Lead generation is the lifeblood of online businesses. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for lead generation improves the visibility of your business and helps to grow it.
Leads are potential clients that already expressed interest in what a business has to offer. Every business needs to generate leads constantly to stay afloat and grow bigger. New leads will be introduced to the business’ best content and offer from time to time to eventually become clients.
This article aims to throw light on SEO for lead generation strategies that will speed up your business’ growth. Let’s dive for details!
What is SEO for lead generation?
To understand SEO for lead generation completely, we will first need to understand SEO. SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a combination of tactics and tasks for a website to gain more visitors from search engines such as Google and Bing. SEO tactics include:
- Off-page SEO: Includes site speed and mobile friendliness optimization, keyword research, content planning and link building.
- On-page SEO: Includes tactics that help improve blog posts’ on-page features such as optimized URL, post title, keyword density, internal and external linking, optimized media, etc.
SEO for lead generation is a strategy that is designed to turn the traffic driven by SEO into leads. Aside from doing SEO, it can also include tasks such as creating landing pages, lead magnets, adding popups, etc to turn visitors into leads.
Why SEO for lead generation is important?
Traffic obtained from SEO is very valuable since it comes from search terms on search engines. SEO is perhaps the most valuable channel for stable and highly monetizable traffic.
When a person searches for a term on search engines such as Google, that person is really eager to learn about the topic. If the searched term or keyword is a purchase intent, the person will likely end up buying something.
For example, if a person searched for iPhone 14 Pro, and he/she landed on a site that sells this smartphone model, then this site has a very high chance of making this person its new customer.
SEO done right will bring highly relevant traffic to a site, which is perfect for lead generation. SEO for lead gen improves brand visibility leading to increased sales and business growth. It can shower a continuous stream of qualified traffic regularly.
Alternative to SEO for faster lead generation?
SEO has become incredibly competitive for all industries. To make SEO work for your business, it really takes a lot of time, hard work, and perseverance.
If SEO is going to take a new business several years, how can the business generate leads and sales?
There are several lead generation strategies to consider, however, cold emailing is one of the best ways to generate leads fast.
Cold emailing is simply sending emails to your prospects and turning them into leads and clients. But first, cold emailing needs a sizeable list of highly relevant and verified prospects.
A reliable prospect database like Limeleads makes sure you get access to millions of fresh and accurate prospects in just a few clicks. Limeleads also offers excellent customer support and free trials. No credit card is required!
SEO for lead generation: Questions to ask
Businesses must have clear answers to the following questions to be able to create an excellent plan for effective lead gen with SEO:
- What are your audiences and their desired demographics?
- What topics do they care about the most?
- What to say to make them interested in what you have to offer?
- How to capture the leads?
- How to engage with the leads?
SEO for lead generation best tactics
We listed out below some of the most important tactics that businesses must pay close attention to. If you overlook any of the tips below, you’ll probably be missing out on a huge potential. Now let’s dive in!
1. Website audit
You should continuously audit websites. It helps you understand how the website is performing and further lets you know which web pages are the best-performing so that you can focus more on them for maximum results.
Website audit also helps you discover overlooked issues or flawed functionalities of a website. These problems might be causing damage to your business without you even realizing it. We’ve seen businesses that let hidden issues cause significant financial losses to them for years until they were discovered and fixed!
2. Build active blogs with SEO-optimized content
SEO for lead generation has to have something to do with SEO, followings are some of the most important aspects you will need to focus on for a fruitful SEO effort. You can follow the link for more details and guidance on how to drive organic traffic effectively.
- Use keywords: Businesses must research important keywords for the industry and embed them in the headline and at various places of the content without stuffing. Keyword stuffing practice can lead to penalties, and if you receive a penalty, your traffic and sales will drop like a stone.
- Publish regularly: It is the key to deriving the most from SEO practices. Maintain a schedule. It entails better results.
- Use subheadings: Subheadings improve the content in two ways. They make the post scannable and improve user experience.
- Add links: Web pages should link the blog post with other relevant content on the website to improve usability.
- Format content: Formatting helps smooth gliding through the page to make it easy for reading and engaging. It further helps with reading comprehension.
3. Increase speed
The speed of the website affects rankings. Since the main goal of Google is to provide the best user experience, speed matters. For this, businesses must take the help of a reliable web hosting provider and also make it mobile-compatible. Also, businesses should proactively look for unnecessary scripts and plug-ins to remove them and ensure a minimum loading time.
4. Research keywords
Keywords are vital for search engine optimizations. These are terms that people use for searching on the internet. Businesses should do extensive research to find out the right keywords. Keywords research tools such as Google Keyword Planner are a great way for finding relevant keywords to drive traffic and effective SEO for lead generation.
5. Leverage link building
It involves acquiring links from other sites, called backlink building. Backlinks are one of the most important factors for search engine ranking.
Search engines always rank a website higher when it has backlinks from trusted sources. Businesses can manually reach bloggers for guest posting and link placements.
Link building in reality is a very challenging task because having sites that link to you naturally is difficult. Most sites will ask for money for any link that points to your site. This practice is called paid link building.
However, recently, Google has been cracking down on this practice, therefore, many paid links and a lot of investments are rendered useless. Building link is still an essential task, however, with today’s SEO landscape, businesses will need to focus more on building natural backlinks.
6. Use local SEO for local business
While SEO techniques make a business visible to the online world, local SEO practices focus more on ranking highly in the local market. Local SEO’s main goal is driving local traffic to a website so that it can sell its services or products to people that it’s able to reach.
For example, a warehouse maintenance service may only be able to provide its solution to clients that live within its operating area.
7. Use active social media platforms
Social signals have close relationships with website ranking. The pages that rank top on Google searches have more social signals than those that do not perform well. Make sure that you maintain an active social media presence to boost the lead generation process.
8. Promote & manage reviews
Customer reviews have positive influences on search engine optimization. They make a website trustworthy and deliver a strong signal to Google and other search engines. It is also a unique strategy for SEO for lead generation
9. Update content to make it relevant
Only updated and relevant content can attract visitors to the website. More than often, fresh content also has a better ranking than outdated ones.
However, you should only update content for the sole purpose of making them better for your readers. Many marketers can’t overcome the temptation of updating content just for the purpose of making it fresh and a better ranking. This backfires a lot of time because while the content is newly updated, it becomes less useful to the readers.
10. Spy on your competitors
Understanding your competition is key to success. Nowadays, there are many digital marketing tools on the Internet that can give you an idea of how your competitors are doing.
Also, businesses must not be complacent, they need to keep a close eye on their industry updates and developments to adjust and adapt quickly.
