Why Use SEO for Lead Generation?
In the competitive digital markets businesses are trying to thrive within today, it makes sense to make the most of each possible route available to help generate leads. The importance in harnessing some techniques for lead generation can often been overlooked, but Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can be key to helping grow your business by boosting worthwhile site traffic.
Why is SEO Good for Lead Generation?
Building a strong SEO strategy is ideal for generating leads to your business. Successful SEO helps your website rank further up on search engine results pages, also known as SERPs. In an age where search engines are available at our fingertips, focusing on optimising your website to appear in these results is vital.
At this point, you may be wondering why paid advertisements aren’t the way forward for lead generation. While pay per click (PPC) ads are a viable step in increasing traffic, many consumers today are highly wary of clicking on these often visibly sponsored results. Social media marketing is another way to launch PPC campaigns; however, scrollers are becoming increasingly disdainful towards the hundreds of ads they are shown on each platform. Alongside this, it’s worth recognising your ads may go unnoticed by the right audiences, due to the continued desensitisation against advertising.
In comparison, SEO is a great way to boost organic traffic to your website or e-commerce platform. Organic traffic lands you the highest chance of hooking an ideal customer in with your digital content, as well-ranked sites tend to be highly relevant to the search phrases they appear for. This is exactly what makes search engines such as Google so popular – they work.
What Kind of Return on Investment Can I Expect from SEO?
The ROI from improving your SEO approach will vary between businesses. It all depends on the type of industry you’re in, the kinds of keywords you’re targeting, and the level of competition you’re up against. While establishing a highly-ranked business can be a slow build, it’s a strategy that will likely pay impressive dividends on investment.
SEO also tends to be more of a long-lasting, sustainable approach than other digital marketing techniques. This is because SERP algorithms are specifically designed to highlight the best websites first. The ultimate goal of SEO is therefore to create and nurture a quality, well-functioning website that enhances consumer experience. Generating leads via SEO can be a successful way to build lasting relationships between your business and clients.
How to Use SEO for Lead Generation
It’s easy enough for us to explain why SEO is so beneficial for lead generation – but how does it work? Here are a few actionable tips you can put into practice while developing your own SEO strategies.
Do your research
Any effective SEO approach involves understanding your audience, inside and out. You almost have to work backwards in order to figure out exactly what you need to focus on – put yourself in the customer’s shoes. What would you search for if you were looking for a solution to the problem your business solves?
Successful keyword research can be undertaken using paid SEO and marketing insight tools, however it can take quite a bit of practice (and money) to maximise your ability to use these effectively on a larger or more long-term scale.
Competitor research is a useful way to ensure you’re focusing on relevant, targeted content creation and keywords.
Surveys or interviews with your audience can help better determine their needs and how they would phrase them. Researching consumer-led platforms is another effective way to look into this.
Optimise your content
Informative and relevant content that is directly targeted to entice your audience can be one of the core ways to boost SEO.
Optimise all aspects of your content. As well as creating compelling content schedules, make sure you incorporate effective keywords strategically in your URLs, meta data and relevant website headings.
Readability can be a great way to increase your ranking too, as SERPs can penalise badly written or disorganised content. Use bullet points and accurate headings to help readers source the information they need quickly. Including images is another way to uplift the readability of your posts and pages.
Ensure your website can be crawled by Search Engines
Search engines understandably favour websites that work properly. There’s nothing more frustrating than clicking a search result, only to be met with an unreadable website that harasses you with irrelevant links, too many ads, and invasive marketing pop-ups. Search engine algorithms take all these factors for usability into account when ranking websites in listings, so improving user experience is in your best interests. This can also help generate more loyal, lasting leads.
For many businesses, a lot of this means focusing on the technical aspect of your website – which can be a struggle for those who aren’t experienced in digital marketing.
Improve loading speeds and responsiveness. Search engines want to provide users with quick, accessible results. Optimise and embed the visual content on your website such as images and videos for faster loading.
