Inbound Marketing Commandment #8: Do Not Ignore SEO / Organic Search

As part of the LeadG2 series on "The 10 Commandments of Inbound Marketing" we're looking at several principles that you can't succeed without. The eighth of The 10 Commandments of Inbound Marketing is: Do not ignore SEO / Organic search. This is your website’s lifeblood. (Tweet This)

Social media, social media, social media…. Sometimes it seems like social media is all we hear about. However, for most B2B websites, the majority of website traffic comes from organic Google search traffic and not social media. This is why we have our eighth commandment: “Do not ignore SEO / Organic Search."

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a methodology of strategies, techniques, and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP)—including Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines. With 60% of all organic clicks go to the organic top 3 search results, you can’t afford to not be focused on improving your search results (Business2Community). As a matter of fact, businesses with websites of 401-1000 pages get 6x more leads than those with 51-100 pages (HubSpot Lead Generation Lessons from 4,000 Businesses, 2011).

A few ways to optimize your website for SEO include:

• making sure you include keyword-rich content on your website
• increasing the number of keyword-optimized landing pages on your site
• using keywords in titles and in meta descriptions
• including keywords in the body of your content

Don’t forget, any money that you can save by not having to pay for keywords on Google Adwords is money that you can either allocate to other marketing or simply let it fall to the bottom line.

The 10 Commandments of Inbound Marketing

1. Thou shall not put pen to paper before conducting research and understanding your target persona.  (Tweet This)
2. Sales must be involved in your inbound strategy at each stage from conception to implementation to follow up. (Tweet This)
3. Your website must be mobile optimized or responsive. (Tweet This)
4. You must have a written plan for lead follow up that’s agreed upon by both sales and marketing. (Tweet This)
5. You must have someone responsible for your inbound marketing program. (Tweet This)
6. Consistently be publishing content on your blog. (Tweet This)
7. You must have premium content (white papers, guides etc) on your website if you intend to generate leads. (Tweet This)
8. Do not ignore SEO / Organic search.  This is your website’s lifeblood. (Tweet This)
9. Thou shall not publish content for the sake of Google. Write for humans not Google. (Tweet This)
10. You must use a CRM. (Tweet This)

Make sure to subscribe to the LeadG2 blog to get each of The 10 Commandments of Inbound Marketing and other great blog content delivered to your inbox. Or you can download The 10 Commandments of Inbound Marketing which includes all 10 of the blog posts and some added content.