Successful companies today have one thing in common — a functional inbound digital marketing model. When 76 percent of marketers use inbound marketing as their primary strategy, having an effective inbound function is the secret sauce for increasing organic traffic and building out your customer base. Here are three well-kept secrets that are sure to give your inbound marketing model an extra edge:

Understanding User Intent is the Foundation for Inbound Marketing

There are four types of user intent based on subsequent online research. The first step in building a superior inbound marketing model is ensuring your marketing team understands these four user intentions and how to balance SEO and SEM efforts.

• Navigational Intent: Today, most users search a brand name via Google rather than the brand’s exact website URL. This gives Google the chance to monetize the search by allowing competitors to run ads for the brand’s name searches.
• Informational Intent: When a user is trying to find information, Google understands the user’s intent is to learn something, not to buy something. In this case, the search engine will eliminate ads and only provide content pages related to the search.
• Transactional Intent: Contrary to informational intent, when Google recognizes a user looking to make a purchase, the search engine will offer price cards for e-commerce sites relevant to the search as results. This allows users to go directly to these sites to make a purchase.
• Investigation Intent: Treading the line between informational and transactional intent, this hybrid occurs when a user has an interest in buying but plans to conduct research prior to making a purchase. For example, searches comparing two brands fall into investigation intent.

Topic Authority is Key

While your team’s SEO strategy may focus on ways to improve domain authority, page authority and page rank, you’re more than likely missing out on a key piece of the SEO puzzle: topic authority.

Despite the abundance of content related to popular industry keywords like “CRM” or “content marketing,” Google will accurately highlight the most appropriate pages in the top positions for both categories by indexing all pages within a domain, classifying those pages into topics and comparing them to other domains that specialize in the same category. By associating individual pages with related topics, Google can then draw the conclusion as to who fares better for a specific topic authority. 

To ensure topic authority gets your domain to the top of the search results page, you must implement a content silo strategy. Most likely, all written content on your blog is organized under a URL such as domain.com/blog, and, while there is nothing wrong with housing your content this way, you’re not giving Google any insight into each individual topic under a blog.

While this kind of organization takes much more conviction and a larger amount of effort, having your blogs systematically organized makes it easier for Google to uncover the various topics and build a good topic authority score for your website.

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A Visual Blog Accelerates Engagement

Organizations spend a significant amount of time creating content, with effort from the entire team to bring that content to life. Yet, despite such effort, most pieces of content see very little attention from users.

Google Analytics watches how visitors engage with your content — using metrics like time spent on a page and the number page scrolls to determine engagement level. Since almost all of the content out there is short-form or long-form text embedded with images, this leaves an opportunity for innovation: creating visual representations of your content. Instead of developing the standard text-based blogs, you can mastermind user engagement sections into a ‘visual blog’ by introducing small gamification embedded within. Because visual blogs send signals to inform Google that users are highly engaged with the blog, the position of these pages will slowly rank up in the search results.

Inbound marketing offers the ability to create valuable experiences for prospects and customers coming to your site — but at its core, inbound marketing is focused on being seen. With the right inbound digital marketing model in place, teams will make their company easier to find and gain the customer’s attention by drawing them to pages with relevant content.

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