Introduction
The term inbound marketing was first used by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in their seminal 2009 book, but the concept has been around much longer. As far back as 1999, Seth Godin referred to the same concept under a different name in his blog: “Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.”
Over the past few years, many marketers who focus on organic channels like search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and content marketing have started using the phrase inbound marketing to describe the combination of these channels in their roles and responsibilities.
So why are marketers now turning to inbound marketing? Reasons abound, but two in particular are both timely and relevant. First, Google—the world leader in search, with more than 90 percent of the global market share—has evolved its algorithmic considerations massively in the past five years. Google has rolled out new types of search results, cracked down on spam, upgraded its ability to detect and remove low-quality content, become faster and fresher, dramatically dampened many historic SEO factors, and renewed its focus on promoting great brands that produce superlative web content.
Second, practitioners of SEO have evolved. We realize that SEO is a tactic, not a strategy. We realize SEO needs to be used as part of a broader set of marketing tools. In order to succeed in SEO, a multichannel approach is necessary. This book is all about how to perform in a new era of inbound marketing.
SEO Is Changing
Search and SEO are changing. Google is hitting suspicious-looking link networks, devaluing directories, and increasingly penalizing sites with highly dubious link profiles. Underhanded tactics to rank well in the search engine results pages (SERPs) no longer work.
Optimizing a site used to be about getting to the number one spot in a SERP and staying there. Ranking number one is no longer the only important factor. Click distribution is different than it used to be; it's influenced by rich snippets like star ratings, number of reviews, price, author photo, video preview, publication date, and social annotations. Optimizing your author photo might increase click-through rate (CTR) more than moving up one or two places in the search results will.
Moreover, Google wants the “fat head” keywords—the small group of keywords that typically drive the most traffic—to themselves. Try searching for credit card offers, flight tickets, and new movie titles. The SERPs are filled with other Google-owned products, which makes sense for its business. This makes it more important than ever before for you to have keywords in the “chunky middle” (more descriptive terms that drive fewer visits individually, but large amounts of traffic overall) and the “long tail” (the many, more specific terms that may only drive a few visits each, but can drive a lot of traffic in aggregate).
In many ways, though, SEO is still SEO. Search engines still need accessibility help in order to crawl, index, and rank the content in the correct way. This requires logical information architecture, correct use of meta tags, implementation of relevant schema markup, and use of sitemaps, as well as correct use of Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Center. You still need links to rank for competitive keywords. You still need to conduct proper keyword research. And you still need to produce content that can be understood by humans and robots. Delighting users has always worked pretty well, and will become increasingly more important as the search engines get smarter.
From SEO To Inbound Marketing
SEO is often declared “dead”—but that concept is just silly. People will always need to retrieve information online, and search is a powerful way to do this. Search and SEO are very much alive, and it's much more fruitful to see search as a part of a bigger marketing mix.
Many of us have suffered SEO tunnel vision, but SEO does not exist in a vacuum. It's increasingly difficult to succeed in SEO when using this channel in isolation. That's where the multichannel approach comes in: Google constantly rewards companies who provide good products, user experience (UI), branding, content, and conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Some SEOs are skeptical of the conceptual expansion of SEO to inbound marketing. We hope to reduce some of this skepticism by briefly addressing two of these critiques:
Critique 1: Inbound marketing is just a new name for SEO. No, it is not. SEO is a tactic. Inbound marketing is a strategy. Inbound marketing is an umbrella term for many marketing channels, whereas SEO is a channel in itself. Some consider social media, content, analytics, and CRO to be part of SEO, but the majority of social media and analytics professionals will hardly characterize themselves as SEOs. In fact, you can do inbound marketing without doing SEO. Inbound marketing is not a new name for SEO, but a name for organic, earned marketing.
Critique 2: Inbound marketing is a branded term used to market the likes of HubSpot and Moz. The term is used and evangelized by companies such as HubSpot and Moz, but we'd be just as happy using terms like organic marketing, permission marketing, and earned media. But marketers are not using any single one of these terms, making it harder to use them broadly. Inbound marketing is rapidly becoming the accepted industry term to sum up all the channels that bring in customers organically.
