We’ve talked about what to do audit your SEO. Now, let’s look at how to really bump up conversions through marketing and promotion. While most people don’t think of marketing and promoting as SEO, they are super-important these days to ensure that you meet the goals you set for yourself.

This is especially true when you use social media as the way to promote your website. With the right strategy, you’ll get more inbound links (or backlinks) to your website and content. Getting more authoritative links and bringing people to your website (especially internal posts and not just the front page) will boost traffic, sign-ups, and sales. That’s the goal, right? That’s why we’re including this step.

Let’s assume you’ve gone through your website and ensured that everything is as up to date as possible in terms of on-page SEO. Your website is user friendly, has plenty of amazing content, and you solve problems for your audience while educating, engaging, and informing them about all things important to them within your defined niche. Now what?

The best way to talk about this is to include marketing and promotion as part of your overall process. Most SEO will start coming naturally. You’ll naturally use appropriate URLs, headers, subheadings, anchor text and so forth once you realize it’s important. The next step is to ensure that you add to that process the marketing and promoting component.

An Example

Let’s say you have a topic that you want to teach your audience about because you have a product to offer to help them solve whatever the problem is that you’re teaching them about. For example, let’s assume you have a website that is about home finances and home management. Your audience consists of parents who work with children and mostly moms, although you do have a few dads in your audience too.

You want to explain the importance of buying life insurance for a growing family. You’ve made a deal with someone who sells life insurance to provide $50 for every completed appointment they make resulting from your referral.

* Write a Blog Post – The first thing you may want to do is create a series of blog posts designed to teach your audience all about life insurance and the things that can happen to someone’s family if they didn’t have it. Don’t forget the call to action.

* Write an Email – For each blog post that you’ve created, create a corresponding email introducing the blog post to your email list. Ask them to click through to read it. If you’ve created a long blog post, your blurb can be part of the email, then ask them to click through to your website to read the rest, with a link to the blog post.

* Write Social Media Blurbs – Create social media blurbs for each social media platform in which you want to share the blog post. Make them unique for each platform so that it doesn’t look like the same thing. If you want to share more than once on a platform, create new blurbs. A good way to do this is to pull a stat or fact from the blog post to highlight. Remember to ask them directly to click, share, and comment.

* Create Images – Your blog posts should contain images that help make the information more relatable and understandable. You’ll need them for the blog post and for social media updates. Ensure that you choose the right size for each platform. If you shake it up a bit and use different images, that will help too.

* Make a Video – Remember that all content on your blog does not have to be text based. You can create an explanatory video, do a live event on Facebook, or more, to encourage people to get involved with the blog series on your site. Note: If you do use video, transcribe the video to place on your site for SEO purposes.

* Promote / Boost – Here’s where the marketing and promotion come in. Once you publish everything and you’ve checked to ensure all the titles, keywords, headers, subheaders, descriptions and so forth are finished, you will want to promote them via your social networks by creating an advertisement from one of the posts. You can do this on most social networks now, the easiest being Facebook.

Ensuring that you create a process will help you succeed in reaching your SEO goals. But, as everyone always likes to point out, you’re still not done. Why? The paperwork still isn’t done. In this case, paperwork has nothing to do with real paper, but it does have to do with tracking progress to ensure that you’re reaching the goals you set for doing search engine optimization. We’ll talk about this next time.