SEO and lead generation are among the most crucial elements of an effective marketing plan to grow your business.
SEO intends to give your website more visibility on different search engines (especially on Google Search). Meanwhile, lead generation is about cultivating interest in your business project and attracting qualified prospects to nurture and transform them into loyal customers. So, no business can survive without leads.
Even though they are two different concepts, bringing the two strategies together will drive massive growth for your business. That's what we will see in this article: how you can combine both concepts and convert those leads into actual customers.
Table of Contents:
- How to Improve SEO for Lead Generation
- What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
- What is Lead Generation
- How Do They Work Together
- How to Optimize SEO for Your Business
- Direct Lead Generation Through SEO
- Indirect Lead Generation Through SEO
- Key Takeaways
What is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO revolves around making changes on different parts of your website to improve your rankings and visibility in search engine results pages like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Optimizing your website for SEO can include improving loading speed and performance, creating content that includes relevant keywords, and encouraging engagement to keep website visitors on your web pages, among other things.
The main goal of SEO is to increase your website's rankings, bring more organic traffic to check your website content, and keep them engaged with your content.
What is Lead Generation
Lead generation is getting a consistent stream of sales-qualified leads willing to make a purchase.
It involves a marketing campaign to capture prospects interested in your service or product and convert them into customers. It can use different strategies, including paid advertising, calls to action, landing pages, and downloadable content to generate and convert leads.
Lead generation campaigns are important for the success of any retail business, especially with such fierce and ever-growing online competition.
How Do They Work Together
Lead generation and SEO work together. For example, when you appear on the first page of Google search results, more potential customers will learn about and interact with your business.
SEO is one of the best ways to increase your customer base, sales, and revenue and keep your business thriving and growing. Implementing an SEO strategy will increase your lead generation, as you are appealing to your target audience in the right place at the right time online.
Implementing strong SEO tactics will increase your rank in search engine results pages, which will lead to more exposure for your brand, more website traffic, more clicks, and, eventually, more sales.
In the ultimate instance, SEO generates leads by ensuring that you are visible in Search Engines when users are looking for your target keywords.
How to Optimize SEO for Your Business
We established how important SEO is for your digital marketing plan. It can increase your client base and sales and make your business grow. But you still need to know how to improve your business's SEO efforts.
Let's check the best SEO tips to improve the visibility of your business and, consequently, increase your lead generation.
Audit Your Website
You need to audit your website to know which pages need improvement and which are performing well. We suggest crawling your website as the first step.
Also, check the loading speed of your website. It is very important for the user experience. Slow load times on desktop and mobile devices can hurt a site's ranking and lead to a higher abandonment rate.
You can use Google PageSpeed Insights, a free tool provided by Google, to check the loading speed of your website. It also suggests how you can improve the performance of those pages as well.
Do Keyword Research
A key element of SEO is the presence of relevant keywords in your content. With that in mind, performing keyword research is very important for steering your SEO strategy and understanding points of interest for your target audience.
Don't just create content based on assumptions or some abstract terminology people aren't looking for. It is a shot in the dark that doesn't work often. Identify the main keywords for your business and create a list of related queries and terms from there.
These keywords will build blocks for an SEO content strategy. The relevant keyword for a blog post or an article should be right on the title and meta description of your content to be recognized by search engine crawlers.
Optimize Existing Content
While SEO helps drive people to your site, ultimately, it is the user experience and the quality of the content that will get people to stay. People want to read content that is engaging, useful, and accessible.
Review your own existing content. Is it clear and concise? Does it offer value or insight to the readers? Ask these questions when checking on your content and see what can be improved.
Some SEO tips that will help you throughout the process are organizing sections with headers and focusing on a healthy blend of context and readability (use bullet points, numbered lists, etc.). You should also include images with alternative descriptions, which helps the search engines crawl.
Whenever you are done optimizing, you should check out your content and the page performance using an analytics tool (like Google Analytics) and see if any areas of your site have high bounce rates (usually, check anything above 60%). These areas are your priority when refining existing content.
Check Your Competitors' Performance
You should keep a record of how your competitors position themselves in search results for similar queries and analyze how well their pages perform.
If it is performing better than you for the same or similar search terms, dig into it and analyze why this may be. When analyzing your competitors' pages, consider the structure of their posts, their backlinks, how they are written, and so on.
Understanding why similar content is performing better than yours will help you plan a better SEO lead-generation strategy for your own efforts. It will highlight many dated aspects of your strategy that needs an update or technical issues that might be hindering your ranking on search engines.
Create an Ongoing Content Strategy
Making a steady stream of content that provides value to your audience is crucial for lead generation. Once they realize that your insight is valuable and can be used, they will be more willing to sign up for a newsletter or fill out forms to access premium content.
This is one of the most important reasons you should create a content calendar and help your team with a well-organized regular publishing schedule.
Organize articles and topics by theme based on keyword research. It will ensure you publish content that people are looking for, resulting in a larger and more engaged audience coming to your site.
Combining an ongoing content methodology with keyword research will significantly assist your SEO lead generation strategy, as making content that people are interested in will increase your brand presence online and bring in those important leads.
Have Active Social Media Channels
While Google says that social signals don't influence your search engine rankings, data from Search Engine Journal shows us that social media will help to rank your website better.
There is a correlation between ranking position and social signals. For example, the top-ranking web pages on Google search display significantly more social signals than those websites that aren’t performing as well.
