Marketing Automation and SEO: How They Work Together | BloggingPro

• Updated on: 2018-10-16
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Marketing Automation and SEO: How They Work Together
4/9/2017
by David Jones Leave a Comment
Search engine optimization is a core tenant of internet marketing. In today’s uber-competitive landscape, surging to the top of the SERPs is a must; especially when you consider that the vast majority of clicks are soaked up by the top three positions; you can play the organic or PPC game, but either way, you need to rank high to compete.
Marketing automation is a much younger digital solution than SEO, but has quickly become just as relevant. In a nutshell, these solutions automate repetitive marketing efforts like email, social media, and various other activities so that time can be spent more effectively on other essential pursuits that need a manual process.
While marketing automation has become a popularized tool due to its effectiveness, most marketers are completely oblivious of the link between automation and SEO practices. This is highly problematic, as marketers dive into these solutions without any real foundation for lead nurturing campaigns to develop and take flight. Without a lead generation system in place, marketing automation services cannot possibly reach their full potential and value, therefore achieving an inferior ROI.
This is where the link to SEO comes into play. SEO drives individuals into the top of the marketing funnel through awareness, effectively creating new leads.
Lead generation, however, is where many businesses struggle as there are a variety of solutions (email, content, PPC ads) and brands often spread themselves too thin and obtain few qualified leads in return.
In order to leverage both tactics effectively, marketers need to understand how to two modalities support one another. Here are 5 ways to two disciplines are intertwined.
#1: User Behaviors
While marketing automation is not wholly necessary for attracting new leads, those who don’t employ such a solution have little understanding of which customers are purchasing the most.
This information is vital for campaign and messaging optimization. Employing a marketing automation software that touts built-in web tracking, however, will enable you to follow PPC ad activity to understand which prospects are most interested.
This is why GetResponse’s marketing automation service is such a useful and effective tool. With this platform, users are provided with web event tracking, drag-and-drop workflow builders, cart abandonment solutions, and loads of other profitable features.
Using such tools will enable marketers to better understand how people are interacting with ads, landing pages , and other campaign elements and optimize those features for maximum conversions.
#2: Link Building
Link building is a major portion of SEO. It takes a lot of time and effort to accrue a meaningful number of high-quality links. All of this can be undone, however, by spammy backlinks that you never asked for from low-quality sites; likely to result in a penalty from Google.
Fortunately, many marketing automation services tout features that will automatically notify a user when a damaging inbound link is identified. This allows marketers to have the link removed before any destruction takes place.
If your marketing automation software does not tout this kind of feature, you can always switch to one that does. Alternatively, you can employ a specialized SEO service like Ahrefs; a stellar choice for this kind of protection.
#3: ROI Tracking
The use of marketing automation allows marketers to conduct closed-loop ROI tracking, which essentially provides a view of the revenue driven by each targeted keyword. This gives you a clear understanding of which phrases are profitable and which should be dropped.
With marketing automation, it becomes possible to affix your keywords to prospects and follow the lead until the loop is closed with a conversion.
This is beneficial to businesses as it effectively displays how a lead progresses through the funnel. This lets you know where each lead came from, the revenue generated from that lead, and can also help you identify weaknesses in your marketing funnel.
#4: Efficiency
When a company intimately understands which keywords are driving clicks and which ads lead to conversions, more compelling and effective marketing campaigns can be assembled. This, in itself, helps to send prospects further down the funnel in a shorter amount of time while also drawing in larger numbers of qualified leads. Not to mention that knowing the most effective elements ahead of time helps to reduce on unnecessary or ineffective expenditures.
#5: Increased Sales
As marketing automation creates a history report on every single lead, sales teams then have an ample amount of information to work from that helps to improve their sales pitch and experience overall, effectively leading to an increased number of sales.
All of this means that SEO and digital marketing efforts are much less blind in their experimentations, now having meaningful data as an anchor to support strategic moves in both sectors.
The key to successfully integrating SEO and marketing automation is not relying too heavily on the machine portion of the program; you must still manually handle many SEO tasks. By viewing marketing automation as a supplement to your SEO efforts, you stand to greatly increase your number of qualified leads, conversions, and sales.