The Best Inbound Marketing Strategies for Your WordPress Directory Business

With little to no qualms, you can effortlessly build your very own website with WordPress even if you don’t have any coding know-how. But is building a website just enough to get your job done?

Well, no matter what business you start with your WordPress website, you must keep inbound marketing strategies on your book to drive leads and run circles around your competitors.

But how to generate more traffic from inbound marketing strategies for your WordPress directory website. If you are in a rush to find an answer to this query, this article is just for you to get off the ground! Besides these effective inbound strategies will work for any website too.

But before we set off…

What Is Inbound Marketing?

In layman’s terms, Inbound marketing is an interactive way aimed at attracting visitors by creating valuable content to your website using channels like blogging, Search Engine Optimization AKA SEO, Social Media, Webinars, videos, eBooks, opt-in emails, SERP, and so on.

In Inbound marketing strategies, visitors can communicate or interact with the media we mentioned above.

As we already said, an endless stream of visitors to your WordPress directory website is all you need to get the ball rolling if you are onto generating more revenue. The inbound marketing strategy provides you with just that but in a more efficient way.

Inbound marketing is rather “Magnetic” than being “Pushy” or “Interruptive”. It falls mostly under the Digital Marketing category and it helps to turn a customer into a loyal and repeating one. Cool, right?

Not to Confuse Inbound Marketing Strategies with Outbound Marketing Strategies

Outbound marketing is outrageously known as “interruption marketing” or “Push Marketing” for its shameless promotions.

If you have ever been into traditional marketing, you might have known that visiting door to door, telemarketing, sending cold emails and cold calls, TV commercials, radio ads,  print advertisements (newspaper ads, magazine ads, flyers, brochures, catalogs, etc.), and many more. These are all outbound marketing strategies.

Not to say, Inbound Marketing lets you bring visitors more effectively than Outbound marketing due to less cost. In other words, Inbound marketing brings more organic traffic who are highly likely to convert due to their relevancy and enthusiasm for your products.

Now that you know about what Inbound marketing and Outbound marketing are, let’s see their characteristics in a flash:

Inbound Marketing Strategies:

• An interactive medium of marketing with visitors.
• Fulfills customers’ needs
• Pulls mostly interested and relevant readers in
• Solves consumers’ needs
• Interactive with readers
• As helpful content is consumed, audience members become leads
• Due to value-adding content visitors turn into leads
• Where you see it: blogging, Search Engine Optimization AKA SEO, Social Media, Webinars, videos, eBooks, opt-in emails, SERP, etc.

Outbound Marketing Strategies:

• Pushes messaging at everyone that is the relevant and the irrelevant audience group altogether.
• Usually doesn’t provide value through contents
• Salesy pitch in copy
• Dissociated or one-way communication
• Disruptive approach
• Where you see it: TV ads, billboards, pop-up internet ads, telemarketing, magazines.

Here Are the Best Inbound Marketing Strategies for Your Business

Now that you know the difference between inbound marketing and outbound marketing, you may be wondering what the inbound marketing strategies are, right? Here, you will find a number of the most effective inbound marketing strategies at your fingertips. If you are on the quest to know how to do inbound marketing these strategies will address those questions as well:

1. Qualified content marketing
2. On-page SEO or Global Search Engine Optimization
3. Off-Page SEO – Social media marketing
4. Optimizing for local SEO
5. Video Marketing
6. Optimizing for voice search
7. Reviving dead content / Updating old content
8. Personalized marketing

Qualified content marketing

It will not be an exaggeration if we address the idea of blogging to be the pillar of overall inbound marketing strategies. be it a travel destination directory or local business directory or event directory or restaurant directory, it works as though it were the backbone for any business directory website.

That’s because it has the potential to pull the most relevant and organic traffic from the SERPs provided that you are writing something valuable to solve your customer’s needs and queries.

Under the hood, your leads will search with a specific keyword in search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. and if they find your blog on the first page of the SERPs, you have a high chance they will visit your site and travel through your sales funnel to become paying customers.

Besides, with high traffic, your site will enjoy high domain authority and the search engines will give your blog the prerogative to get ranked faster.