One could argue that social media indirectly correlates and impacts SEO. The more social media presence you have, the more chance you have of attracting those who will link to you.
Make sure to maintain an active social media channel to boost your SEO lead-generation campaigns.
Plan a Backlink Strategy
Backlinks are created on different websites to link with one another. These are very important to improve your rankings, as search engines will see them as a vote of credibility. But not all backlinks are ranked the same. They need to make sense and not be linked to a random, unrelated piece of content. Getting a backlink from a trustworthy website with a high authority domain is key.
For backlinks to have a positive impact on your page ranking, it has to include the tag "rel=follow." It signals to site crawlers that they must follow this link to the corresponding website. Meanwhile, "no-follow" links (rel=nofollow) will tell search engine crawlers to prevent link equity from passing.
Backlinks are a huge component in SEO, but earning those can be tougher than it sounds. Google is highly suspicious of any artificial linking activities and might penalize websites with backlinks that don't look organic or are linked to irrelevant content. Any shady operation may hurt you more than aid you.
You should also look at your site's current backlink profile and check for any broken links that need to be fixed. It is an easy way to improve your SEO while you are working on getting high domain authority from other websites.
Consider any existing relationships with your brand and see if there is any opportunity to gain a backlink. It could be in the form of guest posts or if you see an article of theirs that would benefit from linking to one of your website's articles and aid in providing additional context to the topic.
Hire Professionals
No one said you have to do everything all by yourself. Hiring an SEO agency is always the best option. They’ll know exactly what SEO strategy will be the best for your business and how to implement it properly.
Consider hiring GamerSEO if you value experience and knowledge of everything SEO-related and don’t want to worry about anything. Letting professionals do the work for you is your best bet, and you shouldn’t hesitate if you have the funds to do so. Simply fill out the contact form, and they will contact you ASAP.
Direct Lead Generation Through SEO
At the basic level, SEO uses Google to drive new visitors to your website and attract them to your content, possibly converting them into leads.
It achieves this goal by reaching the right audience by using transactional keywords and publishing high-quality content for that target audience by understanding search intent.
Next, we will see how SEO generates leads directly by connecting prospects looking for what you provide and sell on your website.
Transactional Keywords
To convert those prospects into customers, you need to target transactional keywords. These keywords are the ones that indicate the searcher is interested in purchasing one of your products or contracting your service.
They range in degrees from fully transactional to more research-oriented. The most valuable searchers are those closer to the purchasing end of the scale. Your SEO content's job is to pull them through the process.
Once you are familiar with managing transactional keywords, you can move to another key element of SEO lead generation, which is regularly publishing high-quality content that includes those keywords by understanding search intent.
Satisfying Search Intent
Search intent is another cornerstone of SEO. Creating high-quality content with search intent in mind results in higher trust with Google (or any other search engine), leading to higher rankings and generating more visitors to your site. This content conveys your authority to the visitors, converting them into more leads.
Google's main goal is connecting their users with the best page for their search phrase. It is what keeps people using Google instead of another search engine.
The visitor engagement is where the concept of "search intent" comes in. When you satisfy search intent, they will stay on your page longer, telling Google they have found what they wanted, and your site should be shown to more people.
You should create the best piece of content that responds to search queries. It should achieve the following three things:
- Taking care of the reader by responding to their question concisely and quickly
- Stimulate their minds on every paragraph, including a genuinely new idea, using engaging graphics or novel pieces of data
- Conclude your content with practical next steps, helping readers to put those ideas into action
Creating content that meets all of these criteria will ensure that your visitors immediately engage with your content and establish your website as a helpful and reputable resource. When those visitors are already in your market, it will lead them to become new leads.
How Regular Publishing Impact Lead Generation
Publishing new content regularly is crucial because each new piece of content is another chance to implement important keywords. It also works because it gives the publisher a "bonus" in authority.
It is called “News Website Bonus." Google sees that you are acting analogously as an authoritative publication or similar to an industry news site. Consequently, this leads to your SEO campaign increasing its organic revenue exponentially year by year.
Indirect Lead Generation Through SEO
SEO is also an excellent way to generate more leads indirectly using content created for the SEO campaign on other marketing channels.
The content can position your business as a thought leader and create more brand impressions by appearing in prospects' social media feeds and email inboxes.
SEO synergizes well with other marketing channels, such as:
- Email Marketing: It helps build your mailing list whenever you include a sign-up box and high-quality content. It provides materials to include in your email drip campaigns.
- Social Media: Content created for SEO campaigns can be impactful on social media channels such as LinkedIn and Twitter if the content is accompanied by an insightful status update.
- Webinars: The quantitive data and organization concepts included in your content that visitors might find interesting could be repackaged as slides within a webinar. Even some blog articles can translate into an entire webinar.
- Public Speech: SEO can be used to attract some speaking opportunities, targeting keywords such as "speaker" and "expert" and acting as fodder for your presentations.
- Trade Shows: A SEO campaign increases your status within your industry. Such name recognition encourages customer interaction with your booth. Your content can also be repurposed for brochures.
Key Takeaways
Making an SEO lead generation campaign will ensure your ongoing marketing efforts have a great chance of succeeding in an oversaturated market.
It will also help future-proof your site's content by maximizing the chances of gaining new leads with a strong online presence and giving a great user experience.
Leads can also be generated with the help of SEO. If you have the right strategy, it will definitely work. This post describes it perfectly: