Nobody eats hamburgers without the beef patty. Imagine walking into McDonalds and asking for a Big Mac with lettuce, tomato, and cheese - hold the bun - oh, and no meat. Doesn’t feel right does it?
Left: A cohesive inbound marketing gameplan (focus on quality to drive margins higher) Right: The salad burger strategy (quantity required because quality
is lacking)
Choosing between SEO, PPC, and web design is like eating a burger without the patty or bun. You just ordered a salad. That’s great but you’re going to be hungry unless you order ten more. Problem is, now you just spent five times as much money as you need to get full. One burger would have been fine. Instead you’re hungry and you’re out of cash. Sound like your internet marketing strategy? We call this the salad burger strategy.
You cannot complete a puzzle with 50% of the pieces. SEO, PPC, and web design are all components of digital marketing; one or two alone are insufficient. You need a cohesive game plan. Incorporate all three around an inventory of high quality content. Use the inbound methodology to tie it all together.
Think of inbound marketing as the other 50% of the puzzle...or perhaps the glue that keeps it together. A key insight of inbound is that everything is related. It’s holistic. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Driving traffic to a site that doesn’t convert is just as bad as not driving traffic at all...you get the same results. You cannot succeed without having a wholesome strategy.
Here are a few problems your business will run into using PPC, SEO, and web design devoid of inbound strategy and absent high quality content:
PPC: You’ll spend a lot of money driving visitors to your site. The up-side: more visitors are coming to your site. You don’t pay anything unless they knock on your door. The down-side: Visitors are a long way from leads and even farther from customers. Converting between one and the other efficiently is the key to success.
Tip: PPC ads focused towards converting visitors and leads into customers should land on a page with options to buy. PPC ads focused at generating awareness should land on pages with premium content in exchange for contact information.
SEO: Search Engine Optimization happens in two places: on your website pages (on-page SEO) and on other people’s website pages (off-page SEO).
Tip: You can control on-page SEO by inserting keywords into page titles, URLs, page headers, meta descriptions, and content. You can control off-page SEO by guest blogging and creating high quality content that gets shared. Varsity advice: on-page SEO is an on-going process for your website but 80% of it happens up front. Then it’s simply iterating for success. On-going SEO is important principally for the content you should be continually putting out (blog pages and marketing campaigns). You want a marketing agency for this, not an SEO firm.
Website Design: Most web designers don’t understand marketing. They build your site to look pretty, not to sell.
Tip: If you want to sell tech, for example, you should be working with an inbound marketing firm that understands tech. Anyone can design a site. You don’t want a site. You want a digital sales platform.
Lettuce, tomato, and cheese are all good things - but without the burger, you’re not getting what you ordered. The same with PPC, SEO, and web design - incorporating them into a larger inbound methodology provides the most bang for your buck and the most effective marketing campaign.
