Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the smartest and most effective strategies for positive results with your inbound marketing. Having a high, organic SEO ranking will not only demonstrate your trustworthiness and reliability, but it can distinguish you from your competitors. With the possible drawbacks coming from changes by search engines like Google’s Penguin Update, how will this affect your future marketing campaigns?

Link-building is one of the strongest ways you will improve your search engine optimization. When Google recognizes you as highly relevant for a particular search, this is the “secret sauce” you want in your marketing mix to drive ideal buyers to your site – because of your “popularity” with Google.

Courtney Eckerle wrote an article about a recent MarketingSherpa webinar, where Alex Dunks, Manager of Business Development with Webmarketing123, whipped up five link- building steps that can improve your search engine ranking. Some of his concepts are:

1. Lay a strong foundation by setting groundwork and understanding how to properly measure what is and is not when working with keyword selection. He believes that the anchor text of a link is important because Google and other search engines evaluate it when they follow a link.
2. Put tracking in place. Tracking is important in the same way we want to have our keyword rankings benchmarked - we want to know exactly where we’ve come from and where we’ve gone. According to Dunks, you what to figure out which keywords are actually making a difference. What if it’s just two of the 20 keywords that are delivering conversion? Hone your campaign and focus on only the two that are leading to conversions, and find some new variations that are very similar to those words.
3. Make your links as diverse as your keywords. He advices marketers to think of external links as entry points to your website, and especially to those deeper points in your website. He said a good strategy to employ is to make sure that the content on your website is organized into themes. An example would be “silo one” for men’s shoes, “silo two” might be women’s shoes, and by grouping things into silos, Google is better able to understand that theme.

Check out all the steps mentioned by Alex Dunks in the article, “5 Steps for Building Links that Improve Search Results”. Would you add other steps? What link building strategies have you found to work especially well for your business? Please share them here by leaving your comment.

Many business owners and marketing professionals struggle to implement link building, especially with the myriad of consistently changing factors search engines use to rank pages – such as Google's new Penguin update. Use these steps to establish a specific plan for strategically building links that will improve your ranking.

Inbound Team is an Atlanta, Georgia Inbound Marketing Agency specializing in helping businesses grow through online marketing.

If you’re happy with the amount of traffic your site is receiving but not with the number of visitors that are being converted into customers, you’re probably wondering where you should focus your time and resources. Since you want your site to generate more sign-ups or purchases, the best thing you can do is add more landing pages. If you already have a main landing page, you’re probably wondering why you need more.

While it’s not the only reason, the most significant one is because it’s hard to speak directly to every visitor with just one landing page. Even if you have a highly targeted message, there’s still going to be a significant number of your visitors who don’t connect with it. In order to give your website a more successful conversion rate, you’ll want to create targeted landing pages for your specific audience, that is based on specific goals, such as, sales, registrations or sign ups. When you’re able to give your visitors what they are looking for in a simple and clear web page, you’ll earn their undivided attention – which will help you when trying to move the visitor through a process for a successful sale.

Since landing pages are so important to your lead generation and conversion rate, it makes sense to increase the amount of the landing pages on your website. The more landing pages you have, the more conversion opportunities you’ll gain. When you have a variety of landing pages offering different messages, various offers and call to actions that you can test – this gives you feedback that will prove to be vital to your marketing.

The goal of most landing pages is to get someone to sign-up or make a purchase. For your landing pages that fall into the latter category, when someone clicks that page’s call to action, they’re going to be taken to your site’s checkout. If you look at your analytics and notice that a significant of the people who click the call to action don’t actually complete the checkout process, it’s probably an indication that your checkout needs to be streamlined. In addition to having a reliable merchant provider, you want to ensure that this process is as painless as possible. Eliminating any unnecessary steps or form fields can significantly boost your conversion rate.

One of the reasons many businesses only have one landing page is because they assume it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to create additional ones. While that may be true for brand new sites, since yours is already established, chances are you already have a significant portion of the content you need. All that will be required of you is putting it together and formatting it in a way that properly targets that landing page’s demographic.

