Florida business owners, this blog is for you. SEO. Inbound Marketing. Are these new buzzwords for the marketing world that will quickly be filed away as has been tactics or are they something more? If you went with the latter, you would be correct. As consumers have changed the ways they search for answers and information to everyday questions and challenges, companies have begun changing how they respond to those questions and challenges. If you are a contractor, roofer, restoration and remediation company this is the need to know blog for your business.
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing flips the idea of traditional marketing. Rather than cold calling, mass mailing, and otherwise sending unsolicited messages about your business or product and trying to convince mass amounts of consumers why they should use your company, inbound relies on metrics and analytics to develop a targeted audience. By creating content that is not only relevant to what consumers are searching your website for, but timely, you can create immediate relationships with inbound marketing.
Benefits of Inbound Marketing for a Florida Small Business
As a small business, your focus is on your customers and always creating an enjoyable experience and overall rapport with them. Inbound marketing has a strong emphasis on personalization, from the content you create to how you distribute it. That rapport can be built through the attracting and conversion process in inbound marketing. By creating targeted content which answers questions and needs of current and potential customers, you’re providing an assurance you are the right business for them to choose.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is what helps Google, Bing and other search engines learn what your website is about. Using keywords readily searched for by consumers, along with a handful of other on-page factors, SEO provides credibility to your business along with providing a higher ROI (return-on-investment) in advertising.
Benefits of SEO for a Florida Small Business
Contrary to popular belief, SEO still works and isn’t going away anytime soon. As the search engine algorithms evolve and become more detail focused, SEO will still play a role in having your small business content rank in organic searches. New changes have begun placing more weight on audio and video content, but when the searches return, likely they picked up on keywords from the original file name of the content.
SEO is still a cost-effective way for the foundation of your small business marketing efforts. While it’s not as flashy as social media or may not provide the revenue stream as pay-per-click, having a solid foundation is always a good idea. Plus, search engines have gained more market share, such as nearly 90 percent of online customers checking online reviews prior to making a purchase, including at small businesses.
Inbound Marketing vs. SEO
In one vein of thought, SEO and inbound marketing are intertwined, one fueling the other. SEO is borne of creating valuable content which inbound marketing is based upon, but the differences soon come to the forefront. As a rule, SEO focuses on ranking in search results, but doesn’t allow you to capture the traffic generated from search results. Inbound thrives on sources which can sustain changes to search algorithms throughout time, such as a blog written two years before but still contains information consumers are seeking out.
As the ranking algorithms used by search engines change, more emphasis has been placed on not only well developed written copy, but visual content and social media from the source. Visual content grabs the attention in a vast sea of words, while SEO quickly blurs together. Google has begun placing weight on social media in terms of a site’s rank.
But you don’t have to be pounding the keyboard daily to see results with inbound marketing. According to HubSpot, business-to-business companies who blog only one to two times each month generate 70 percent more leads than companies who don’t blog at all. Those leads nearly double when a company increases its blogging from three to five times per month to six to eight.
What Does it Mean to be an Inbound Business?
When you become an inbound client, the first thing is to develop a marketing strategy. As with any strategy or plan, goals, objectives, challenges and more will be outlined during this process, producing a guide to refer back to. A website that meets user friendly standards will be the front gate to sought after blogs that can be shared, while further engaging audiences through social media.
At this point in being an inbound client, the focus will shift slightly back to SEO as optimized keywords from the content help pull it to the front pages in search engines. Once the audience has come across the content, landing pages and calls-to-action will begin to convert traffic to leads, appealing to potential customers at all levels of the buyer’s journey. From there, leads convert into sales through lead nurturing and email marketing to deliver timely information to all contacts. The final step is compiling and analyzing the metrics gained from the previous five during the inbound process.
Attracting the Right Customers to Your Website
Everyone who visits your website has specific questions and is seeking information related to those questions. What will keep them thinking of you and your business is well written, concise content that can engage the reader through all stages of the buying process. The ability to access this information at the right time and through the right platform will also drive leads to your website. Social media, regardless of the platform you use, expands the opportunity to engage your audience and encourage sharing of your informational content. Newsletters and podcasts are other forms of communication which can be utilized for inbound marketing and spreading the word about your company or industry to consumers.
Ready to Take Your Small Business to Inbound Marketing?
Inbound Marketing focuses on an around-the-clock presence among your targeted audience, a focus we at Elevare also believe in. As Inbound Marketing and SEO are continually growing and changing, we understand that so will your goals, challenges and everything in between. We work with you from the initial meeting to craft a successful and flexible inbound marketing campaign that will keep your brand at the forefront of your customer’s minds. Contact us and let’s get started.
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