Lead generation is a pivotal part of any business whether it’s online or offline. Especially, when it comes to online business, lead generation becomes imperative. As more businesses are coming online to grow their customer base, it’s important to gain an edge and thrive on higher profitability.
When it comes to quality lead generation, search engine practices can help businesses in multiple ways. SEO services not only improve online visibility but also helps businesses generate more sales without aggressive paid marketing.
If you are new to SEO and online lead generation for your business, then we have you covered. We will dive into how you can use search engine practices to generate leads and outperform the competitors. Whether you are into a B2B industry or into a B2C business, all businesses need a steady stream of leads coming to them so that they can scale rapidly.
What is lead generation?
If you are not aware of this term, lead generation is a process of gaining a constant stream of sales qualified leads to the business that are ready to make purchases from your business. The whole efforts of the lead generation process focus on capturing prospects and then converting them into a sale. Lead generation campaigns are highly crucial for growing your business whether you are in the B2B or B2C domain.
Why SEO and lead generation work together
When users perform SEO without measuring the result, they are leaving a significant amount of money on the table. SEO requires a lot of investment in terms of time and it becomes important to gauge the results. And when it comes to results, the total number leads metric works seamlessly with it.
Only ranking for keywords and getting organic traffic is not enough, you need to be generating business out of all the efforts and investments you are making. If a website is getting 5,000 visitors per month but the leads are hardly 10-20 then there is something wrong with the execution or planning.
If 5,000 users are coming to your website, you need to think of turning them into your paying customers, and here comes the lead generation. Using several proven tactics and strategies, you can get the maximum benefits from your existing and new visitors.
Using SEO for quality lead generation
Before getting started with SEO, you need to understand the fact that SEO is broader and you need to know about your ideal customers to generate the best results. If you are already doing SEO for your website, then you can improvise the strategies to generate maximum results.
Defining ideal leads
The first thing you need to understand is what kind of visitors you want to target and them your customers. Open your analytics and see what your audience base looks like and whom you want to target. Once you figure this out, you can go ahead with the strategies to attract them. When you define and create a customer persona, you will get more precise regarding what platforms and channels you need to focus on through the search optimization tactics. This thing will ensure that your products or services will appear the maximum times when your ideal leads will search about what you offer.
Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis is not a direct lead generation tactic but it will give you an overview of what others are doing to capture leads through SEO. For doing this, you can spy on what keywords your competitors are ranking and how they’ve optimized the pages with competitive keywords. Audit a couple of competitors’ websites to check for keywords that you are not using as of now. Create a list of such keywords that are attracting more leads and start optimizing your content for the same.
Look for low-competition keywords with higher volume that are attracting more users to the website. Along with this, also check what are the high-performing channels that are bringing the most traffic to their website. It will help you get ahead with the strategy to target ideal customers.
Perform website audit
For generating leads from SEO, you need to ensure that your website is technically sound and top-notch in terms of user experience. As search engines are focusing more on overall user experience and website usability, it’s important to audit the website and fix underlying issues. When the website will be up to date as per the industry standards, it will start appearing on search results and you will gain more leads organically. To begin with a website audit, first, check all the technical aspects of the website. Some key elements that you need to fix are broken links, higher redirects, slow website loading speed, issues with mobile compatibility.
Use a website audit tool and check for all the factors to fix them on priority. Ensure the website is fully functional on mobile devices and offers the best user experience like the desktop version. Perform a complete on-page audit to check multiple elements. Make sure the URLs, images, and content of the website are optimized.
Focus on speed
Speed is a major ranking factor among multiple search engines including Google and if the website speed is higher, it will start generating business leads by default. In simple terms, when a website loads faster on both desktop and mobile versions, then search engines will improve the organic positioning of the website. It will put your business in front of more people that are interested in buying what you have to offer.
So, it’s important that you work on improving the website speed. You can use Google’s free tool called PageSpeed Insights to explore how fast your website loads. The best part about this tool is that you will get suggestions to boost the speed and enhance the overall performance. If there are some issues, it’s better to hire a developer and optimize the website by resolving all the underlying technical shortcomings.
Content audit
For generating quality leads, you need to have compelling content that will convince the visitors to take action and become your customers. The best way to boost lead generation is to optimize the entire website’s content. First, check that all pages are having relevant meta titles, meta descriptions, and image alt tags. If they are missing or outdated, consider updating them on priority.
Optimize the existing content with the latest keywords that you’ve just found through the competitors’ analysis. It will improve the scope of ranking among competitive websites. While auditing the content, consider updating all the stats and figures so that it will boost credibility and improve rankings. Along with services pages and blogs, they also perform content audits of the landing pages. It is because the majority of the leads come from landing pages and you need to optimize them.
Create a content strategy
Content marketing is the ultimate way to keep generating leads for your business and it also adds more value to your visitors. Prepare a content calendar and list down all the topics that visitors are searching to reach businesses like you. Focus on creating quality content and if possible long-form content to offer complete information to users.
When you create long-form content, your visitors don’t need to visit multiple websites to collect chunks of information. It will build trust among your audience and ultimately bring more leads to the business. One pro tip here is to always focus on creating evergreen content that remains unaffected by time and market trends. Focus on core topics that will remain unchanged and users will still search for them after years. It will help you create a foundation for generating organic traffic.
Focus on Off-page activities
Off-page SEO is all about improving the brand’s visibility and awareness among potential buyers. Along with content creation strategies, also focus on how you will distribute the content so that it will reach the maximum number of people. Guest posts are an impactful way to generate brand awareness among potential customers and drive more traffic & leads. Focus on consistent off-page activities and it will help you generate plenty of business leads through different sources.
As more people are moving towards video marketing, you can also jump onto this trend and promote your products or services through platforms like YouTube. Video content is convenient and it helps significantly with overall branding. Turn your high-performing blogs into short informative videos to build an audience. While converting a blog into a video, make sure it’s not promotional otherwise the engagement rate will be much lower. When focusing on branding through videos, make sure it’s highly informative so that people will share it.
Final thoughts
Lead generation is an ongoing process and by focusing on these tips, you can gain an edge over the competitors. As more businesses are coming online to grow their customer base, you need to boost your website’s visibility using search engine strategies and keep generating business leads. Get ahead of the curve with an effective lead generation process and make your business future-focused.