MARKETING
The Correlation and Impact of SEO on Lead Generation
Lead generation isn’t easy by any means, and it’s one of the most challenging aspects of marketing that businesses face online. It may not be a major challenge getting followers or views on social media, but driving traffic to your site and turning visitors into potential customers is another game entirely. How do you optimize your site to not just fulfill a viewer’s immediate need but collect their info? It takes more than the power of persuasion to make a visitor a lead.
Strong lead generation requires a dynamic SEO strategy designed to meet your current needs and help you acquire enough customers to help your business grow. Sustainability and growth have to be handled parallel; if you try to prioritize them together, one always suffers. SEO allows you to satisfy returning customers while gradually attracting new ones as well. In addition, search engine optimization for lead generation also helps you build brand awareness.
What Is Lead Generation?
Potential customers are leads that you follow and target to convert into paying customers. Those who land on your site aren’t automatically guaranteed to become a customer. The process of converting another viewer into a customer is called the buyer’s journey, and it occurs through a personalized sales funnel that you develop.
The sales funnel addresses the various questions that arise as people move toward a purchase and can enter at any stage, and you need to have a firm grasp on how each one differs in order to provide the most relevant, effective content. When you have a good sales funnel, you’ll know what your leads are thinking at every stage. Are they just looking for general information, or are they already comparing your product to your competitors? Lead generation tackles the three primary stages of a buyer’s journey:
- Top funnel: awareness through marketing efforts
- Middle funnel: interest, education and application
- Bottom funnel: decision-making through price comparison and value assessment
How to Improve Your Leads Through SEO
The more visible your brand is, the more potential leads land on your site. Google doesn’t just reward you for being online. You have to create engaging, recurring content that answers questions, provides value and ultimately serves a purpose to more than just your company. One of the biggest mistakes businesses make online is designing solely for themselves. Their entire website is one big advertisement, and it fails to deliver any real value to visitors. There are plenty of reasons to click off of a website. Good SEO can stop that from happening with targeted content and effective web design.
Get an Audit
A site audit involves analyzing the on- and off-page elements to address any potential issues. A professional SEO audit looks at keywords, site structure, content formatting and more to pinpoint areas you could improve. You can grab your instant SEO audit for free online right now. The entire process takes a matter of seconds, and you’ll have personalized feedback on why your site isn’t ranking higher in top search engines.
Once you know where your SEO falls short, you can come up with a strategy to make incremental improvements. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is a good website. In fact, search engine optimization requires ongoing dedication to thrive. Trends will evolve, and even in industries with a fairly standardized consumer base, there are still particular topics that are more likely to generate traffic at any given time.
Make Your Pages Mobile-Friendly
In addition to a fast server and responsive design, you have to structure the layout of your pages to be skimmable and mobile-friendly. People don’t want to read blocks of text or navigate around bulky images to get what they want. Keyword-rich headers, natural language and alt-descriptions on useful images will all help you rank higher. People will also be more likely to engage with more pages on your site if it’s easy to read.
Compare Your Content to Your Competitors
Make a list of your top three or five competitors, then explore their service pages and content posts to see how yours measure up. When you Google some of your target keywords, what sites come up, and what do they have that’s different from your website? You don’t have to outrank everyone, and your goal shouldn’t be to copy what you see on the top-rated sites. After all, there’s no point for Google to award you a higher ranking than a competitor if both of your sites have the exact same information. Instead, use these sites as inspiration to improve your content and evolve your site. Leads aren’t just looking for a one-time answer; they want to know that your business is able to fulfill their needs and offer ongoing solutions. If their experience at your site is memorable, they’re likely to come back again.
Keep Track of Your Potential Customers
Have landing pages and freebie prompts that encourage people to leave their email and gain exclusive information or offers. Once you have their email, you’ll be able to target them again later. Make sure that you’re also using a dedicated customer relationship management (CRM) software to track leads. With the help of a CRM, you can keep profiles of all your clients and leads in one place. You can also document your interactions with them, ensuring that you’re able to meet them no matter where they are in the buyer’s journey. When it comes to leads, a CRM is the best way to keep track of data. Prospective customers can be rated based on factors that influence their likelihood of converting. Criteria like budget and interest can then be sorted and easily retargeted through marketing efforts.
With new insights, you can refine your SEO to convert more traffic into leads. This also makes it easier to identify what aspects of your current content strategy aren’t appealing to your audience. If people are highly responsive on one web page but consistently leave another in less than five seconds, what’s the reason? Putting all of these elements together, you’ll be able to create a search engine optimization strategy for your brand that does more than just rank. It will help you grow, evolve and gain a better understanding of your top customers.
Author:
Drew is a financial enthusiast, seasoned blogger, music and sports fanatic. He enjoys spending time outdoors with his wife and daughter fishing and boating. He is dedicated to his 15+ year career in the banking, mortgage, and personal finance industry.
