SEO is not a lead generation destination. It’s a form of a map given to potential customers to guide them to your site. It must be routinely updated and maintained with proper labelling of keywords and destinations in order to work well.
SEO will assist in the visibility of your site by search engines and rankings.
Utilise SEO for lead generation
SEO is important in lead generation. If the SEO is not performing well, then you are potentialy limiting a large percentage of search traffic. and ultimately your leads.
Search engines, and people using them, are looking for quality content that is heavily related to the search terms or keywords. As with SEO, if you are not displaying quality content, then you will miss out.
SEO and the market are constantly evolving, making it hard to keep up and difficult to stay on top of it all.
Create a SEO strategy
You will need to know your audience, define your ideal leads, identify target keywords and monitor SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) rankings.
Know your audience
- Who are you trying to attract?
Age, gender, education, income level, key challenges and pain points. - Understand your target users search pattern!
If you have set up your Google Analytics account, then log in and go to Behavior > Behavior Flow. Here you will see a visual representation of the users path travelled from one page or event to the next. - What content keeps users engaged?
Identify potential content issues. - Placement of strategic content, properly optimised for the people who need it most, will enable your lead generation stragety to take on a whole new life.
User intent
- Start by conducting user intent research on a few of the top keywords. See if the results are what you were expecting. If not, how does your company’s content met their needs?
- The real meaning behind keywords people type in the search engine text box. User Intent is categorised in two forms:
- INFORM: When someone is looking to learn about a topic or product.
- PURCHASE: When someone is shopping for something described in the keyword.
- A business selling specific products should make sure their content includes a strong product page that targets the specific keyword. High quality informative content.
- Buyers at the top of the funnel, or the beginning of their journey, are looking for educational or entertaining content. You need to include:
- definitions of key lingo
- simple explanations of core industry principles
- infographics
- easily digested media
Identify major keywords
- Make a list of relevant keywords. Start with a list of key products and services and terms that are important to your industry.
- Look through your Google Analytics platform and review what keywords lead people to your site.
- What keywords do you need to focus on and fully optimise content for improvement?
- Google them. Use a spreadsheet to keep organised. Google each of the keywords and make a note about whether the search results primarily reflect an inform or purchase intent.
Organise results along your sales funnel
- Keywords that generate a strong inform intent are most likely going to represent users at the top of the funnel.
- Keywords that generate results with a strong purchase intent are likely being used by people at the bottom of the funnel.
Optimise existing content
- Review content you have already created.
- Make sure assets are using appropriate language.
- If content was created to target a specific keyword, make sure it is addressing the user intent behind that keyword.
- Make sure all your images and media have keyword rich URL (file names), Title tag, Alt Text tag, Description tag.
- Make sure all your pages, posts, portfolio, testimonials, etc. have keyword rich URL (slug), Title tag, Meta Keywords, and Meta Description focussing on the keyword.
Create content to fill in the gaps
- If you have the wrong type of content for a particular keyword/user intent, you don’t necessarily need to remove it, but you do need to create additional content.
- If an important keyword yields a strong inform intent in search results and all your website has is a product page for that term, you need to start building some informative content assets such as blog posts, landing pages, ebooks, etc.
- If a keyword has a fairly balanced user intent, as in a few informative pages and a few product pages, it is okay to create a few (high-quality, engaging, helpful) pages based on related keywords for each user intent.
Monitoring your ranking
- You will need a starting point, so you can accurately measure your success in organic lead generation.
- Assess which pages are your key web pages and rank them in terms of conversions.
- The first page to optimise is your home page.
- Weed out the errors and present best content first.
- Check for technical SEO errors.
- Search target keywords and see where you rank in the SERP.
- Compare ranking to competitors.
- Analyse for mobile friendliness. Mobile indexing has become more widespread on sites and Google. Make sure your theme is responsive.
Get local
- Much of your traffic will come from local people searching products and/or services.
- If you haven’t already, set up your Google My Business page.