Generating leads is vital for the success of your online campaign. Without it, what’s the point? How can you expect to make profits, expand your business or increase sales without maximizing the potential of your website? As an online business, you must always be improving your lead generation – and you can do it with SEO.
What’s The Connection Between SEO & Lead Generation?
Firstly, it is important to understand the connection between lead generation and SEO. Although two very different strategies, they work hand-in-hand to deliver the results you want.
In basic terms, lead generation is the strategy in which you cultivate an interest in your business by building a list of potential clients or customers, aka, leads. SEO is the practical strategy to implement search engine optimization techniques within your website to improve rankings on search engines, such as Google.
So what’s the connection?
Without SEO, you won’t generate the interest in your site that can boost its lead generation. Optimizations can complement lead generation strategies by driving awareness for your company via organic traffic to the site. That traffic turns to leads. We got the tips on how you can do this.
5 SEO Tips For Lead Generation
Audit Your Website
You can’t fully commit or implement an SEO strategy for lead generation without auditing your current website. It’s the starting point for your whole strategy and will ensure that you’re able to execute your plan without any far-reaching consequences. Part of this audit should include the following assessments:
- Keyword research (look over the quality of your keywords, and if they’re working. You might have to change completely or adapt them slightly to ensure you can compete online)
- Website speed (slow-loading websites are killers for user experience and will significantly deter lead generation. You can improve your website by removing unused plugins, clearing caches and optimizing image and video sizes)
- Use Screaming Frog, a website crawler that assesses the current state of your website. It will check your website for broken links (404 errors), over the character limit titles and meta descriptions (or even worse: missing), duplicate content, and so on.
Once you have identified your website’s key problems, you can now look to make amends and fix up the remaining issues.
Update Existing Or New On-Page Content
While SEO helps drive people to your website, it’s the quality, uniqueness and style of the content that keep your users engaged and turns them into leads. That’s why there are two approaches to your website content:
- Update your existing content
- Publish new content
For the former, it’s all about making it better than it should be. Is the language concise, clear and consistent? Does it offer more in-depth insight into products and services than others? Conduct a review of your current content and update it to make it more engaging to your users.
Some SEO tips that can help include: organizing sections with headers (use only one H1 and a few H2s), mix your content between paragraphs and dot points, and use images (with optimized names to help rankings).
For the latter, publish new content consistently on your site. You can do this by always updating your blogs with new stories, case studies and articles, such as commonly asked questions and answers, how-tos or advice for solving common customer problems, what to look for in a product or service and tips for maximizing your business (like this blog here!). You can also add resource pages that describe your products or services or landing pages.
Make sure that you create high-quality content that speaks directly to your customers, with a strong focus on keywords that are littered throughout your page – title, meta, headers and within the content itself – while ensuring that you convert them from users to leads.
Build Links from High-Quality Sources
Any SEO agency will tell you that links (or backlinks) are an integral part of the SEO equation. Links are seen as a vote of credibility for your content by search engines, so the more links you have, the better your rankings, the higher the chances you’ll increase your lead generation.
But not all backlinks to your website are the same. Some are naturally better than others. If you have a guest blog posted on Forbes that links back to your website, it’s going to rank better than ones from a random blog on the internet.
That’s why you have to invest time and effort in procuring a backlink from a trustworthy site that ranks high on Google and is considered an authoritative provider. There are a few ways you can develop these high-quality links:
- Join directories like Bright Local and the Better Business Bureau. Place links within the bio of your page to help build some link support.
- Post guest blogs on websites such as Forbes, the New York Times and so forth.
- Create social media profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram (use the platform most suitable for your business). From there, post regularly on your profile, using links back to your website.
- Create a Google My Business profile (more details on that below).
- Consider relationships with other businesses and see if you can post links from their website to yours and vice versa. It can help both of you.
Sign Up for Google My Business
It’s in your best interest to ensure that you are easy to find on Google – the world’s leading search engine. So it makes sense that you create a Google My Business profile.
Similar to a Facebook business page and account, a GMB provides instant information about your business to potential customers when searching for your keywords. In fact, in many cases (thanks to Google Maps), your business can appear on Google first through this platform.
But it’s more than just signing up to a GMB. You have to make the most of it. Post on it as you would on social media, keep information on your business updated and insightful (so when your details change, update your account too), and respond to customer reviews and feedback.
This process will help you generate links and interest to your business, while providing your customers with direct access to your website’s most important pages, thereby increasing lead conversions.
Add a Call to Action to Each Web Page
How do you convert all that incoming SEO website traffic if your customers don’t know what to do next? This is where creating Call-To-Actions (CTAs) for each page pays off.
A simple form at the bottom of the page, a sign-up form, or a link to a specific page can be enough to get your users active on your site. It’s a clear statement of intent, and most importantly, makes generating leads easier than ever before.