The main goal or purpose for the majority of businesses is to generate a profit, without revenue, brands like ours and yours would simply cease to exist. 91% of marketers say that generating leads is their number 1 goal, ahead of things such as brand awareness or engagement. Whilst not every single lead is likely to close into a sale, your lead generation strategy is key to securing a sustainable future for your business.
The question of ‘do I really need SEO?’ comes around a lot for us, probably more so now than ever before. The answer is yes, every business across various industries and of all sizes and structures can benefit from a solid search engine optimisation strategy.
If your business is currently experiencing a drop in online conversions or you’ve identified a fall in traffic to your website then this is the guide for you. We’ll be walking you through how SEO can help empower your brand and supercharge your online presence to ultimately generate new leads.
Why is SEO Important For Your Business?
In today’s overcrowded marketplaces, brands and businesses are constantly competing to win-over prospects in the market for their products or services.
The majority of online experiences, around 68%, start with a search engine. In terms of handling our search queries, it’s no surprise that Google holds the largest share, 83% of all global traffic comes from Google Search, Images and Maps. Bing accounted for nearly 9% of the global search market.
To depict how crucial it is to achieve visibility on the first page in search results, 75% of users don’t scroll past the first page of search results. If your website is sitting down on the second page of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Page), it’s unlikely many people are going to be aware of your business let alone visit your website. There’s a running joke in the SEO world that the best place to hide a dead body would be on page two of Google, we can’t say that we’ve tested this theory.
SEO and its subsidiary activities are predominantly focused on increasing the frequency of visitors who land on your website. However, the most impactful SEO strategies will consider user experiences too, something Google now keeps a much closer eye on. Aside from satisfying search engines, seamless usability and engaging content will encourage your first-time visitors to come back for more, or better still, convert on a form.
How Does SEO Support Lead Generation?
SEO has become more of a critical component in the wider marketing mix throughout the years and is now considered one of the key drivers behind online success for many businesses. In fact, 61% of marketers stated that SEO and organic traffic generate more leads than any other initiative.
If SEO is new to you, it’s likely you’re implementing some optimisation tactics already, that’s because there’s a huge crossover between SEO and wider marketing tactics.
Optimising for search is one of the key tactics that when correctly set up, grows stronger over time. If you can successfully rank for your desired keywords this traction can accumulate over time, compared to paid search tactics like PPC, in which you’ll be required to consistently top-up your spending to ensure a consistent and sustainable flow of traffic to your website.
Creating an Effective SEO Strategy for Lead Generation
Unfortunately, when it comes to SEO there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, don’t trust anyone who tells you differently! SEO practices continue to change and evolve with every algorithm update, making it more challenging to keep up. Your SEO strategy should be completely bespoke to your business, market, and target audience. This will ultimately ensure that your efforts feed directly into achieving your lead gen goals.
Now, we know that this sounds like a lot to take in but to make things a little easier, we’ve compiled the following top tips to help you create your SEO lead generation strategy.
Carry Out Keyword Research
Evaluate Keyword Intent
Start Link Building
Repurpose Your Content
Improve Your Website
1. Carry Out Keyword Research
This one is more of a necessity as opposed to a ‘top tip’. The key to any successful SEO strategy is a solid and well-planned keyword strategy. Conducting research into your keywords can provide insights into the phrases that your ideal audience is using to browse search engines and ultimately discover your brand. Without it, your target market won’t be able to discover your brand, let alone become leads.
To achieve a higher click-through rate to your web pages you’ll need to secure higher spots in SERPs for your targeted key terms. The more refined and relevant your keywords are to your target pages, the better the quality of traffic will be. This more qualified traffic will be more likely to convert on your website and become leads for your sales team.
Your keywords will also play a role in your wider marketing strategy, particularly when it comes to planning and producing content for your audience.
To start, we recommend establishing topic buckets or clusters for your business. This is essentially building out a number of different topics that are relevant to the top-level services or products your business provides.
You’ll later unpack these buckets into individual keywords that support the wider topic. It’s important to put yourself in the shoes of your buyer persona here, what is your target audience searching for online?
Using online keyword tools such as Moz, Semrush, or Google’s Keyword Planner you’ll be able to find their avg. monthly search volume. This depicts how many searches are made for that particular topic.
Next, you’ll need to explore keywords for each bucket. Here you can begin to brainstorm long-tail keywords that align with their corresponding short-tail groups. These will be the phrases and queries you think your desired audience is looking for via search engines. For the topic ‘wedding venue’ you’d produce something like:
How to pick the perfect wedding venue
Where to find the best wedding suppliers
A wedding venue checklist
The tricky bit here is finding the right balance between relevancy and search volume. In order to drive the best quality traffic to your website, you’ll need to ensure that your content is relevant to its topic, and your brand. Over time this will attract qualified users who are most likely to become leads for your business.
2. Evaluate Your Keyword Intent
All too often, we see businesses carry out keyword research without analysing the intent behind their selected keywords. You need to gain a strong grasp of what your user is looking for in order to produce the most valuable content. Why are users searching for that particular query? Review your buyer’s journey and outline at what stages they’re likely to search for answers or when they’re ready to enquire.
Google and other search engines are continuing to develop their algorithmic understanding of search intent which will impact where or how your web pages are displayed for specific searches. We’ve outlined below the different types of search intent:
Transactional Intent
When a user’s search shows an intention to make a purchase.
