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SEO

Inbound Marketing and SEO: Which is Better and How They Work Together

MM
Matt Montenegro Founder & CEO
11/02/2022 6 min
TL;DR

SEO supports discovery within a broader inbound workflow; it is not a substitute for content, conversion, nurturing, or customer support. Map each stage to a purpose and measurement source, then evaluate search visibility separately from what people do after arriving.

  • Why it matters: One channel cannot represent the complete customer journey.
  • How it works: Connect attract, engage, and delight activities to explicit goals.
  • Case in point: Use Search Console before the visit and Analytics after arrival.
  • Reality check: Differences between those systems are expected.

If you work in marketing, you know that Inbound marketing and SEO (search engine optimization) can help you boost your business and grow your brand. 

But you may be wondering: is one better than the other? 

And more importantly: can both areas of expertise work together to make the biggest impact? 

That is exactly what we will answer in this article about SEO and inbound marketing. It is broken down into the following sections, so it’s easy for you to find the information you’re looking for:

What Does SERP Have to Do With SEO?

SERP stands for search engine results page. You want to rank as highly as you can on SERPs, because the higher you rank, the more traffic your website is likely to get.

Search engine results pages are the pages that come up when someone enters a search into Google or another search engine. 

For example, if you type, “Pandas,” you may receive back several websites that contain information about the Python Data Analysis Library, the animal or, in some cases, PANDAS, the medical condition.

What determines the websites that come up? Largely, the websites’ SEO techniques. 

Pages with excellent keyword optimization and good content are likely to rank higher, reaching more users. However, pages are also suggested based on the user’s browsing history, social settings, and physical location.

It is possible to have two SERPs that look identical, but that have some variations in results. 

For the example above, for instance, someone researching panda bears may receive more content with the animal than a medical provider doing research on PANDAS. Why? Google and other search engines attempt to tailor the results to their users.

You can expect search engine result pages to be in a state of constant flux as Bing, Google, and other search engine providers tweak their algorithms. Their goal is to provide the content that their users want, so they have a more intuitive experience.

For you, that means that your SEO needs to be concise. 

It should be optimized to include keywords that show the intention of your content. Multiple keyword strings and combinations can be used to maximize visibility and to be sure your website shows up in front of the correct users.

What’s the Difference Between Organic and Paid Results?

SERPs usually have both paid and organic results. Organic results are what you’re aiming for. These are results that come up as a result of search engine optimization.

Paid results show up because an advertiser has paid Google or another search engine provider to post them. These, in the past, usually showed up as text-based ads.

Today, they come in many forms and can include links that look like any other search results.

Do You Need to Use SEO?

If you want your website to be seen, SEO is crucial. SEO is what makes your website visible. It’s what draws traffic to your website and makes sure users are hitting your landing page.

Good SEO creates more opportunities for you. With the right SEO in place, you have the opportunity to convert hundreds, if not thousands or more people, to customers of your business.

If you choose not to use SEO, you will likely see a drop in search rankings and results. 

Your average daily or monthly visitor count will likely decrease, and your website will have less visibility online. Fortunately, you can implement SEO at any time in order to begin increasing your visibility again.

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Inbound Marketing and SEO: The Differences Explained

There are some overlapping elements of inbound marketing and SEO. 

Put simply, inbound marketing generates leads through the content on your website, and SEO helps boost that strategy by making sure that content gets in front of the correct user when they’re looking for it. 

SEO is, technically, an aspect of inbound marketing.

It’s important to have an SEO-optimized website, because having the right keywords and content to draw in customers matters. 

However, without inbound marketing, the customers may come to the website and bounce without making a purchase or looking deeper. That’s where inbound marketing comes in.

Inbound marketing strategies build on the visibility of the website and take steps to encourage conversions.

In inbound marketing strategies, SEO is usually part of the first stage, which is to attract the customer. 

From there, the rest of the strategy focuses on converting the customer, making a sale, and encouraging loyalty through cross-selling, interesting content, new calls to action, or other techniques.

If you look at businesses that really nail their lead nurturing, most are quietly balancing both SEO and inbound marketing—there’s no real shortcut. One without the other just isn’t enough anymore. You can have a perfectly optimized website, packed with keywords, but if it doesn’t funnel the visitor toward anything meaningful, it falls flat. Conversely, even the most engaging funnel is useless if no one ever finds it in the first place. These days, the gap between merely generating traffic and actually converting that traffic into happy customers is where the magic (and all the headaches) live.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that customer intent is a moving target. Folks don’t land on your site following a straight line from search engine to thank-you page; they poke around, compare, maybe get distracted by a funny meme, then return a week later. The mix of SEO signals and inbound tactics you line up need to stay flexible for that reason alone. Sometimes a single strong blog post gets you on the radar, but the follow-up email or a smartly-placed call-to-action is what tips the scale. Don’t underestimate how chaotic online behavior can look on the surface, even when everything is working.

How Can SEO and Inbound Marketing Work Together?

Think about SEO as a function of a much larger inbound marketing process.

The first stage of inbound marketing generally uses SEO to get content in front of users. 

Blogs, social media posts, SEM, podcasts, and other content are optimized with keywords to make sure that when a user searches for the topic, your website comes up.

There are multiple tactics that you could use to achieve a top position in search engine results pages (SERPs). Some include:

  • Creating optimized URLs.
  • Optimizing your website’s SEO.
  • Content marketing.
  • Link building between your site and other high-ranking websites.
  • Creating interesting titles, descriptions and headlines.
  • Keyword research.
  • Keyword selection.

Good SEO brings in visitors, but SEO doesn’t necessarily convert those leads into sales or repeat customers.

Inbound marketing has to move forward and work to convert the sale with forms that potential customers fill out, landing pages with interesting information, or calls-to-action.

Making a sale, the third step of inbound marketing, requires lead conversion. This could happen with repeat emails or different types of workflows that lead the customer to interact with your business in the way you want.

Finally, after a purchase or once the user has completed a task the way you want, you focus on loyalty. 

Continuing to post optimized content, interesting updates, or cross-selling can all be good techniques to encourage loyalty to your brand. 

Regular newsletters, emails, calls, texts, and other content could also boost customer retention and even encourage them to advocate for your brand.

inbound marketing process
Source: Cyberclick

Wrap Up

Using inbound marketing and SEO together is a good way to improve the number of visits to a website and encourage users to make a purchase or interact with the website during that visit. 

Inbound marketing also includes follow-up tactics to encourage loyalty to your brand.

Do you want to learn more? Check out this article on the SEO trends of 2025 that can help you improve your page visibility and results.

Frequently asked questions

How does SEO fit into inbound marketing?

HubSpot describes inbound through attract, engage, and delight stages and lists SEO among the channels used to attract people with useful content. The broader workflow also includes content, social, video, email nurturing, conversion, and customer support. SEO can support discovery without replacing the rest of that journey.

How should an inbound SEO workflow be measured?

Start with a defined audience, search need, page purpose, desired on-site action, and review window. Search Console reports pre-visit search activity such as queries, impressions, and clicks. Analytics reports interactions after arrival. Assign each question to the suitable source rather than blending every number into one score.

Why do Search Console and Analytics numbers differ?

Google explains that the products observe different parts of the journey and use different metrics, so their figures do not match completely. Reconcile definitions, filters, dates, attribution, and implementation before interpreting a gap. Neither correlation nor an increase by itself proves that SEO caused leads, loyalty, or revenue.

MM Matt Montenegro

Matt Montenegro

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