text, news, etc.) and the better your SEO ranking will be.
The meta description
Finally, filling in a meta description, which will appear below the link in the search results, is the last element to optimize. Even if the meta description does not play directly in the criteria of the Google algorithm, it strongly influences the click rate, by making you want to click, or not, on the link of your page. An effective meta description should be short (about 160 characters) and describe your content very briefly.
Optimize your content for SEO
The importance of quality content
Finally, the last SEO element to optimize for an optimal inbound strategy is your content of course! If you are tackling a very competitive keyword, it is advisable, to optimize your chances of being well-positioned in search engines, to produce fairly long content (at least 1000 words). However, you shouldn’t write long content just because it’s good for your SEO strategy. Content must above all be interesting and target an objective, an audience, and respond to a given problem.
To build your content, you must first decide on the main keyword, which will define the theme of your article. It must indeed be kept in mind that an article corresponds to an objective and therefore to the main keyword. From there, you can decline a whole lexical field and the list of questions related to this keyword. To help you with this step, you can use tools like Ahref.
Reader-oriented SEO content
Then, each piece of content must be unique, this point is fundamental. Indeed, Google very severely punishes a site that has two pages (or more) with similar content. He sees in this practice an attempt at fraud, by creating a very large number of pages to be well-referenced, without creating quality content on each of them. If there is therefore one thing not to do to avoid finding yourself at the bottom of the list, it is this one.
Another point, we talked to you a lot about the rules imposed by the Google algorithms which are the only ones capable of defining the order of appearance of the sites during an internet search. However, remember that you are creating content for real people, not robots. Your content must therefore first and foremost be fluid to read, understandable, pleasant to read, and grammatically correct. Finally, the more varied your content (text, photos, videos, infographics, etc.) the better you will rank.
The authority of your website with net-linking
Another interesting SEO element to put in place that will have a direct impact on your inbound strategy: is net-linking. The principle of net-linking is that other sites, outside yours, include a link that refers to your site within their content. What is the point? At first, it can bring you traffic, but above all (and all the interest is there), the Google algorithm will consider your site reliable because recommended by a peer. The type of site that refers to you is important: the more a site has significant traffic and quality content, the more it will be beneficial for you.
You are now aware of the main best practices for adopting an SEO-oriented inbound marketing strategy, whether in the structuring of your site, your pages, your content, or the use of keywords. The more SEO-oriented pages you create, the more your traffic will increase, and the more the power of your site will do the same. Finally, thanks to SEO you will gain notoriety and visibility, the holy grail of any brand.
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