It’s been some time now that you haven’t been satisfied with your lead generation results, so you are looking for quick fixes to make your leads grow overnight.
You can’t exactly remember where, but somewhere in some article some time ago, you read that optimizing your website for search engines can help you grow leads quickly and easily.
We will be honest with you straight away. Don’t fool yourself, SEO is not a quick fix. Rather, it is a long journey that will take both your time and energy. But the benefits you eventually reap will be more than rewarding.
When you use the best SEO practices over a long period of time, your website will be more visible to your potential customers, and you will stand much better chances to turn them into leads.
But before we start listing the most effective SEO lead generation strategies, we want to answer one fundamental question.
Why is SEO important for lead generation?
More and more users are no longer interested in paid ads. According to Statista study on ad blocking from 2014 to 2018, 24.4 percent of the people in the United States were using ad blockers on their devices. Moreover, this figure is estimated to increase to over 30 percent by the end of 2018.
In other words, if you are relying only on paid ads and neglecting the high power of SEO, you are probably failing to reach a large number of web users and turn them into leads.
Stats revealed the following findings:
- 18 percent of the people who performed a local search on the mobile device purchased the product or service on the same day or within 24 hours.
- Half of mobile local search resulted in visiting the store on the very same day.
- 78 percent of mobile local search led users to an offline purchase.
All this shows that SEO is crucial for your lead generation. It is the language of web search and, more importantly for you, the foundation of successful long-term lead generation.
That is why we decided to list the five most effective SEO techniques that will improve your online visibility and ultimately grow your leads.
Know your target audience
You will not send the same type of message to your friend and your annoying team member, will you? As a matter of fact, you may not even use the same app to communicate with them.
That is the thing with SEO as well. Your audience is your friend, so you want to communicate with them in a personal and pleasant way using different apps like Slack. But to do that, you need to know them like the back of your hand.
What is your audience demographics?
You need to create a buyer persona with as many details as you can think of. This includes their age, gender, education, income, and so on.
Once you determine all this, you can use it to create engaging content on your website that will speak the language of your audience.
What bothers them?
This is a big one. Finding out your potential customers’ problems and addressing them can play a significant role in your lead generation efforts.
This is not to say that you should manipulate your audience. Instead, try to answer their questions directly and help them solve their problems. This way, you build trust and make them more likely to convert to leads.
Where do they search for information?
To turn someone into a lead, you need to know where they spend time on the web. For example, if your customers are avid social media users, then focus on social media platforms and get the most out of them.
Optimize your website
Once you have found your audience, you need to host them at your home and make them feel amazing. In this case, your home is your website, so you want to do your best to optimize it for your visitors.
Website speed
Nobody has time to waste on a slow website. And not only is your website speed important for your audience but for search engines as well.
Here are some tips to improve your website speed:
- choose a reliable web host
- optimize your scripts
- enable caching
- optimize your images
- make your website responsive
- remove unnecessary baggage (scripts, plugins, spam comments, broken links, etc.)
Landing pages
A landing page is essential for an advertising campaign. In fact, it is the entrance to your website. That is why you need to build landing pages that convert.
Always make sure that your landing pages are optimized for search.
A good landing page will have:
- useful content based on the keyword that the visitor has searched for
- no navigation (because you want users to stay on the page)
- a clear call to action that will ask your visitors to sign up for email list through downloading a lead magnet (We will talk about lead magnets later in the article.)
Is your website mobile-friendly?
Stats show that responsive websites are necessary if you want to keep your visitors on the site. You need to understand that a mobile-friendly website is no longer a luxury but a necessity.
Therefore, if you don’t want to be penalized by Google and other search engines, make sure you create the landing pages that can help your business grow.
Optimize your content
The next step in your SEO lead generation journey is optimizing your content. This is a crucial aspect, especially when you know that only one page of high-quality content grew at an average of 413% in product signups for Freshsales in just four months.
Here are the most important aspects you should consider when optimizing your content:
Titles and descriptions
Titles and meta descriptions are what people see in search engines before they decide to click, so you need to optimize them the best you can.
Put your target keyword early in the title and make your descriptions appealing as this will make more people click on your content.
Page content
Include your target keywords in your content if you want to rank for those terms. Apart from targeting the main keywords, you should also include semantic keywords, which are the terms related to the primary search term.
Link building
First, make sure that you link your content to other content on your website as this enhances the website’s value and encourages your readers to go deeper into the site.
After that, you need to attract external links from high-quality sites through guest blogging, participating in expert roundups, as well as creating pillar content and mentioning influencers.
Content marketing
Even though this is not a content optimization technique per se, creating a solid content marketing plan and sticking with it will do wonders for your lead generation.
To get the most out of your content marketing, you should consider using content marketing tools as they will help you boost your content strategy and attract more visitors.
Think social media
With over 2 billion active users on social media platforms every day, it is easy to see why this type of marketing is essential. Moreover, social media marketing can be a very affordable and easy-to-use method to grow your leads.
Here are some tips that can help you get the best results on your social media:
- post valuable content
- speak the language which is used on the platform
- use the combination of your landing page and call to action
- use paid ads
- organize contests
- target the right audience using Facebook marketing tools
Finally, when it comes to social media, quality trumps quantity. This means that it is better to be more active on one or two platforms than to have accounts on all platforms and be unable to dedicate enough time to each of them.
Maybe your audience is not addicted to social media, but you have to build your social media presence nevertheless.
Google and other search engines take your social media presence into account when ranking websites. Therefore, fostering an active social media approach will have a positive long-term impact on your search optimization efforts.
The sooner you realize that everything is interconnected, the more effective your marketing campaign will be. After all, the Internet is not called the world wide web for no reason.
Use lead magnets
Lead magnets are special offers that you give to your website visitors. This can be any free offer which encourages them to subscribe to your email list.
It is very simple to use lead magnets. First, you create a high-quality post aimed at your visitors who are at the beginning or middle of their buyer’s journey.
However, you also need to create a downloadable companion resource such as a PDF checklist or a worksheet. The key is that this piece of content is useful to your readers.
These are the lead magnet ideas that work best:
Email courses and mini-courses
In a series of emails, you can teach new visitors how to achieve something. Similarly, you can host free mini-courses on Teachable, LearnPress or your website to show your visitors how to do something specific.
E-book
A free e-book lets you expand on a topic already covered in a blog post. In an e-book, you can combine several existing posts or even create new content, but make sure that the e-book content is longer than your regular blog posts.
Resource
If you have a post that covers a list of things (e.g., a shopping list or a step-by-step guide), you can turn it into a PDF file and offer it as a lead magnet.
Conclusion
As you can see, SEO is one of the top inbound marketing strategies, and it is among the most important lead generation factors.
It is far from being a quick fix. As we said, it is a long journey and a strategy that builds on itself. If you are wise enough to invest time and effort into optimizing your website for search engines, you will undoubtedly see an increase in your leads.
When you develop more high-quality content, optimize your website and use other top SEO lead generation strategies, you will start building an organic system that keeps your sales pipeline filled with quality leads and ultimately grows your revenue.
Dave Schneider is the founder of LessChurn, churn reduction app. In 2012 he quit his job to travel the world and has visited over 65 countries. In his spare time, he writes about SaaS and business at DaveSchneider.me.
