The Difference Between Inbound and SEO Marketing Strategies

Do you want people to find your website when they are searching online for related terms? Then you’ve probably thought about search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and maybe even wondered how they differ from inbound marketing strategies to drive traffic from search engines.

SEO Techniques

SEO is the optimization of headlines based on algorithm changes and search term estimates to help the search engines like Google and Bing favor a website or page of content over someone else’s.

So if someone owns a pizza shop and discovers the term “supreme pizza” is a highly competitive term and only has 2,000 local searches a month in the U.S. but “everything pizza” has a medium difficulty score and 50,000 local searches a month, they would change the name of the pizza online to “everything pizza” to increase the chances of more potential customers finding and buying that pizza online. They would also want to avoid other SEO mishaps such as keyword stuffing, the practice of shoving as many SEO keywords onto a page as possible.

Inbound Marketing Techniques

While inbound marketing efforts result in potential leads finding a website or content by searching for related terms, it is much more about the content strategy than the technicalities.

The theory behind inbound marketing content strategies is that instead of pushing messages out to people in traditional forms of outbound marketing methods like telemarketing and direct mail, a brand becomes an authority about a topic that provides useful content - which then brings people to that website organically.

So instead of a local business running a small direct mail campaign for about $.55 a piece with a typical conversion rate of maybe one percent (optimistically speaking) they could write a blog about their industry - Italian food, junior league hockey, or accounting - and when combined with an effective SEO strategy described above, appear at the top of search results when someone is ready (and searching for related terms online) to eat at an Italian restaurant, find a hockey league for their son to join, or switch accountants.

That is why companies like Hubspot claim “Inbound consistently delivers a cost per lead dramatically lower than outbound” like they said here in their 2012 State of Inbound Marketing ebook (Although there are still the costs associated with paying someone to write).

Inbound and SEO strategies are both important pieces of the puzzle for increasing your traffic from search engines but implementing both will generate the best results.

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