You may know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the traffic to your website by the result of organic search engine results. You also know that there are jobs fully dedicated to this role in many large companies, and businesses completely dedicated to helping companies improve their SEO (we are not one of them), due to the ever-evolving and ever-changing algorithms of search engines. But that doesn’t mean you just throw in the towel with your SEO strategy in lieu of these dedicated resources – you can wrap your arms around the essentials and implement elements of an SEO strategy within your overall marketing. Your other marketing strategies, utilizing your Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) can in turn bolster your SEO even further – fueling the rotational energy of your marketing engine.

While the elements of a true SEO strategy are FAR more extensive than this (there are experts on this topic for a reason), as a jump start (or friendly reminder of your SEO efforts that have long been forgotten), we’ve outlined 3 useful techniques your business can implement tomorrow for increased organic traffic and conversion.

1) Optimize Your Landing Pages

First and foremost: landing pages are not dead. They are the focused website page that aims to drive your conversions! However, you can help search engines find your pages faster if you fine tune your page keywords in your meta descriptions, headers and titles, as well as the actual body copy on the page. Don’t worry about using the exact keyword multiple times throughout the page; you want your landing page to make sense to the visitor and not feel as though the keywords are forced.

An optimized landing page can support your marketing automation efforts by collecting valuable information through a form fill or chat bot with higher conversions, and in turn, triggering relevant, automated messaging to the lead. Sending out relevant content causes increased engagement, therefore improving its search engine’s ranking.

• A secondary goal of a landing page is a lead’s extensive time on a page, coupled with a low bounce rate. Our friends at Hubspot recommend that your bounce rate remains lower than 80%. How do you keep people on your page? See #3 below.
• Search engines acknowledge that some landing pages are more relevant than others; the more relevant that search engines see your landing page, the higher the rank it will receive. First, tackle your technical requirements; help search engines like Google access, understand and crawl through your content so they determine its initial rank. Google’s Search Console provides a glimpse into the performance of your content ranking on google. Then, when you are established as a SME, Google’s AI will rank all of your other relevant content higher. This proves that it will take a LONG time to develop authority and rank well, so set your expectations realistically (12-24 months).
• Engagement keeps your URL’s relevant and google refines your ranking based on that engagement over time. Check out Search Engine’s Journal article for what metrics you should be focusing on to stay relevant.

2) Analyze Website Trends

Carve out some time to analyze your search engine keywords, website traffic, and its performance. Diagnose and resolve your website errors and monitor your web performance over time. Popular tools such as Google’s Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools , and Hubspot’s Website Grader will do this for free.

Armed with the data you need to improve your site, optimize your MAP landing pages for quick wins and work with your IT department to enhance your website.

3) Provide Quality Content

The more relevant content your business has online related to a keyword search, the further you can improve your credibility with search engines. Search engines will look to provide users access to authoritative, legitimate websites, as well as the links that are promoted on those sites.

Consider a guest blog through a co-marketing strategy to increase your link presence online or build Topic Clusters around core topic. Pillar Pages also increase your brand authority. Hubspot provides a great overview of the benefits and use of this strategy here.

Not only should you build a volume of relevant content links, consider sharing this content across your social media accounts on a recurring schedule. This will encourage more users to follow and share your content, increasing your outreach, impressions, and social media activity.

In tandem, email marketing from your MAP can share the same content that has been optimized in other marketing channels, thereby improving that content’s reach, promoting your business as an authoritative leader in the eyes of a search engine.

Fitting Your Strategy Together

With a basic SEO strategy fueling your lead gen efforts, your lead nurturing strategies implemented from your MAP can then fuel your SEO efforts. Consider one of your buyer persona’s online with a particular problem they are looking to solve. You’ve optimized your website and content, improving your SEO, placing your website front and center in the persona’s online search. As a result, the lead is introduced to your business, ultimately completing a form to obtain your gated content or perhaps your e-newsletter.

With the lead captured, your MAP will continue to nurture the lead, providing relevant, personalized content. The emails and landing pages presented to the lead will further encourage them to visit and engage with additional web content, and social accounts, where they will potentially share your posts and content within their networks.

These actions are in turn further bolstering your SEO through the increased use of relevant links and shares. And so continues the rotational energy of your marketing engine.

Understanding and implementing a successful SEO strategy can be a complex and multi-faceted effort. However, some effort is better than none if you are among those without access to dedicated resources and experts. Let us know what other ideas you’ve implemented with success!