Work on accessibility. It’s almost impossible to generate leads if audiences can’t access your website in the first place. Make sure all pages are equally as accessible across devices and browsers. You might have to adjust how things load or display on desktop, tablet and mobile to ensure key content and navigation works.
Perhaps most importantly, you should always look to enhance the accessibility of your website for those users with additional needs. Adding alternative text (ALT tags) to images, providing subtitles for video content, and making sure navigation links are clear is important.
Fix technical issues. Broken links are a common find as URLs change, websites shut down, or links are even misspelled or added incorrectly. You should remove any duplicate content throughout your website, as this can be flagged as spam or irrelevant. Develop a comprehensive XML sitemap that search engines can easily navigate and crawl through.
Follow the SEO guidelines! In some cases, search engines will ‘blacklist’ those websites using ‘SEO hacks’ that claim to trick the system. These ‘black hat techniques’ are easily picked up on, and your ability to generate leads will suffer as engines prevent you from appearing in results.
Measure your site’s performance and adapt to patterns
Using Google Analytics alongside an effective marketing attribution tool such as Ruler Analytics can help track lead generation efforts.
Get to know your audience more. Analyse how they interact with your website and content. What do they prefer to click on at the end of an article? How often is your ‘contact’ page used, and where do these links originate from?
Evaluate your SEO and keyword strategies. Track which keywords and content brings traffic to your site, as well as specific phrases that result in the most conversions to leads.
Pinpoint and fix technical issues. Performance analytics can identify areas of your site that aren’t functioning properly or need developing further. For example, noticing an unexplained drop in traffic to a certain page can indicate you have a broken or missing link.
Use data to drive your decisions. Understanding your analytics data is key to making informed decisions about which areas to feed your marketing budget into.
Strategise with effective link building techniques
Link building is one of the top ways you can optimise your content successfully. Using links from trustworthy sources is essential, as you may be ‘penalised’ for including irrelevant, spam-like, or even faulty links. Here are a few tips for lead generation via link building:
Valuable content creation helps with making sure you have a website that others will want to link to! Building these connections proves to search engines that your site is well worth taking a look at. Growing these industry links, both digitally and personally, can boost your online presence significantly.
Consider guest posting opportunities. With the impressive statistics boasted by a range of social media and industry influencers, it’s worth looking into how much they might charge you for a guest post. Having them link to your site via their popular platforms will generate interest and, hopefully, income too.
Utilise the power of social media. With a multitude of platforms to build links to your website from, social media enables businesses to access new, targeted audiences they may not otherwise have reached.
Ensure quality content creation
While optimising your content from a technical perspective is important, making sure your content is on point to begin with is key to maintaining that organic approach to lead generation.Develop a strong, consistent content schedule. Research relevant industry topics and upcoming news to share with your audience. Look at writing about unique perspectives, interviewing customers or clients, or developing useful guides that provide value to your target audience. Content is everywhere, and you need to make yours worth seeking out.
Utilise a range of content formats. By posting relevant and engaging content in different media forms, you can maximise the potential for lead generation by building your visibility (and shareability) online. Look beyond blog posts.
Working with skilled content writers can encourage leads. They’ll be able to come up with engaging content and compelling meta descriptions and titles, encouraging click-through rates from organic traffic.
Generate Lasting Leads with SEO by Speaking to Epic New Media
It’s fast become a known fact that SEO plays a crucial role in lead generation. Developing organic content that drives interested audiences to your website is well worth the investment, and you’ll find organic traffic can translate into valuable leads for your business.
By following our guide to SEO for lead generation above, you should be able to implement a few of the best practices we’ve described. However, this can take a considerable amount of time and resources that many business owners just don’t have spare. Epic New Media can help. As a results-driven search engine marketing agency, we work with a number of businesses across the UK. Elevating their online presence and practice, we focus on building sustainable growth through our tried-and-tested SEO strategies and engaging digital content.
Call our team today on 0800 464 0161 if you’d like to discuss how we could transform your approach to lead generation. You can also take advantage of our free online marketing audit, where our specialists will analyse your website and identify ways to enhance your SEO strategy. We look forward to working with you!