A company's digital marketing strategy contains many different tactics that require attention. Two of those tactics are marketing automation and SEO. How they work together is vital to getting your content in front of the proper audience and increasing the leads you gain from the campaigns. In today's blog, we'll be giving you insight into where SEO fits in your overall marketing automation strategy.
SEO Strategy
SEO has been a part of digital marketing since the inception of search engines. Being able to be present in search results by targeting certain keywords and placing them in your content as much as possible was a ranking factor. Using just keywords to rank isn't possible any more with Google's constant upgrades. Because of these upgrades, every searcher has their own search results based on location and previous activity. Basically, you have a very small chance to rank for something as easily as you use to.
SEO today is an everyday requirement for digital marketing but in truth it has taken a back seat to many other tactics within the marketing strategy. There are still basic SEO procedures that are required to give you the best shot at ranking on the first page for searches being performed by your potential customers. Those procedures include:
- Meta-tags: When creating content for the web, it's important your meta-data is present to help Google index, understand your content and presenting it properly.
- Semantic Keyword Research: Understanding what your primary keywords are and your secondary keywords are will help create your content.
- User Experience: Writing for the reader and not Google's search bot is a main ranking factor based on the user experience you're giving your visitor.
- Creating a Hub-Strategy: This strategy takes your primary keyword content and connects other secondary keyword content to give visitors and bots a path to follow when learning about you and your company's services.
SEO Tools
Unfortunately, setting up your content properly doesn't guarantee a top ranking. The best practices mentioned by anyone for SEO are tailored for the company that they work for. That's why it's important you find what works for you. What works for your company may be completely different from another company or a competitor.
SEO today is an everyday requirement for digital marketing.
There are some great tools to help you find your groove and we want to introduce you to some of them. RavenTools is a great tool to use when trying to find issues with your site and monitor the changes that you've done. BuzzSumo is a content development tool that helps you find what's trending all based on keyword search done in the software. Google Search Console is a required tool to use because it's Google. If issues on your website exist, this tool will tell you. It is also where you'll find, at least what is left of it, keyword analysis for your site. Then of course there is Google Analytics. Using GA to monitor the health of your site is a great way to understand what works and what doesn't.
SEO for your Marketing Automation Strategy
So, to the issue at hand. How does this all tie into your marketing automation strategy? If you've read through the top portion of this post you'll understand how it kind of does already. The two main inroads to marketing automation for SEO is research and user experience. Creating content that drives leads to raise their hands starts with SEO research and ends with creating a good user experience for those visitors with the content.
Research starts with finding trending topics and keywords that Google associates to your website. Whether it is a blog or a new webpage, before creation you need to understand the ultimate goal of the page, how a visitor will find the page, what they will learn, and then what the next step is for them. That next step is either going to be converting into a lead or providing an opportunity to dig deeper. This is why making sure the content provides the visitor exactly what they're looking for has become more important than keyword density.
Data Collection
SEO work doesn't stop on the front end of content creation. The data that the content piece is collecting is important for understanding its value and making decisions on future content creation. The most important data points can be found within Google Analytics. Having data to report will help you make the decisions and that's why it's important to get as much traffic to the content as possible. A good rule of thumb is buy traffic in the short term, grow organic in the long term. When digging into the date there are a few data points that you should be looking at to make better decisions.
A good rule of thumb is buy traffic in the short term, grow organic in the long term.
The first is organic ranking. You can find this ranking within Google Search Console. The average position your content is showing up in helps you track the progress it's making in Google's eyes. Those "eyes" are looking at the data within Google Analytics. The data points you should look at are your content's bounce rates, time on page, behavior flow, and conversions from the page. Analyzing this information will help you understand how to best fix the content that doesn't work or copy the success of the content that does. Doing this will help your content move up rankings and earn even more qualified traffic from search.
SEO is a vital piece to any marketing strategy, including the marketing automation strategy. The SEO process has changed over time but making sure the piece of content can be found properly and help visitors answer their questions will help gain more organic traffic and to better more qualified leads. And, that's why SEO and marketing automation work so well together.
So what are your next steps? Register now for these webinars to get you started:
Getting Started with Marketing Automation and CRM: In this three-part webinar series, we'll be giving you our take on the topic. We'll define marketing automation, show you how to implement it within Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and address how marketing automation should fit into your overall digital marketing strategy.
How PowerObjects Uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Lead Gen – With Chris Baldock, PowerObjects Digital Marketing Data Analyst
Happy CRM'ing!
