SEO in Inbound Marketing: How to Attract Quality Traffic to Your Website
November 2021
SEO, or search engine optimization, is a discipline that involves applying a series of techniques to web design and content in order to improve a website's position in search engines. It is very useful within an inbound marketing strategy.
The goal of SEO is to make a website appear at the top of the search results in order to attract more visitors and increase conversions
To avoid confusion, it is important to distinguish between SEO and SEM:
SEO positions a website among organic results. With this technique, you can not pay the search engine to improve your positioning.
In contrast, SEM positions the website through paid ads in search engines.
Although there are many search engines worldwide, in most of the world Google is number one. Therefore, when we talk about SEO, in general we are talking about positioning a website on Google.
Within an inbound strategy, SEO techniques help create a channel for qualified, long-term traffic. Once these users have reached your website, you can use different strategies to contact them and encourage them to become potential clients or customers.
There are two fundamental distinctions we have to make to differentiate the types of SEO. One is on-page SEO versus off-page SEO, and the other is white hat SEO versus black hat SEO.
White hat SEO is based on techniques that comply with the guidelines of search engines and that aim to position a website in an ethical manner. In general, white hat techniques result in higher quality websites and improve the user experience.
In contrast, black hat SEO seeks to bypass the rules and achieve rapid results in a short time. This can be done by including hidden content on a website or spamming forums and blogs with links. Although sometimes you can get a quick jump in positioning, in the long term it is very risky and it also does not add value to your brand or to the users, so it is not recommend.
SEO techniques can be very complex and they constantly get updated as Google modifies its algorithms. However, here are some of the basic tools that will improve your web positioning within an inbound marketing strategy.
Keywords correspond with what you want your website to position for. For example, if you sell ethically made clothing, you'll want to select keywords that correspond to the items (shirts, dresses, pants, etc.) but also highlight the fact that you are a social enterprise (ethically made, ethical clothing brand, etc.). Therefore, a good SEO strategy is based on studying which words or phrases are the most searched within your field and then seeing how you can include them in your website so that Google detects them.
Websites that often breakdown or are poorly optimized for mobile devices and have excessive loading times are SEO's biggest enemies. To be able to position well in search engine results pages, it is necessary to fine tune your website from a technical point of view.
The URLs or links to the different pages within a website are a key aspect when it comes to positioning. Ideally, they should be as simple as possible and contain the keywords that you seek to position for.
Search engines like pages which are useful to users. Having well organized, quality content that you update regularly will help you improve your SEO.
All articles and pages within a website must have a descriptive title containing the keywords. They should also be divided into different sections, each with its corresponding heading. Additionally, the descriptions of each page appear in the search engine results, so optimizing these is also a priority.
Link building refers to techniques designed to generate inbound links to your website from other quality sites. Always seek to get links from well optimized, trustworthy sites. Pay attention to details such as the text of the link and the type of relationship established with our page (follow or no follow).
We hope this information helps you to learn a little more about what SEO is and how you can improve your positioning on search engines and add to your inbound marketing strategy.
If you want to develop your SEO strategy or optimize your positioning results, please don't hesitate to contact us! We would be happy to be part of your team and help you attract more quality traffic to your website.
