These days it’s tough for a business to stand out online. You’re facing a lot of competition, and if you don’t use the best marketing methods, you’re likely missing out on a lot of customers. One of the best and most essential marketing methods online is that of SEO – or Search Engine Optimisation.
SEO is the act of making your websites more search engine friendly, so that you appear higher in search results. The great thing about SEO though, is that while you’re working on moving up in the search rankings, you’re also getting some additional side benefits. Here are just a few techniques you can use to move your website up the search results and benefit your overall lead generation abilities at the same time.
1. Promoting Your Landing Pages
Example of a landing page: https://www.shopify.com/free-trial
The major focus of SEO efforts is to get your website appearing higher in search engine results. However, it’s about more than simply getting your homepage to appear. You also want to get your various landing pages to rank highly, so that they begin to attract more visitors.
Your landing pages are where you try to convert your visitors. These are the pages that you optimize the most and which do most of the work on your website. If the pages that appear most in search engines are your homepage or your Contact Us page, you’re likely not going to convert many of the people who click through.
By focusing your SEO efforts on your landing pages, you can not only bring more people into your website, but you can convert them once they arrive. This in turn will generate you more leads.
2. Exposure from Link Building
One of the most important aspects of SEO is link building. Link building is the process of getting other websites to link back to your own. Search engines like Google love to see other sites, particularly prominent sites, linking back to you. If they see this, they are more likely to bump you up in their search results.
However, building links isn’t only good for appearing higher in search engines. When you build links, you are also tapping into other audiences. Let’s say that you’ve just created an amazing new product. To promote it, you conduct an interview with someone from the New York Times. This interview then gets published online, with a link back to your website. Now not only are you getting a great high-quality link from the New York Times, you are also introducing yourself to their large audience.
Getting exposure from link building is a great way to increase the number of leads you receive. If you do link building right, and you get yourself mentioned on some popular websites, your exposure will increase exponentially. More people hearing about your business means more people visiting your website, which then means more leads.
There are plenty of ways that you can go about building links, with conducting an interview being just one of them. Some options you have are:
- Write a guest blog post
- Produce instructional videos
- Create custom infographics
- Write an informational ebook
The more kinds of media you can create, the more opportunity there is to build links. People like to consume content in different ways, and by providing more options, you give other websites choices for which of your stuff to link to. Link building is often a time-consuming and lengthy process, but if done correctly, could yield long term benefits for both your SEO efforts and your lead generation efforts.
3. Claiming Your Business Listings
Another link building strategy you can use, that deserves its own section, is claiming your business listings. Business listings are online directories that connect their visitors with local businesses. Think of the last time you were searching for a new restaurant to try – you probably opened up a site like Yelp to get suggestions. Yelp, and other sites like it, link back to local businesses in addition to providing more information about them.
On many of these business listing sites, business owners can “claim” their business, and then provide customized information. Every business owner should be claiming as many of these listings as they can for three reasons:
First, if you provide your website address, it gives you another backlink. When you’re trying to build backlinks, every link you can get helps. These are some of the easier links to get, as they don’t require you to do much besides confirm your ownership of the business.
Second, just like with other link building strategies, you are tapping into another audience. Large online business directories have their own audience, many of whom might not have heard of you. By claiming your listing and providing basic information about your business, you are making yourself known to more people.
Finally, these business listings often appear highly in search results themselves. This is particularly true of Google’s My Business, which routinely displays listings from it at the top of their search results. So even if your business doesn’t rank highly in the results, your online business listing might, and this could eventually turn into a visit to your website anyway.
As you can see, claiming your business listings is good for not only SEO purposes, but for generating more leads. Take some time to find business directories in your area, or that cater to your niche, then make sure you’re listed.
4. Performing Keyword Analysis
Image Source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-using-laptop-computer-on-brown-wooden-table-1323592/
When you’re trying to rank highly in search engines, what you’re really doing is trying to rank highly for certain keywords. Search engines try to match up the keywords that people type into the search box with the keywords associated with different websites. Any website that matches the keyword is then shown, with the order being determined by other factors such as inbound links.
In order for your SEO efforts to be truly effective, you need to conduct keyword research. Keyword research will tell you which words or phrases are being used in relation to your niche, and how often they are being used. You can then use this information to include those keywords on your website, and start appearing when they are searched for.
However, doing good keyword research will provide you with an additional benefit as well. By learning which keywords are more popular among search engine users, you can learn more about your customer base. With this information you can better tailor your products, your marketing plan, and much more.
Keyword research will allow you to not only do better in search engines, but it will help you to learn more about your audience. Both of these are invaluable when it comes to generating leads.
5. Analyzing Your Pages
If you want to run an effective SEO campaign, you can’t accept stagnation. It’s not enough to do some keyword research, get some backlinks, and then move onto other marketing strategies. You need to regularly analyze what you’re doing and look for ways to improve.
The reason for this is simply because things change. The keywords that are popular today might not be popular next week. Or maybe a popular website that was giving you a link takes down that page. If you just set up your SEO efforts then forget about them, you’re likely going to find that they become less effective over time.
The good news is that keeping your SEO efforts efficient provides some additional benefits. As you’re analyzing all of your efforts, you’ll notice which of your pages are performing well and which ones aren’t. You can then use this information to generate more leads. For example, if you find that one of your product pages is receiving a lot more traffic than the others, you could put more effort and money into marketing that product.
Make it part of your routine to check on your page stats at least once a week. See which pages are performing well and how people are finding that page. You may gain some valuable insights on how to increase leads just from going over the results of your SEO efforts.
6. Making Your Website Mobile Friendly
Next up, it’s important that your website is mobile-friendly – not only for SEO purposes, but to help you attract leads. More people are using their mobile devices to complete searches these days, so if your website isn’t prepared for this, you’re going to miss out on some customers. If someone is conducting a search from a mobile phone, search engines are more likely to display a mobile-friendly website at the top of the results.
Making your website mobile-friendly can also help with lead generation. By optimizing your website for mobile devices, you give yourself more ways to promote your website. For example, you could include it on fliers or your business card. Then, once people see it, they will check it out right away on their phones. And since your website is now optimized for viewing on mobile devices, they are more likely to come away with a good impression, and perhaps even become a customer.
There are several ways you can make your website more mobile friendly. You could convert website to mobile app, use responsive web design, or get a mobile-friendly WordPress theme. For more information on making your website mobile-friendly, you can check out this guide.
7. Being Active on Social Media
Finally, you’ll want to make sure that you are active on social media sites. Search engines like to see websites that are associated with social media accounts, along with websites that are routinely getting traffic from social sharing. Promoting yourself on social media, and interacting with your followers, is therefore a great way to increase your search engine rankings.
But social media marketing can be effective for generating leads on its own. With social media tools you can easily connect with customers or potential customers – providing them with more information or answering their questions. Before making a purchase many people like to get a recommendation, and social media is a primary spot for getting recommendations from your family and friends.
If you don’t already have social media accounts set up for your business, now is the time to do so. Social media marketing could become one of your most effective tools for generating leads – not to mention the benefit it will provide to your SEO efforts.
Killing Two Birds with One Stone
As you can see, when you implement an SEO strategy, you get some great ancillary benefits. This makes SEO one of the best marketing strategies you can employ, so it’s a good idea to get started on it if you haven’t already. Use the list above to guide your SEO efforts and you should find that not only are you doing better in search engines, but you’re generating more leads at the same time.