Navigational Intent
Normally occurs when a user is trying to get to a specific location online, Instagram for example, the user wants to visit the platform.
Informational Intent
Google’s understanding of this intent has grown significantly, the SE now identifies what a person is searching for and provides the best medium to communicate that content. A DIY how-to is likely to be a video, a food-related question will bring Knowledge Cards with recipes.
Commercial Investigation
When a user is actively researching or comparing a product or service but is not quite ready to make a purchase decision. An example would be “What is the best smartphone?” – which would likely bring up a ‘Listicle’ (an article or blog formatted into a list) describing the most high-rated devices.
Providing content that best serves the intent of your user’s queries will help influence your users along their buyer’s journey. High-quality and relevant content will support your business to more efficiently nurture your leads and close more sales. For your lead generation strategy, you should focus on keywords with high commercial intent.
3. Start Link Building
In the world of SEO, link-building tactics still have an influence on how search engines rank your web pages.
If you’re new to SEO, link building is the process of obtaining hyperlinks from other websites that send users to your site. Search engines like Google use these links to crawl the web, learning all the while how websites and webpages link together. Imagine that a backlink to your website is like a thumbs up or vote of confidence. This tells search engines that your website is a good source of information.
Back in the early days of Google, they used a link system to establish the quality of a page and where it should rank based on the number of links it had. This is still somewhat true today but there are other factors to consider. Google now evaluates the quality of the links you have appose to just the quantity.
Link-building techniques can vary in complexity and some tactics are more powerful than others. We’ve outlined a handful of link-building strategies below:
Guest Posting
Editorial Links
Infographics
Broken Link Building
Unlinked Mentions
Mastering the art of link-building has the potential to enhance your SEO and boost your organic rankings. With a higher organic reach, your business can attract more prospects, increasing your opportunity to generate new leads.
4. Repurpose Your Content
Now more than ever your content should be at the forefront of your overall marketing strategy. You should always be looking for ways in which you can leverage your content to provide value to your visitors. In terms of SEO, high-quality content can keep your users on pages for longer, reducing bounce rates and promoting users to explore the products and services you have available.
If this isn’t your first content marketing rodeo, you’ll know that the planning, creating and publishing of content is a time-consuming process. However, you might have just the thing to help accelerate this process.
We would argue that there is no such thing as ‘bad content’, there’s simply content that is misdirected or not optimised for search. A great way to improve your organic visibility is to analyse your existing catalogue of content and craft an optimisation plan.
Your optimisation plan could include making changes to the following:
Updating H1, H2s and other header tags
Adding alt text to your images
Improving internal linking
Reformatting content
Update meta description
Adding supporting imagery
These simple changes are relatively easy to implement but they can help breathe a breath of fresh air through your content. When your content is re-indexed by search engines, they’ll acknowledge the changes made and rank your webpage accordingly. As we’ve highlighted throughout this blog, the higher your website ranks, the more leads your business could generate.
5. Improve Your Website
This one is slightly controversial to include in an SEO guide but it’s really important. In addition to creating high-quality and optimised content, it’s crucial that your website provides a good experience for your users. This is not only important for your visitors but it’s something Google has increasingly put emphasis on being a ranking factor.
For the purpose of this guide, we’ll look at the more technical aspects that can impact your website’s SEO.
Website Speed
More so now than before, Google will evaluate the speed of your website to help determine where it should rank in SERPs. If your website suffers from poor speeds or other related issues, then it’s likely Google will penalise you for this. There could be various different reasons why your site speed is slow but it’s definitely worthwhile investigating.
Mobile Usability
This one is closely linked to the above. As more users now access search via mobile devices as opposed to desktop, Google now evaluates the mobile-friendliness of your website. Its findings will determine where it ranks your content. Mobile optimisation also benefits the user as they can navigate your website on their preferred smart device.
You wouldn’t want to lose a lead to a competitor now, would you?
Make Each Page Unique & Valuable
Our last top tip is focused on satisfying your users and search engines. As you know, Google ranks the relevance of each website according to the content it contains. Search engines will prioritise fresh and unique content in their rankings. If you publish content that is readily available somewhere else online, you risk simply being ignored by search engines.
From a user’s perspective, you want to provide content that is unique and valuable, something they cannot find elsewhere on the web. The more valuable a user finds your website, the increased likelihood they’ll return and progress into a qualified lead.
Michael is an exceptional Sales Manager at Loop, leading our team with a profound dedication to achieving shared positive goals. His passion lies in forging meaningful connections with new prospects, providing them with a platform to express their visions and witnessing those visions come to life. Michael’s commitment to delivering outstanding results is unwavering, and his support for clients sets him apart. With an impressive 18-year background in sales, Michael brings a wealth of experience and expertise to his role. His extensive knowledge and understanding of the industry enable him to navigate complex challenges and guide clients towards success. Michael’s relentless pursuit of excellence has positioned him as a trusted advisor and a go-to resource for our clients. Beyond his professional endeavours, Michael’s outgoing and sociable nature shines through in his love for meeting new people. His ability to connect with individuals on a personal level strengthens relationships and fosters a collaborative environment. In a delightful twist, Michael proudly proclaims himself as the UK’s number one NBA fan, showcasing his enthusiasm and dedication to his passions beyond the workplace. Michael’s professionalism and infectious enthusiasm make him an invaluable asset to our team. His ability to guide and inspire our sales team, coupled with his commitment to client success, sets him apart as a Sales Manager.
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