Inbound Marketing & New Websites: Do They Go Hand-in-Hand?

Inbound marketing is becoming an essential process for online businesses and traditional manufacturing companies with websites. It's a revolutionary way of building customer relationships by combining information, engagement and marketing without spending as much money as traditional marketers do on media campaigns. Even though it's a process that takes several months to develop, the sooner you can get inbound marketing going for a new site, the better it will be poised for attracting traffic.

Planting Seeds for New Sites

New websites are exciting because they mark a new beginning for a business, but they can also be very hard to promote. It takes months to get indexed in search engines and it can be expensive to advertise, so you might as well consider inbound marketing, which conveniently goes along with building your website content. The best way to get good rankings in Google is to develop a comprehensive site full of valuable information for your followers. Creating hundreds of quality content pages will give your site an edge over competitors who don't. 

Many first time web owners get sidetracked by graphic design, which isn't as important as the actual text that search engines index. A page with eight paragraphs of useful knowledge will likely get better search results than a page full of ads and links. Even though graphics should not overpower the site, high resolution images help hold the attention of users and provide visual variety. Integrating various media with text is a good way to stimulate further interest. 

Blog Toward Authority

One of the most important inbound marketing vehicles is a blog. The purpose of creating a blog is not to be trendy, but to be informative in a refreshing way. Blogs are treated by Google as gold if they are well written and improve user experience. The goal of the blogger should be to create a series of commentaries that answer the questions and concerns of followers and to establish expertise. Google regards quality blogs with loyal followings as authoritative, especially if the content is updated frequently. 

Google+ Engagement

Social media clearly has become a crucial component of inbound marketing, but which social network should you choose? While Facebook is the most popular, you may discover that Google+ is more important to Google Search. Putting Google+1 links on your web pages will help create activity, as "+1s" have become like endorsements for your site. Facebook likes, interestingly, aren't as important to Google as +1s. Each page should have some sort of call to action to get users to respond your content. 

The main purpose for integrating social media in your campaign is that it provides a way to communicate with your audience in a real time interactive fashion. Developing relationships with followers through social media interaction is part of the lead building process. Avoiding hype and sales pitches is central to this new paradigm, which favors a slower process of educating consumers about your product then directing them into a sales funnel that leads to your product pages. Your social media activity should include posting on other people's social media pages as well as your own. This interaction can turn up new leads.

Reviews and Testimonials 

One of the most common ways to capture new leads is to post reviews and testimonials on your site so that followers learn about your customer feedback. People with Google+ accounts can create Google reviews that might show up in search results. These days reviews matter a lot to consumers and have become part of their research before making purchases. Ultimately, inbound marketing can build trust and loyalty through sharing content.

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