Every business needs customers to be successful and generally, the more customers you have, the more successful your business will be and the more your bank manager will love you. Inbound marketing is a fantastic way to attract new customers.
There are so many ways to attract new business. There are the more traditional methods such as ads on newspapers, tv and radio. The newer ways consist of digital and online marketing such as social media ads, Adwords, email promotion and of course, having a website.
Word of mouth and recommendations is the best way to connect to new customers. This happens because your service is so exceptional and has provided great value to a customer and they recommend you to their friends, family and colleagues.
Marketing can be broken down into two basic categories, outbound and inbound marketing.
Outbound marketing is when you reach out to customers with adverts. It is invasive and you don’t have people’s permission to put your products or services in front of them. It also generally cost money to acquire new customers.
One of my pet hates is adverts on tv and radio, or online videos. I always turn the volume down or change channels. I don’t want to spend time listening to something I don’t want to listen to.
Adverts on newspapers, magazines or websites don’t bother me because I can just skip them which takes up none of my time.
I sometimes use outbound online marketing anyhow so I can’t complain too much, can I?
I digress.
This article is primarily about inbound marketing. Most of my articles on this website are inbound article marketing. I love this form of marketing because –
A. It is free (if you write the article yourself… and you should).
B. It helps the customer out by offering solutions to their problems.
C. It has a great conversion rate.
You might have reached this article by searching on Google for a solution to a problem that you have. In all likelihood, you want to attract more online traffic and want to know how to get it. If you did, I have done my job.
Inbound marketing is not invasive because the customer comes to you for help and assistance. You don’t need their permission to put your content in front of their eyes.
This is a fantastic way of marketing because the conversion rate of people looking for help and becoming paying customers is very high; far, far higher than outbound marketing is.
Try this for an example. Go to Google and type in “Guernsey inbound marketing” and I would imagine this article will appear for that search term. It may even show this exact sentence in the meta description.
When you write an article for inbound marketing purposes, you will need to include lots of LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) and synonyms. LSI keywords are words that are closely related to your main topic of your page.
In the case of this page, my main keyword is “inbound marketing”, but I have included many other associated words such as, “outbound”, “digital”, LSI”, “Google”, “Search terms”, “website” and the list goes on.
This will serve two purposes.
1. You will appear for many more search terms in Google, therefore you will receive more website visitors.
2. Google will know more about what you page is about. This is about the searcher’s intent.
For a very basic example, if you search in Google for “Riding”, and you had a website about bicycles, you wouldn’t want to appear for horse riding or the place Riding in Yorkshire. So the other words on your website or web page say to Google that your website is about bicycle riding.
Ok, so that is a very simplistic example.
Another thing that you should do is write an article that has many words in it. Research shows that the more text that is on a page, quality text that is, the higher you will rank in the search engines.
It is not so crucial for local search rankings such as in Guernsey, but there still needs to be quite a bit of text on a page.
Google likes high quality and longer form text. Also, an image or two with the “alt tag” optimised will help rankings, as will the addition of a video or other media. Google can’t read images yet so there is an “alt tag” that you can fill in with an appropriate keyword that Google can read.
I have seen many Guernsey websites that have different pages for different parts of the business, and those pages have next to no content, or they have the same content on every page. Both of these scenarios are no good for ranking and I see those websites on pages 2 and lower all the time.
With just a little effort those same websites have a much greater chance of ranking on the first page of Google, where the money is.
I have even given free advice to the owners of these websites and they still don’t do anything about it. I don’t do this any more because it is a waste of my time.
That is why I am now concentrating on inbound marketing, offering solutions to problems that Guernsey website owners have. This is the best way to achieve my business goals and I believe is the best way for you to achieve your online business goals.
It doesn’t stop there though. You will probably require some off-page search engine optimisation, inbound links to your site to get right to the top of Google.
If you want to know more about inbound marketing or seo in general, please give me a call and I will try to help you where I can.
Tel 07781 426713
Email martin@guernseydonkeyseo.co.uk.