For many companies, the most important element to their long-term success is lead generation. Indeed, businesses these days take great care to determine where their leads come from and how best to generate new leads in the future. With that in mind today we’re going to focus on SEO leads: how your business can generate them, identify where they originated, and ensure that you give yourself an advantage over your competitors in this field. Consider this your definitive guide to generating SEO leads:
First Steps
Before you begin to rework your website or marketing strategy, you need to consider your leads and current customers carefully. Who are these people, and why did they choose your company? It’s crucial that you first understand your customer base and your buyer personas if you’re going to attempt to widen it. Once you have an idea of who you'll be marketing to, you can start to identify messaging that connects with the pain points these individuals commonly face in order to encourage them to convert on your website.
Furthermore, this self-examination will allow you to analyze how you bring in leads currently whether this is from paid search campaigns, search engine results, social media, referrals or email campaigns. Look at your unique traffic sources and ask yourself what’s the most successful element of your current strategy in terms of volume and conversion; the answer could give you insight on how to move forward.
Why SEO Lead Generation?
Leads can come into contact with your business across various platforms and for any number of reasons. For our purposes though, we’re going to disregard larger search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns that may include social media, paid advertising and more, to focus on SEO-related plans. (If you want a more in-depth look at SEM vs SEO, click here.)
For the uninformed, search engine optimization, or SEO, is a mixture of best practices in order to generate traffic from the "free" and "organic" search results on search engines. From optimizing your page content with proper title tags and meta descriptions to creating personalized content based on your buyer persona, the ultimate goal is to rank your URLs higher in the search results where they will acquire more clicks. That way when someone searches for your company, or a related product or service you offer –– search engines end up finding your website instead of your competitors.
How To Create SEO Leads
1. Write for the Visitor, Not the Search Engine
The mistake many professionals make when creating SEO content is that they focus more on what they think the search engine “wants” –– instead of zeroing in on what their leads actually desire. The key to creating SEO leads is to treat each piece of your SEO strategy with care while focusing on the visitor experience. A keyword-stuffed post might help your visibility in the short term, but your blogs, articles, and on-site content should be a valuable resource your leads can enjoy and understand. There’s nothing more off-putting than coming across an article that doesn’t deliver what its headline and meta description promised.
Remember that well-written blog posts can and should bring in new customers. (That’s also why it’s vital to boost your organic content on social media as well!) Don’t think about your on-site content as a “placeholder;” because if you give it the proper TLC, it could make a massive difference for your company.
2. Perform Competitive Analysis
One tip I usually recommend is looking at your competitors in the search engine space and seeing how feasible it is to show up alongside them or above them. For example, if your industry has high competition for your main keywords and your competitors outrank you in domain authority, backlinks and other important ranking metrics, it's going to be difficult for you to compete on these main keywords. Therefore, it may be best for you to write content targeting specific industries or specific problems that your competitors aren't focused on.
In performing competitive analysis you can also see what's working well for your competitors and whether or not you can adjust this strategy to fit your needs.
3. Set Yourself Up to Convert
Lastly, bringing in traffic via organic search results is great, but if you don't have a plan to convert these visitors into leads, you're not taking full advantage of this traffic source. Making sure forms are available on the top of landing pages and utilizing personalized call-to-action buttons throughout your content will bode well for conversions. For example, if someone visits a blog on your website, they're clearly interested in the topic you're writing about. Therefore, they might be interested in a related content offer or talking with your company about a consultation. Don't make these items hard to find or difficult to complete!
The Bottom Line
At the end of every piece of online content, you should always give interested readers an opportunity to interact with your company through your contact page and finish with a content offer. And that’s exactly how we’re going to close this blog! Contact the Leap Clixx team today if you’re interested in learning how SEO can help you generate more leads than ever before. Plus, if you want to learn more about how to garner quality leads, download our free eBook here:
Topics: SEO
