What is SEO? How does it differ from inbound marketing? I get this request from prospects on occasion.
“Ok, great! What does that mean to you?”
“Um, better, SEO?”
In essence, SEO helps more people find your site and get exposed to your solution.
SEO is just a tactic. A powerful tactic, but a tactic nonetheless. So if we want to use this tactic we approach it the same way we approach every other one.
We start with our goals. If we want more visitors to our site and more leads SEO can help. Better SEO helps prospects find you if they are searching for a solution similar to yours.
However, SEO is less efficient without the rest of the inbound strategy.
Remember, inbound marketing is an overall strategy, but SEO is only a tactic. Granted if you do it right it is a very useful tactic, but bringing more people to your website is not the end all be all.
Look at it this way. Let’s say you want to increase your leads. You currently get a 100 visitors a month, and your conversion rate (how many people give you their contact information) is 1%.
So for every 100 visitors, you get one contact. Right now let’s not look at how valuable your leads are or how qualified they are, let’s just look at the raw numbers.
Now if we increase visitors to 200, we can double our conversions. That is what we can accomplish with SEO. We get more visitors and get more conversions.
However, wouldn’t it be easier to just get one more conversion out of your 100 visitors? If we double our conversion rate to 2%, we can have the same amount of visitors and get more leads.
If we use lead nurturing and other inbound marketing tactics, we should be able to increase your conversions even more.
The ideal would be to use SEO in concert with the rest of your inbound marketing strategy.
Want to learn more about SEO and Inbound marketing? Download our guide to inbound marketing.