Inbound Marketing
So, what is inbound marketing? In a general sense, we see it as things you can do on the web that earn traffic and attention, but don't directly cost money.
Don't buy. Don't beg. Don't bludgeon. Inbound marketing is all about earning attention and love. This is often a superior way of marketing, simply because people prefer inbound channels to outbound. According to Google, 82 percent of clicks in the SERPs go to organic results and 18 percent go to pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Less than 1 percent of clicks on Twitter go to promoted tweets. The best and brightest Facebook ads are lucky to amass a 2 percent CTR.
There is no single way to do inbound marketing, and it's not about being everywhere. Your goal should not be to have a presence on all channels, but to really be present where your audience exists. For example, if your target audience is 55+ year-old men, Pinterest might not be the right channel to invest in. It's ultimately about selecting the channels that fulfill your strategic goals the best, and selecting the channels that give the highest ROI.
The channels with the highest ROI are often those others don't invest in—there is so much potential there! This is what Rand calls the short men, tall women rationale: most men are interested in short women, while most women are interested in tall men. Consequently, there are many single short men and tall women who are very attractive based on other parameters. The smart singles, therefore, pursue those tall women and short men the majority tends to ignore. This rationale is one of the reasons inbound marketing works so well: for each dollar spent on inbound channels, eight dollars are spent on paid channels.
Inbound marketing is not free; it takes time and money to create and distribute phenomenal content. But it's often a more cost-effective marketing strategy than paid marketing. We are not arguing that paid marketing doesn't have its place in the world, but the point of this book is to show you how effective and efficient inbound marketing can be.
Investing in Inbound Marketing for the Long Term
The best way to build a brand is to be truly remarkable, recognizable, and authentic—and to provide the world with answers to the question “Why?” Successful inbound marketing plays a pivotal role in branding, but takes time and effort. Don't invest in SEO—or any other inbound channel—for the short term. Like all well-planned strategies, inbound is a long-term investment.
Inbound marketing helps with brand building, and having a brand helps inbound marketing. It is a positive spiral that rewards those who are already successful, as is illustrated in Chapter 11, “The Rich Get Richer: True in SEO, Social + All Organic Marketing.” As Eric Schmidt said in 2008, “Brands are the solution, not the problem.” If you are a good brand, SEO tends to be the solution, not the problem. Through Google, brands receive preferential treatment. Brands get increased visibility in SERPs, and penalties and filters increasingly target unbranded sites. This makes sense, for familiarity breeds trust. You probably recognize this from your own searches. When looking for that new long blue nightgown, you are probably clicking the link to Amazon or Macy's, not the link to longbluenightgowns.biz.
Building your site and marketing efforts for a long-term ROI also solves the old dilemma between using black hat tactics (deceptive or questionable SEO practices that don't follow search engine guidelines) and white hat tactics (best practices to build an experience that's actually valuable to customers and crawl-able by the search engines). Truly remarkable brands do not take the low road or use aggressive marketing tactics. They don't need to.
Why Read This Book?
SEOs are upgrading their job title to inbound marketer, which comes with responsibilities that include a wide array of channels. New marketers are entering this fast-paced industry all the time. While The Moz Blog is a rich resource for inbound marketers, it can be hard to get an overview of the field from its many hundreds of posts. This book curates the best of the blog over the past few years. All of the blog posts have been reassessed and many of them have been updated for relevant content. We hope this book will help you make a steady investment in inbound marketing that gives you good returns over the long run.
ABOUT MOZ
SEOmoz started as an SEO consulting company in 2004 and later became a leading provider of SEO software. In 2013, SEOmoz transitioned its brand to Moz, expanding its product line to include search, social, and content optimization within a single platform, Moz Analytics. Moz's mission is to create products that streamline the inbound marketing process while staying true to the company's TAGFEE* values, giving marketers everywhere a better way to do inbound.
*The TAGFEE code sets the standard that all work and content produced by Moz is Transparent and Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, and Exceptional.