Best Inbound Marketing Strategies for SEO in 2018

A lot is changing in the world of online marketing, and rather quickly. Videos are driving all the attention instead of images, and blogs now need to be at least 2000 words in length in order to make any sense to search engines. After all, SEO for business marketing is extremely crucial, since 93% of all Internet sessions begin with a search. Hence you will need best inbound marketing strategies to make your campaigns successful.

All such changes and other challenges are making the lives of marketers’ increasingly difficult year on year. But with the right strategy, there is no need to worry. Here are the best inbound marketing strategies that you can deploy in your Online Marketing efforts for 2018:

1. Deploy the Power of Videos

It is not just images and text anymore. Statistics suggest that marketers who deploy videos in their campaigns grow revenues 49% faster than non-video users. But it is not enough to just produce videos and post them. They have to be marketed as well. This requires you to add a transcription with them (both on Facebook and YouTube) that is keyword rich to make the videos more SEO friendly. Moreover, they should be embedded in both old and new blog posts and articles to increase the on-page time of the readers. Let us close the case with some mind-boggling numbers:

2. Make Use of Influencers

Influencers are one of the hottest marketing trends on the Internet today. Basically, they are people who have branded themselves as an expert in a niche and have build a loyal following around them as a result. Influencers can directly help your campaigns in three ways:

• Provide a back link to your website’s landing page from their website/blog which will increase your off-page SEO authority.
• Give a huge shout out to your business to their followers on social media.
• Share content created by your in-house team on their social media profiles.

Hence, if campaigns are shrewdly deployed, they can be instrumental in bringing your website both organic and inorganic traffic. Here is what makes Influencers crucial for your campaigns:

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Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are the leading social media platforms today where you can easily find top influencers that are relevant to your business. So reach out to them right away and kick start your influencer campaigns.

3. Optimize Your Pages for Mobile

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If you are thinking that this does not come under the purview of web optimization or the best inbound marketing strategies, think again. Smart phones have penetrated everyday lives like nothing seen before. About half of traffic on the Internet today originates from one form of Smartphone to another. Owing to such soaring numbers, Google now takes into account whether the webpage is optimized for mobile or not, before it ranks them. There has been a paradigm shift from desktop first to mobile first. Therefore, Mobile optimized pages tend to rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Here are some basic things to take care of:

• Make sure that your pages are dynamic and can fit any screen size
• Post mobile-friendly content on all web pages
• Include a map to the location of your office so that customers can navigate via their Smart phones
• Mention phone numbers clearly and in large fonts so that they can be clicked upon and automatically dialed

4. Analyze Data from Campaigns

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No marketing campaign is ever successful if you do not keep a track of what’s working and what’s not. Marketing is often nothing more than calculated predictions and hit and trial. Therefore, it makes sense to keep a track of the ROI of your campaign.

A study from Hubspot reveals that 40% of the marketers consider calculating the ROI of their marketing campaigns as their biggest challenge. With the help of relevant data analysis, you can easily overcome this common hurdle. Doing so would also help you to pinpoint the best inbound marketing strategies and search engine optimization tips that are relevant to your company.

5. Blogging as Best Inbound Marketing Strategies

Unlike what you hear from the so-called “SEO Experts” every other year, blogging is not dead. It has merely adapted itself into a new form altogether. There was a time when a 500-word post could rank on the first page of Google. Now you might not even find in on the tenth. Take a look at the graph below:

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This proves that the current trend has increased the minimum word count to about 1750, if you want to rank on the first page, with blogs of word count around 2000 words ranking at the top.

6. Implement AMPs

You might have noticed a change in Google result pages this year. Some links show a ‘bolt’ sign in front of them and load within a second if clicked upon. These are known as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Google is now pushing for the Internet to quickly adopt these as it rallies for Mobile First.

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AMPs are crucial since, as mentioned before, most of the traffic is driven by mobile devices today. Hence, while analyzing your website’s traffic data, look at the amount of volume that is driven by mobile searches. If significant, you need to create and AMP version of the website as soon as possible! This is a priority today, especially for blogs, news websites as well as recipe websites.

7. Optimize Content for Voice Search

It’s a whole new world of SEO trends indeed. Thanks to the growing adaptation of Virtual Assistants like Siri and Cortana, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of voice searches received by search engines over the past few years. Here are some eye-opening stats:

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Hence, it makes sense to optimize your content for voice choices. But how can you do that for an effective inbound marketing strategies?

You can begin by incorporating long tail keywords in your current SEO plan. Since speeches are more conversational in nature, voice search queries tend to be longer than text queries. Furthermore, it is also crucial to understand what people are searching for.

Here is a breakup of the nature of the top voice searches:

• Questions to get direct information about topics
• Navigations for directions
• Help with homework (among teens)
• Local information
• Fun and Entertainment queries
• And more

Hence, here are some direct action points that can optimize your content for voice searches:

• Have a page dedicated to the various FAQs about your business and product/services.
• List your business on Google My Listing to increase your local SEO score
• Use Structured Data Markup to provide voice search devices and search engines with accurate data about your website and content

Conclusion

So these are some of the best Inbound Marketing strategies practices that will be relevant for the next few years to come (till AI arrives and we have to begin afresh!). It is often said that inbound or content marketing is the only marketing that is left since the marketplace has become too competitive for everyone to deploy outbound marketing. After all, hardly anyone pays attention to advertisements these days.

All this makes organic traffic crucial for a company’s success. The reason is simple. Customers are more likely to buy your products/services if they stumble upon you themselves, as compared to you reaching out to them screaming about the quality of your offerings. It just doesn’t work like that anymore.

If you are looking for the best SEO services for your business, get in touch with us today for a quote!

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