At the heart of every online marketing strategy should be SEO and lead generation.
Lead generation is essential for gaining an initial audience as well as maintaining one. Whether you’re promoting a product or service, you can capitalise on that new interest by pointing any leads in the direction of offers they might be interested in.
Lead generation is one of the most important aspects of any business. Without it, your company simply would not survive and it’s no surprise that many companies are turning to SEO as a long term way of boosting lead generation.
But, how do you leverage lead generation with SEO?
SEO helps you reach those people who are actively searching for what you have to offer – while simultaneously boosting your organic ranking with Google, potential customers will find it easier than ever before to locate exactly what they’re looking for.
In this blog post, we’ll discuss some of the basics on how to boost lead generation with SEO.
What we will be looking at:
- Auditing
- Page speed
- Content strategies
- The competition
- Local SEO
- Backlinks
Organic Lead Generation Strategies
Auditing Your Site
You may not know which web pages are working and which need improvement, but you can find out by way of an SEO audit. This is the first step to improving it too, so start crawling!
Luckily for us, there are plenty of tools that make this easy.
Take Screaming Frog, for example. Screaming Frog offers an innovative website crawler. This tool can crawl your site to find broken links, titles over the character limit or missing meta descriptions, all of which can negatively impact rankings on the search engine results pages as the likes of Google won’t offer your website as a credible source of information to the user. Ultimately, this has a knock-on effect when it comes to generating more leads and driving traffic.
Increase Your Page Speed
Tackling slow loading pages are just as important for the user experience on desktop and mobile devices. Sites that load too slowly will likely rank lower in search engines and/or have high bounce rates, both of which will result in missing out on potential leads.
Luckily, there’s an easy solution. Tools such as Google’s PageSpeed test will analyze your website performance so you know what areas of web development need improvement.
It could be that a certain plugin on your website isn’t performing well, you have too many plugins which are causing bloat, or image files are too large. All of these things (plus others) can negatively affect the speed of your website and thus, affect the SEO performance and amount of traffic your website gets.
Content is King
Quality content that your audience can engage with should be the backbone of any SEO strategy. Visitors are more willing to sign up for newsletters or fill out forms if they believe that your insight can be of value to them.
This is why it is so important to have an organised content strategy and create a brand voice. Introduce a content calendar and organise articles by theme based on keyword research and audience analysis. This allows you to produce the quality written content people value, want and are searching for, and will enable you to target a larger but more targeted audience.
A content strategy can make or break your SEO campaign, so it is important to have a plan that includes keyword research. If you create the kind of content people are looking for then not only will this improve the brand’s presence in search but also will go a long way in generating quality leads.
Keyword Research
As you can see above, keyword research is an integral part of SEO, especially when it comes to generating high-quality leads through content.
Content needs to be seen by your audience. The key to this is targeting the right keywords that your audience is searching for. Don’t gamble by assuming what users are looking for, performing keyword research will save you time and return results.
Tools such as SEMRush’s Magic Keyword finder will help to identify keywords related to your business with measurable information such as how many people search for that term, how much competition you’ll have, as well as offer up related terms – allowing you to diversify your focus keywords whilst remaining relevant.
TIP: Whilst still taking into account user experience, try to make the first word in title tags or meta-descriptions one of these relevant keywords, so it’s recognised by search engine crawlers more effectively and given higher priority.
Monitor the Competition
People may say that comparing the competition is redundant, but it isn’t. Analysing your competitor’s SEO performance against your own can be extremely useful and beneficial to your own.
Your competitor’s posts are a wealth of information that can help you improve your content.
You should keep track of the similar queries for which they rank higher than you, and carefully evaluate why their post performed better than yours to see how it might apply to your own website.
Having an understanding of your competition can help you to establish effective SEO strategies of your own and enable you to identify areas of improvement.
If you want to be the best, learn from others.
Local SEO
Have a bricks and mortar business but you’re not quite seeing the footfall or local trade you were hoping for? Then local SEO is what you need.
But, what is local SEO and how will it help generate leads?
When a highly localised search is made (take “online marketing Nottingham” for example), search engines will crawl all online content and rank by the most relevant results, filtering out those results that don’t meet the necessary requirements.
Some basic elements to consider when optimising for local SEO are things such as having a prominent address and telephone number, relevant keywords and external factors such as up to date local directory citations.
Not only can local SEO literally put you on the map, but it will also allow you to interact with your target audience on a more personal level. You’re able to tailor your website specifically for those in the area with highly relevant content. Instead of competing with major companies that are based purely online, you’ll be working to stand out within your community and become a place of interest for those looking for your products or services.
Backlinks Count
Backlinks are a key component of SEO. A backlink is created when different websites link with one another, but not all links have the same effect on your ranking in search engines.
Not only are links from other sites great for building brand awareness and driving direct/referral traffic, these links can have a huge effect on the ranking of your content, and it’s seen as an indicator of credibility by search engines. The type of backlink you get is important too – not all backlinks are treated equally.
It stands to reason, but getting a link from a trusted, quality website with a consistent amount of monthly visitors, will give your site more credibility than being linked to from an obscure page without context or relevance for your content.
Although backlinks are essential when it comes to SEO and lead generation, if you want to rank your site, don’t resort to shady strategies when it comes to backlinks. It’s important that these inbound links are organic and with relevant content that serves a purpose for the user.
The last thing you want is Google penalising you for suspicious linking activities.
But, how can you build inbound links?
Aside from outreaching a specific piece of creative content or offering up a press release to publications through digital PR, you may be surprised to find that your website has a lot of broken backlinks. The good news is they’re easy enough to fix!
Looking at which external links are broken and then fixing them, means you can improve your SEO while simultaneously working on building high authority links from other websites.
There’s a reason you’ve linked to another website, often their content is relevant and you trust the content they’re producing. So, when you’re trying to get relevant inbound links with strong domains (good for our rankings), consider these existing relationships and see if there could be an opportunity for those publications to link to you. Perhaps offer a guest post or if you’ve spotted an article on their site which would benefit greatly by linking to some of your content, suggest the idea as additional context about the topic at hand.
SEO and Lead Generation
If you want to generate leads for your business, it may be time to take a closer look at SEO as part of your long term strategy.
It’s not just about ranking higher on Google search results pages; there are many other benefits of implementing an SEO strategy in your marketing plan that will help drive sales and grow your customer base.
By implementing the SEO strategies discussed, you will undoubtedly develop a more successful lead generation strategy.
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Want to find out more about how these strategies can benefit your business? Get in touch with us and our SEO team will be happy to help!
