What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is shouldering traditional advertising into the dustbin of history. This is the central thrust of needing great SEO in Cape Town. Whereas, in the past, marketing intruded into your world from loud billboards on the side of buildings, bridges, lamp-posts, trees, and jammed between your favourite crime series, this is now becoming obsolete. This entire, pervasive culture is being eroded in favour of your own search for what you want. It’s driven by you, and relies on you knowing what you need and going online to find it.
You want to go camping? You search on google and sites pop up where you can find the outdoor gadgetry your heart desires. You want to fix your aeroplane? Google will direct you to the sites that are offering the very service you are looking for, expressed in your own words. Inbound marketing helps you find what you want, and helps you make sure it’s a reliable product for a reliable price.
Sell effectively with clever digital marketing.
If you are a seller, and not a buyer, this is even greater news. You are free from traditional advertising which is eye-wateringly expensive, time-consuming and resource-heavy. To attract attention on the side of a highway or with a movie commerical is a whole other ball-game from the quiet cunning of using Google well. You won’t need to bankroll legions of gaffers, grips, gophers, set departments, lighting departments and wardrobe departments their with directors, assistants and assistants’ assistants. All you need is your own ingenuity, or at most a few brainy geeks with a sterling command of the lingua franca, who may not even wear clothes.
The role of the major players in this business has shifted accordingly. The opulence of single-malt-swigging executives like Don Draper in “Mad Men” spinning unaffordable fantasies is becoming a vintage curiosity. Instead, we are seeing the rise of practical thinking by acutely agile observers of Silicon Valley tech innovations, like Rand Fishkin of MOZ. Fishkin is a groundbreaker in the growing field of search-engine optimisation (SEO).
Innovation in SEO
Fishkin has a genius for stripping away the hype of marketing-speak to reveal the inner workings of digital marketing in a manner so simple and obvious, it’s as if you had known it all along. He emphasises the importance of drilling down to the user’s main objective, which is finding what they want with the least possible hassle.
From this practical perspective, it becomes clear why good SEO works in an almost polarly opposite manner to traditional advertising. Instead of bamboozling with meaningless phrases, it should speak concisely to a practical need. It is not selling an idea, but selling an actual product to someone who has their mind already made up. In short, the act of “selling” in not conceptual but literal.
The practical practise of selling
What does a shop-assistant do when someone comes in already knowing that they want? They show the customer where to find the item, in the right size and colour with the right features. They will demonstrate its reliability and value for money, and escort them to the till. These are all features of great inbound marketing. Before this can happen, a crucial step is to direct the customer to the right shop in the first place, and this is where good SEO comes in.
Good SEO consists of finding the words the customer will use to search for the shop, and making sure that the shop reflects them. There may be quite a few regular words that are used, and all of these need to be findable on the site. This is where you need a clever SEO strategist and a good blogger: to find the important words and to use them.
SEO Cape Town
In our own mini-Silicon Valley of Cape Town, SEO is a burgeoning industry that is still just small enough for it to be possible to be light on one’s feet and not need a large, hulking digital marketing agency to get the job done.
Our next article will focus on trends and techniques for SEO in Cape Town in particular.
We will show you how to gear yourself up for great inbound marketing aimed at local needs as well as the wider world of global customers.
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