Høgenhaven Thomas - Inbound marketing and SEO insights from the Moz Blog

INBOUND MARKETING AND SEO

INSIGHTS FROM
THE MOZ BLOG

Rand Fishkin and
Thomas Hgenhaven

This edition first published 2013

2013 SEOMoz

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Dedication

To the Moz communityYou rock! Thank you for helping to build an
extraordinary organization.
To the remarkable writers and marketers who helped make this book possibleThank you for your generous contributions.
Special thanks to Ashley Tate and Christy CorrellYou made this book possible.

Rand and Thomas

To the Moz teamMy thanks; I feel lucky, thrilled, and humbled to share this
journey with you.
To GeraldineI'm sorry for all the nights blogging and writing have kept me away from you; your love and support means the world to me.

Rand

To MarieFor making everything look brighter, day after day.

Thomas

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Introduction

By Rand Fishkin and Thomas Hgenhaven

The term inbound marketing was first used by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in their seminal 2009 book, but the concept has been around much longer. As far back as 1999, Seth Godin referred to the same concept under a different name in his blog: Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

Over the past few years, many marketers who focus on organic channels like search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and content marketing have started using the phrase inbound marketing to describe the combination of these channels in their roles and responsibilities.

So why are marketers now turning to inbound marketing? Reasons abound, but two in particular are both timely and relevant. First, Googlethe world leader in search, with more than 90 percent of the global market sharehas evolved its algorithmic considerations massively in the past five years. Google has rolled out new types of search results, cracked down on spam, upgraded its ability to detect and remove low-quality content, become faster and fresher, dramatically dampened many historic SEO factors, and renewed its focus on promoting great brands that produce superlative web content.

Second, practitioners of SEO have evolved. We realize that SEO is a tactic, not a strategy. We realize SEO needs to be used as part of a broader set of marketing tools. In order to succeed in SEO, a multichannel approach is necessary. This book is all about how to perform in a new era of inbound marketing.

SEO Is Changing

Search and SEO are changing. Google is hitting suspicious-looking link networks, devaluing directories, and increasingly penalizing sites with highly dubious link profiles. Underhanded tactics to rank well in the search engine results pages (SERPs) no longer work.

Optimizing a site used to be about getting to the number one spot in a SERP and staying there. Ranking number one is no longer the only important factor. Click distribution is different than it used to be; it's influenced by rich snippets like star ratings, number of reviews, price, author photo, video preview, publication date, and social annotations. Optimizing your author photo might increase click-through rate (CTR) more than moving up one or two places in the search results will.

Moreover, Google wants the fat head keywordsthe small group of keywords that typically drive the most trafficto themselves. Try searching for credit card offers, flight tickets, and new movie titles. The SERPs are filled with other Google-owned products, which makes sense for its business. This makes it more important than ever before for you to have keywords in the chunky middle (more descriptive terms that drive fewer visits individually, but large amounts of traffic overall) and the long tail (the many, more specific terms that may only drive a few visits each, but can drive a lot of traffic in aggregate).