One of the key factors in the Inbound Marketing strategy is the web positioning in search engines like Google. Let us remember that the content strategy aims to attract potential customers, satisfying their information needs. So appearing on the first page of the search engine, for queries related to our industry, is essential.

According to a study by Sistrix, a company that developed a powerful web positioning tool, the first result of organic searches on Google, takes 60% of clicks . The second 15% and the third 7%. In other words, appearing on the following pages of Google is almost the same as not appearing.

For this reason, every Inbound strategy must have an SEO professional, responsible for content optimization, so that the web page can be measured with the first results of the ranking.

In general, these are the 6 changes that your page needs.

Web positioning: Improve your content

This aspect is possibly the most important of all. Google’s algorithm is designed to prioritize the pages with the best content. Those that perfectly answer user inquiries and that have therefore become popular. The more interactions, visits and shares a blog post has, the faster it will climb to the top of the ranking. 

Stop for a moment and analyze your content: do you publish quality information? With added value such as infographics, videos or images? What data can you provide that really interests your target audience and ignore your competition? There is the key to success.

Create content that provokes sharing

• ✔ Incorporate a blog to your website, “ Marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13 times more likely to see a positive ROI” ( HubSpot, 2019 ) 
• ✔ Having a blog will allow you to share relevant information, which will multiply your traffic 
• ✔ The articles that lead the first page of Google, have between 400 and 2000 words.
• ✔ Use simple language, without technicalities
• ✔ The content must be original, creative and innovative
• ✔ The more recent the information, the greater the impact it will have on the internet
• ✔ Post frequently

Web positioning: Identify the keywords of your brand (keywords)

The keywords or keywords, in web positioning (SEO), are the terms used by users to carry out their search queries. This means that if we find the keywords that our potential clients normally use, we will be able to identify their concerns, needs and curiosities about different topics in our industry.

That gives us enough information to develop articles and content offers, which are really interesting and valuable to the audience. We call this setting the stage for lead generation.

There are main keywords, which we are interested in positioning for having a high volume of monthly searches and linking directly with the product or service offered by our company. For example: the keyword of an insurer is “life insurance”. And if we create a section on our website that refers only to that service, we will have a significant flow of traffic with purchase intent.

Then there are the secondary keywords, which refer to all the topics related to the main function of the brand. For example, in the case of the insurer, we have: “family life insurance”, “vehicle insurance”, “types of insurance” and the like. These are perfect for the web positioning of blog articles.

Keyword types

There are three types of keywords in the world of web positioning. 

✔ Short-tail words: Made up of a single term. They are characterized by being on the cusp of monthly searches and having fierce competition. Let’s take a dealership as an example. The short-tail keyword would be “Carros”, which has 23,000 monthly searches in Peru.

✔ Middle-tail words: Made up of two or three terms. They have a significant number of searches and less competition than the previous ones. Continuing with our example, the keyword would be “Toyota cars” or “Used cars”.

✔ Long-tail words: They can have up to 5 terms. They have much less search volume and little competition. But they are an interesting start to get into Google. In fact, these keywords are considered transactional, because they have an implicit purchase intention: “2018 toyota cars”, “used cars in Lima”.

Where do the keywords go?

• ✔ In the article title
• ✔ In the subtitles
• ✔ In the first paragraph
• ✔ In the last paragraph
• ✔ In the meta description
• ✔ In the attributes of the images
• ✔ In the body of the text

Web positioning: Take care of the structure of internal and external links

One of the aspects that the Google algorithm values ​​the most when positioning topics is that the website has a clean structure of links, both internal and external. This allows you to track similar topics and verify that the site has enough information to address user concerns. In addition to verifying if your sources are of quality.

Internal links link to articles, landing pages and content offers published on the website. 

For their part, external links refer to other domains that are better positioned than ours. The objective is to gain authority in the ranking. In fact, if that website links to us, it transfers a bit of its authority to us. Which basically tells Google “Hey, this website publishes good content.”

Tips for a clean link structure

• ✔ Repair or replace broken links. Or they will cause a drop in the ranking.
• ✔ Do not link to web pages not related to your industry
• ✔ Remove links from pages dedicated solely to exchanging links. They have no content and Google could penalize you
• ✔ Avoid hiding links in areas of the website such as the footer, it is also a cause of penalty

Web positioning: Don’t underestimate the power of social media interactions

SEO or web positioning is highly dependent on social media interactions. The more people who see your content, indicate that they like it, and share it, the more relevance your website will have. Google highly values ​​these indicators and automatically catapults popular content to the first three places in the ranking.

That is why the Inbound Marketing method places special emphasis on the social media strategy. The dissemination of the content is as important as its production. 

Web positioning: Structure of web design (user experience)

You can have good content, have a solid keyword strategy and a lot of popularity on social networks, but if your website design is not focused on the needs of the user, you will have a very high bounce rate.

Google takes the user experience during its crawl very seriously. It basically verifies that:

• ✔ Charging time is less than 3 seconds
• ✔ Content can be accessed from mobile devices
• ✔ Navigation is simple and intuitive
• ✔ Images are not heavy

Web positioning: Domain relevance

Finally, we have the relevance or authority of the domain, which is nothing more than the reputation of each page quantified on a scale of 1 to 100. 

This factor works as follows: a user does a search and the algorithm locates two topics that are equally good in quality and interactions, coming from two web pages with excellent internal structure and good user experience. Which places first? 

Domain authority increases for many reasons, but mainly because it already has a good time hitting the top of Google with other topics. Then, the page with the highest score will be, without a doubt, the one that will rank first.

How do I increase domain authority?

• ✔ Positioning the highest number of keywords
• ✔ Increasing the quality and quantity of inbound links
• ✔ Optimizing SEO
• ✔ Publishing quality content
• ✔ Having a good number of social interactions

Summarizing…

If web positioning is one of your goals, remember to take these fundamental aspects into account. Evaluating the competition is always an excellent option to analyze their steps and take into account their best practices. Lucky!