Inbound Marketing vs SEO: Is the balance of power changing?

Used properly, Inbound Marketing and SEO operate in symbiotic harmony to help grow and promote your advisory firm. After all, there’s little point creating content that doesn’t adhere to SEO principles and, vice versa, little point creating optimised content that no-one wants to read.

In reality though, and if there is a war between the two marketing tactics, Inbound Marketing is starting to topple its more established compatriot and advisers are becoming wise to it.

Where it used to be the case that your home page ranking on Google was the most important factor in whether people could find your company or not, now, visibility means something different.

Good inbound marketing can give your company the opportunity to be discovered in new ways, outside of the scope of direct Google searches, which end at your domain.

Your content doesn’t even necessarily have to sit on your own website. Whether it be on a social media platform, in the comments of a Money Marketing article or, yes, on Adviser Lounge, the location of your excellent content matters less.

Inbound marketing increases awareness of you and your firm. It builds your credibility and creates a connection between you and a client audience; whether those are existing clients you want to build up your relationship with, or brand new potential clients. It gives you authority and authenticity on financial topics you want to be seen as knowledgeable on. At the end of all this, it has also created awareness – people know who you are and what you’re qualified to talk on, all without having Googled you.

On the other side of the argument, SEO is a generically cold, scientific strategy, an artificial boost to your standing in an online ranking system you can never fully see. You can’t pursue SEO without content of some sort and you can never be fully sure exactly what impact the changes you make will have on your successes. Your clients never see how good or bad your SEO is and they probably don’t care either.

The message – increasingly loud as more advisers wake up to the potential of Inbound Marketing – is that content is becoming king and the way clients discover it is changing. Next time you review your SEO and Inbound Marketing budgets, consider this: do you want your clients and prospects to simply find you, or completely understand you?