Inbound Marketing Methodology: First, you need to "Get Found".
The phrase, "getting found" translates to the art, science and process of having your best possible prospects find your website or blog messages (attraction marketing). This process starts the sales cycle and is designed to feed the top of the sales funnel with qualified traffic using focused SEO as well as other components that are appropriate and are in line with the overall inbound marketing strategy.Another way to explain the process of "getting found", is that when your potential clients or prospects perform any search or research on Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Technorati, Digg, Stumbleupon or anywhere else (including the blogosphere), they find you (pull marketing). Research is one of many reasons individuals and businesses look for information, advice, entertainment, thought leadership, analysis, projections, resources, data or conversation. The trick (and priority) is that they find your content, your people, your brand, your products, your services and your company.
As a certified HubSpot partner, we recommend these Inbound Marketing fundamentals to improve your ability to "get found".
- First, create remarkable content. That's the core of inbound, attraction, search or pull marketing.
- Optimize the content for the major search engines (SEO) and other audiences.
- Promote this remarkable content in the blogosphere, social mediasphere, email marketing, and other appropriate channels.
A. Content Creation
The first and most important part of “Getting Found” is creating remarkable content. This means creating blog articles, web pages (updating existing pages & creating new landing pages), videos, photos, webinars, whitepapers, and other resources that are useful, interesting, thought provoking, controversial, and entertaining. This may be the most critical step in the development of a powerful inbound marketing & SEO plan and generating more traffic and qualified leads.
Create a content creation strategy and schedule, and then try to stick to it as closely as possible.
Every web page has the potential to rank well in search engines and draw traffic from other sources, like social media sites and the blogosphere. Of course, whether a page draws traffic (and links) depends on whether it's optimized and how remarkable (useful, interesting, etc.) it is. But in general, most pages do "well" and contribute to the cause, so it's both a quality and a quantity game.
Consider a 10 page website. This site has 10 unique pages that could rank on the major search engines as well as other places. 10 unique opportunities to draw traffic. Now compare that to a 100 page website. The 100-page site has 10x more opportunities to draw targeted traffic, and on average will be drawing 10x the amount of actual traffic. Thus, content really is king, and creating great content is the first challenge in any inbound marketing strategy.
B. Optimize Content
After content creation (which you need to continue through the entire inbound marketing process), you need to optimize that content for search engines (SEO) as well as for other channels, like YouTube & Twitter.The foundation of any successful inbound marketing program is compelling content creation. Optimizing that content is a key step to ensure you give your valuable content the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web.
Focus on two major components of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO):
- On-Page SEO is the process of placing selected keywords in the right places on the web pages so that Google and other search engines know what each page of our client’s website is about, and what keywords to rank the different pages for. On-Page SEO makes up about 25% of how well you rank in the major search engines.
- Off-Page SEO is the process of building links and authority, getting other sites on the Internet to link to you. The more links you have from other popular sites, the more important your site appears to be to Google and other search engines. Links are your online reputation from the perspective of the search engine. Off-page SEO makes up about 75% of how you rank in search engines.
