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The Correlation and Impact of SEO on Lead Generation

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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.

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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.

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How To Combine PR and Content Marketing Superpowers To Achieve Business Goals

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A figure pulls open a dress shirt to reveal the term PR on a Superman-like costume, reflecting the superpower resulting from combining content and PR.

A transformative shift is happening, and it’s not AI.

The aisle between public relations and content marketing is rapidly narrowing. If you’re smart about the convergence, you can forever enhance your brand’s storytelling.

The goals and roles of content marketing and PR overlap more and more. The job descriptions look awfully similar. Shrinking budgets and a shrewd eye for efficiency mean you and your PR pals could face the chopping block if you don’t streamline operations and deliver on the company’s goals (because marketing communications is always first to be axed, right?).

Yikes. Let’s take a big, deep breath. This is not a threat. It’s an opportunity.

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Reach across the aisle to PR and streamline content creation, improve distribution strategies, and get back to the heart of what you both are meant to do: Build strong relationships and tell impactful stories.

So, before you panic-post that open-to-work banner on LinkedIn, consider these tips from content marketing, PR, and journalism pros who’ve figured out how to thrive in an increasingly narrowing content ecosystem.

1. See journalists as your audience

Savvy pros know the ability to tell an impactful story — and support it with publish-ready collateral — grounds successful media relationships. And as a content marketer, your skills in storytelling and connecting with audiences, including journalists, naturally support your PR pals’ media outreach.

Strategic storytelling creates content focused on what the audience needs and wants. Sharing content on your blog or social media builds relationships with journalists who source those channels for story ideas, event updates, and subject matter experts.

“Embedding PR strategies in your content marketing pieces informs your audience and can easily be picked up by media,” says Alex Sanchez, chief experience officer at BeWell, New Mexico’s Health Insurance Marketplace. “We have seen reporters do this many times, pulling stories from our blogs and putting them in the nightly news — most of the time without even reaching out to us.”

Acacia James, weekend producer/morning associate producer at WTOP radio in Washington, D.C., says blogs and social media posts are helpful to her work. “If I see a story idea, and I see that they’re willing to share information, it’s easier to contact them — and we can also backlink their content. It’s huge for us to be able to use every avenue.” 

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Kirby Winn, manager of PR at ImpactLife, says reporters and assignment editors are key consumers of their content. “And I don’t mean a news release that just hit their inbox. They’re going to our blog and consuming our stories, just like any other audience member,” he says. “Our organization has put more focus into content marketing in the past few years — it supports a media pitch so well and highlights the stories we have to tell.”

Storytelling attracts earned media that might not pick up the generic news topic. “It’s one thing to pitch a general story about how we help consumers sign up for low-cost health insurance,” Alex says. “Now, imagine a single mom who just got a plan after years of thinking it was too expensive. She had a terrible car accident, and the $60,000 ER bill that would have ruined her financially was covered. Now that’s a story journalists will want to cover, and that will be relatable to their audience and ours.” 

2. Learn the media outlet’s audience

Seventy-three percent of reporters say one-fourth or less of the stories pitched are relevant to their audiences, according to Cision’s 2023 State of the Media Report (registration required).

PR pros are known for building relationships with journalists, while content marketers thrive in building communities around content. Merge these best practices to build desirable content that works for your target audience and the media’s audiences simultaneously.

WTOP’s Acacia James says sources who show they’re ready to share helpful, relevant content often win pitches for coverage. “In radio, we do a lot of research on who is listening to us, and we’re focused on a prototype called ‘Mike and Jen’ — normal, everyday people in Generation X … So when we get press releases and pitches, we ask, ‘How interested will Mike and Jen be in this story?’” 

3. Deliver the full content package (and make journalists’ jobs easier)

Cranking out content to their media outlet’s standards has never been tougher for journalists. Newsrooms are significantly understaffed, and anything you can do to make their lives easier will be appreciated and potentially rewarded with coverage. Content marketers are built to think about all the elements to tell the story through multiple mediums and channels.

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“Today’s content marketing pretty much provides a package to the media outlet,” says So Young Pak, director of media relations at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. “PR is doing a lot of storytelling work in advance of media publication. We (and content marketing) work together to provide the elements to go with each story — photos, subject matter experts, patients, videos, and data points, if needed.”   

At WTOP, the successful content package includes audio. “As a radio station, we are focused on high-quality sound,” Acacia James says. “Savvy sources know to record and send us voice memos, and then we pull cuts from the audio … You will naturally want to do someone a favor if they did you one — like providing helpful soundbites, audio, and newsworthy stories.”  