However, your blog will only work well only if you craft content that really helps people. In other words, the copy you are making must provide value to the visitors to make it work. But what is the ideal length of content?

The majority of SEO experts think that should fall within the 1,000-1,500-word range:

An important point to note here is that you can not become salesy while writing a blog post. For example, you can only invite your reader to give a shot to the demo of your solution but can not shamelessly prod the reader to buy your product.

On-page SEO or global search engine optimization

Not surprisingly, without much organic traffic, you will find your opportunities to sell your product extremely limited. You can consider it the pillar of all your inbound marketing strategies.

That being said, Search Engine Optimization comes to the spot to save your day. Yes, if you can ensure proper on-page and off-page optimization, you will get an endless influx of traffic to your unique blog and unique product.

Now, you may wonder whether SEO is dead and is not that effective these days. But actually is not!

For your WordPress directory website, make sure you have your on-page SEO in order first. Here are a few items you need to focus on for on-page SEO:

• A low competitive focus keyword with a good number of search volumes.
• URL containing the focused keyword.
• Use of LSI (Latent Semantics Keyword) or simply synonymous or relevant keywords.
• Use your focus keyword in the SEO title and other headings.
• Use the focus keyword in content in coalition with other relevant keywords.
• Use necessary multimedia within your content.
• Provide a number of internal links accompanied by external links.
• Use no-follow links for your competitors.
• Make sure your page is mobile responsive and loads quickly.
• Create a meta description.
• Minimize your images and use alt text for them.
• Check plagiarism and grammar before you publish your content.

Off-page SEO on social media

Now, more often than not people are seen attached to their mobile phones everywhere. Not to say, most if not all are sort of addicted to social media.

So, why not grab this opportunity to boost your website exposure?

Well, off-page SEO in various related social media where your target audience is roaming around is the key to getting more relevant traffic to your website.

Having said that, if you think social media are just the place to share your content, you are wrong. That’s because they are more than just social media. In social media, you can not only share your content but also interact with your audience easily by exchanging thoughts or reacting to others’ opinions.

However, you should not select all the social media under the sun and focus on all of them to share your content. The key here is that select only the social media where your leads are present rather than choosing the ones where there is no visitor present.

Common great social media places for a Directory Business website are Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, Linked In, etc. If done properly, you can engage with your audience, build brand awareness and drive more visitors to your website.

Optimizing for local SEO

If you search with the keyword “Best Restaurants” from California, all the visible restaurants will be from California, obviously not any restaurant from London. This is the power of local SEO and this is exactly what a directory site should provide to its customers.

If your restaurant shows up on your local visitors’ mobile they are more likely to convert. Here are few facts to consider:

A good WordPress directory business integrates this system as an inbound marketing strategy so as to attract more traffic to its business owners.

Video marketing

In an effort to bring more traffic to your website, the contribution of video content can’t be ignored. Gone are the days when people only read articles.

Here are a few eye-opening facts to look at:

• 75 million people in the U.S. watch online videos every day.
• Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text.
• 76% of marketing professionals plan to use video to increase their brand awareness.

Needless to say how important to incorporate video marketing in your inbound marketing strategies.

In this case, the most effective medium for sharing your videos is YouTube. Another interesting point is that YouTube is the second-largest search engine:

YouTube processes more than 3 billion search results a month

Cacpro.com

Therefore, integrating keyword research and video optimization for YouTube is essential. This way, you can attract more organic visitors to your site.

You can make appropriate videos for your WordPress directory website. Here are a few examples:

• Automobile Directory: If your directory site is on listing automobile businesses. You can unbiasedly review cars and upload them on YouTube as well as on your website.
• Jobs directory: As employers and job seekers list their needs, you can create a series of videos that shows people how to create more effective video resumes to land their dream job by overcoming all the odds. You can even offer a “Done-for-you video resume service” for job seekers telling them, “Send us your details, and we will make your resume to get aboard your dream job.”.
• Vacation Rental Directory: For such a website, you have to create cinematography for beautiful local attractions, resorts, hotels, and B&Bs and post the video on YouTube and on your website.
• Local business directory: Create interview videos with the most successful entrepreneurs in your area and post and share the videos on YouTube, Facebook, and your website as well.