Below are several ways you can easily increase your number of landing pages:

• Invest in a Landing Page Creation Tool that enables you to quickly and easily create optimized landing pages
• Create more offers to go along with your landing pages that provide a variety to allow you to test feedback and responses
• Adjust your existing offers to cater to different personas by revising previous offers and customizing them based on the needs of your site visitors

To help you understand why you need more landing pages for your business website, check out this article from HubSpot entitled, “Why You (Yes, You) Need to Create More Landing Page” What other questions do you have regarding multiple landing pages? Leave your comments below, and share with our community.

More landing pages only means more opportunities for your business. It can help improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), provide you a higher conversion rate, while allowing you the chance to speak to all the different needs of your prospects and clients.

Inbound Team is an Atlanta, Georgia Inbound Marketing Agency specializing in helping businesses grow through online marketing.

If you’re using education to reach your targeted audience, you know that quality content is vital for online marketing. But your prospects are constantly being bombarded with distracting content that clutters their attention, so what are you doing to make yours relevant and outstanding amongst your competitors online?

Online marketing doesn’t end with just creating a website alone. You have to exert all kinds of effort to make your website well known and established online.

Every day new technologies are being developed and it’s important that as a business owner, CEO or the person responsible for your company’s marketing, you keep up with the advances and changes. It’s not enough just to build a website that publishes resourceful content. You really have to distribute your helpful content in places where your prospects are located.

The key to this strategy is getting found online where your prospects might be searching. Your potential customers or clients should be able to easily find you because of the placement of your content. But how do you establish a better online presence?

Let’s start with a well-designed and better developed website. Appearance is not everything, but it can be a great contribution to set the professional “tone” for prospects. Your functionally, well-designed website needs to be appealing to keep your visitors interested, engaged, and wanting to come back again for more!

1) Know how you want your business to be known Is your brand recognizable? You should know what your prospective customers or clients want in order for them to choose you among the variety of competitors in your marketplace. It is important that they clearly see your business as the only answer to their needs and wants. Better branding will make your business more identifiable than your competitors in the market, and makes it much easier for them to find and recognize you online.

2) Publish great quality content with targeted keywords and phrases Always keep in mind that the excessive use of keywords is a detriment to you by search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing and others. Be sure that you incorporate your keywords and phrases sensibly without compromising the quality of your content. This will also help improve your search engine (SEO) ranking. A high search engine ranking will certainly improve your chances for getting found online.

3) Drive traffic , generate leads and convert leads to sales Once you have an appealing, relevant and “sticky” website  people can go to for their searching needs, website traffic will come (and stay)! The next step therefore is for you to turn these visitors into customers, and these customers into sales. To do this, make sure that your website has a “call to action” in order for your visitors to move to the next step. Your call to action should be relevant, specific and it must encourage them to respond. It’s also a good idea to reward them for responding. You could reward them with a free download of valuable information, access to a “private” area of your website or something else to thank them for taking action. Once they respond, you’ll likely have sales you never experienced before. When you begin a system of moving prospects smoothly through this process, you’re influencing your industry and beginning to capture a larger segment of the marketplace – for good!

4) Use social media to interact and engage with your audience More and more people are engaging in social communities like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter to research, find their needs and connect with other like-minded people. Because of this, social media communities are the best place to position your business while educating, informing and empowering prospects about your business. Become regularly involved in the social media networks where your prospects “hang out”, and take the time necessary to interact and become involved in their questions, comments and discussions. It’s a great way of advertising and presenting your business in a “soft sell” way, while making your products or services more accessible for your audience. It’s also a sure way of getting found online.

Establishing a better online presence can be done by following tried and true steps that take time, effort and patience, but the fruit of your labor will surely be rewarding. An established online presence will position you above your competitors, and make your company a highly recognized and trusted brand that people will want to buy from and share with others.

Inbound Team is an Atlanta, Georgia Inbound Marketing Agency specializing in helping businesses grow through online marketing.

Useful analytics are your best friend when it comes to measuring and improving your inbound marketing.

After college, you need to find the perfect place for you to grow and become a better person. Lucky for me, I’ve found just that.

There are a lot of ways to get more leads through your webite. One of the best is to drive more traffic. However, there are many tools and strategies available. You may feel uncertain about what really works.

If you care about getting traffic to your website, you care about Google's new Penguin update!

Our researchers and writers are continuously searching the web for better ways to improve results from Inbound Marketing. Here are some recent articles we've been reading.

All business marketers want to increase website traffic. Finding the right and suitable ways to do so is just not easy.