While production value matters to some media, you shouldn’t stress about it. “In the past decade, how we work with reporters has changed. Back in the day, if they couldn’t be there in person, they weren’t going to interview your expert,” says Jason Carlton, an accredited PR professional and manager of marketing and communications at Intermountain Health. “During COVID, we had to switch to virtual interviewing. Now, many journalists are OK with running a Teams or Zoom interview they’ve done with an expert on the news.”

BeWell’s Alex Sanchez agrees. “I’ve heard old school PR folks cringe at the idea of putting up a Zoom video instead of getting traditional video interviews. It doesn’t really matter to consumers. Focus on the story, on the timeliness, and the relevance. Consumers want authenticity, not super stylized, stiff content.”

4. Unite great minds to maximize efficiency

Everyone needs to set aside the debate about which team — PR or content marketing — gets credit for the resulting media coverage.

At MedStar Washington Hospital Center, So Young and colleagues adopt a collaborative mindset on multichannel stories. “We can get the interview and gather information for all the different pieces — blog, audio, video, press release, internal newsletter, or magazine. That way, we’re not trying to figure things out individually, and the subject matter experts only have to have that conversation once,” she says.

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Regular, cross-team meetings are essential to understand the best channels for reaching key audiences, including the media. A story that began life as a press release might reap SEO and earned media gold if it’s strategized as a blog, video, and media pitch.

“At Intermountain Health, we have individual teams for media relations, marketing, social media, and hospital communications. That setup works well because it allows us to bring in the people who are the given experts in those areas,” says Intermountain’s Jason Carlton. “Together, we decide if a story is best for the blog, a media pitch, or a mix of channels — that way, we avoid duplicating work and the risk of diluting the story’s impact.”

5. Measure what matters

Cutting through the noise to earn media mentions requires keen attention to metrics. Since content marketing and PR metrics overlap, synthesizing the data in your team meetings can save time while streamlining your storytelling efforts.

“For content marketers, using analytical tools such as GA4 can help measure the effectiveness of their content campaigns and landing pages to determine meaningful KPIs such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, lead generation, and conversion rates,” says John Martino, director of digital marketing for Visiting Angels. “PR teams can use media coverage and social interactions to assess user engagement and brand awareness. A unified and omnichannel approach can help both teams demonstrate their value in enhancing brand visibility, engagement, and overall business success.”

To track your shared goals, launch a shared dashboard that helps tell the combined “story of your stories” to internal and executive teams. Among the metrics to monitor:

  • Page views: Obviously, this queen of metrics continues to be important across PR and content marketing. Take your analysis to the next level by evaluating which niche audiences are contributing to these views to further hone your storytelling targets, including media outlets.
  • Earned media mentions: Through a media tracker service or good old Google Alerts, you can tally the echo of your content marketing and PR. Look at your site’s referral traffic report to identify media outlets that send traffic to your blog or other web pages.
  • Organic search queries: Dive into your analytics platform to surface organic search queries that lead to visitors. Build from those questions to develop stories that further resonate with your audience and your targeted media.
  • On-page actions: When visitors show up on your content, what are they doing? What do they click? Where do they go next? Building next-step pathways is your bread and butter in content marketing — and PR can use them as a natural pipeline for media to pick up more stories, angles, and quotes.

But perhaps the biggest metric to track is team satisfaction. Who on the collaborative team had the most fun writing blogs, producing videos, or calling the news stations? Lean into the natural skills and passions of your team members to distribute work properly, maximize the team output, and improve relationships with the media, your audience, and internal teams.

“It’s really trying to understand the problem to solve — the needle to move — and determining a plan that will help them achieve their goal,” Jason says. “If you don’t have those measurable objectives, you’re not going to know whether you made a difference.”

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Don’t fear the merger

Whether you deliberately work together or not, content marketing and public relations are tied together. ImpactLife’s Kirby Winn explains, “As soon as we begin to talk about (ourselves) to a reporter who doesn’t know us, they are certainly going to check out our stories.”

But consciously uniting PR and content marketing will ease the challenges you both face. Working together allows you to save time, eliminate duplicate work, and gain free time to tell more stories and drive them into impactful media placements.

Register to attend Content Marketing World in San Diego. Use the code BLOG100 to save $100. Can’t attend in person this year? Check out the Digital Pass for access to on-demand session recordings from the live event through the end of the year.

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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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