Optimizing for voice search

Now, more than ever, people are towards voice search rather than typing with their hands. With the advent of Google voice search, smart speakers, and other voice search-enabled devices, voice search has just burst into popularity.

This is why you need to optimize your content for voice searches too. But how can you optimize your content for voice searches?

While there is no 100% working and perfect answer to this question, we have tried to build the following approaches:

• The usage of long-tail keywords: People don’t have to type and thus they are more likely to talk more to get the most relevant answer to their search queries. Hence using long-tail keywords is overwhelmingly effective for voice searches.

• Focus on answering questions: With voice searches, people are going to ask a lot of questions. So, always, try to give answers to questions on your content. It means you will have to write the question together with the answers. This is dramatically effective to get your content pulled by the voice bot.
• Consider the questions people are more likely to ask: People will ask a plethora of questions using the ‘WH’ questions or What, Who, Why, How, Where. So, you will have to consider adding them to your text and answer them accordingly. This will help you get ranked higher in the voice search.
• Develop content with an informal tone: Google’s voice search algorithm is based on natural and informal day-to-day conversations. So, chances are very high that your content will be picked if you develop your content with informal and day-to-day easy English.
• Try out voice search: If you want to show your content on voice search results, try with a keyword and listen to the narrated text. Observe how the text is being written and then optimize your content accordingly.

Personalized marketing

It creates a sense of trustworthiness in their mind thinking that you take care of them.

Then again, if you do not know your visitors well, you can not give them what they want. If you study your visitors and segment them into groups, you can provide them with tailored needs.

For example, when you are sending emails, keep in mind the recipients’ age, sex, religion, etc., and also address them with their first name so that you sound more friendly to them.

Bonus: Reviving or Updating Old Content

Be it Google or Bing, every search engine likes to have unique and fresh content. If the search engines crawl and find out content to be stale like containing very old statistics, old data, and any inconsistency, then they will consider your content irrelevant and thus penalize it by not showing them on the first page of SERPs.

Hence, you always need to relaunch old and outdated content with the latest statistics and data.

Best Inbound Marketing Tools to Attract New Customers

Inbound marketing is a strategy that aims to attract potential customers by providing them with valuable content and experiences that align with their interests and needs. Here are some tools that can help you attract new customers using inbound marketing.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a comprehensive inbound marketing platform that offers a suite of tools, including blogging, SEO, social media, email marketing, and analytics. It provides all the tools you need to create and manage effective inbound marketing campaigns.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows you to schedule and publish content across multiple social media channels. It also offers analytics and reporting features that can help you measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.

Canva

Canva is a graphic design tool that enables you to create visually appealing content, such as social media posts, infographics, and ebooks. It has a wide range of templates and design elements that you can customize to match your brand.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool that helps you track website traffic and user behavior. It can provide valuable insights into how your website is performing, which pages are most popular, and where your traffic is coming from.

SEMrush

SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO tool that can help you improve your website’s search engine rankings. It provides keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink tracking features that can help you identify opportunities to improve your website’s visibility in search engines.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an email marketing platform that allows you to create and send newsletters, automated emails, and other types of email campaigns. It also offers segmentation and personalization features that can help you target your messages to specific audiences.

Leadpages

Leadpages is a landing page builder that can help you create high-converting landing pages for your inbound marketing campaigns. It offers a range of templates and customization options, as well as A/B testing features that can help you optimize your pages for maximum conversions.

Takeaways

While there are no hard and fast rules to follow, we have touched on 8 inbound marketing strategies you can apply to your directory websites.

Not every strategy will equally work for your directory website. So, you have to check them one by one and determine which one works better than the others. This way, you will have to prioritize your strategy and get the best results.

Then again, we will suggest not mastering all strategies at once especially if you have limited resources.

We hope these strategies will help you do better inbound marketing and turn your visitors into repeatedly visiting leads and eventually into paying customers.

Finally, if you struggle to implement any of these strategies, don’t hesitate to share with us by popping your thoughts below. We would love to help you with our level best.