SEO for lead generation is an essential process for digital marketing that helps drive traffic to your promotional campaigns.
If you are in the business of acquiring prospects and converting them into customers, you need to invest time, energy, and resources into search engine optimisation (SEO).
When your website doesn’t show up at the top of search results pages, your sales suffer. To avoid such heavy loss of leads and customers, using SEO in your lead generation strategy is a must. 61% of marketers state that SEO and organic traffic generates more leads than any marketing initiative.
SEO can help you generate valuable leads and increase sales, but it’s not as simple as it sounds. There are a lot of factors that go into SEO, and to do it right, you need to have the right strategy and tools. There are many affordable ways to ensure your web pages rank at the top of search results pages. This article will discuss the importance, benefits, and strategy for SEO that can get you started to set up an efficient lead generation process.
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
Search engine optimisation, or SEO, is a collection of techniques for improving the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results. It enhances the overall user experience by increasing its relevance to specific keywords.
What is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic is the number of visitors coming to your website through a search engine like Bing, Google, etc. Such traffic arrives at a web page because of quality content and SEO without paid marketing efforts.
What are Keywords?
Keywords are words, phrases, or terms the target audience enters into search engines for finding solutions to their problems. For example, if an e-commerce store sells baby clothes, they can see what their target audience is looking for by a simple Google search.
All the phrases shown in the suggestion box, like baby clothes for girls, baby clothes for boys, are potential keywords. Google auto-suggests such keywords based on past searches. The e-commerce store can use such keywords in their content for effective SEO.
SEO as a strategy works because when potential clients search and come to your page, they find the information they want. It motivates prospects to explore your brand and services. There’s a good chance they will contact you for more information or make a purchase.
Why We Should Use SEO for Lead Generation
One of the most critical strategies for lead generation is to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). You might think that using SEO for lead generation is only a good idea if you’re ranking on the first page of Google’s search results, but that’s not true.
Search engines like Google evaluate a web page according to different factors when ranking it for a given term or topic. These factors are:
- Quality content: Involves curating relevant content like blog posts, guides, checklists, white papers, webinars, etc., for your target audience.
- Page speed: How fast your web page uploads is also a crucial factor that determines your SERPs.
- On-page optimisation: Revolves around spreading keywords throughout the web page, optimising title tags, URLs, and performing internal linking.
- Mobile-first design: Web pages customised for all screens get better rankings.
You can check out this blog to know more: Why Every Online Business Needs Mobile-Friendly Landing Pages.
One other factor is the number of links that point back to your site, which you can acquire through press releases and articles where you get quoted as an expert in your industry. The more backlinks you have pointing to your site, the higher you will rank in Google’s search engine results pages.
Utilising SEO for lead generation may mean creating content specifically designed with conversion in mind. For example, one article might highlight selecting colours for your marketing campaign, while another might advise optimising your marketing campaigns. The content should be relevant to your business and help generate leads by providing valuable information. In addition, well-written posts shouldn’t just contain words but should include photos and videos from your company’s products and services. This type of content will generate leads and increase organic traffic coming from search engines like Google.
How to Set up a Basic Search Engine Optimization Strategy For Lead Generation
A basic SEO strategy includes keyword research, on-page optimisation, off-page optimisation, and link building.
The first step in setting up a basic SEO strategy is understanding the needs of your business or organisation. You need to know what keywords you should focus on, which keywords are already ranking well for you, and how competitive is a keyword.
Many tools can help with keyword research, including Google Keyword Planner, ahrefs and Semrush. These tools will help you find out what potential prospects are searching for and which pages rank well for those searches.
Let’s understand the basic steps of doing keyword research for web pages.
Step-1
The first step in keyword research is identifying the keywords you want to rank for at the top in SERPs. You can do it by looking at the current ranking of your competitors and what keywords they are targeting. Once you have identified these keywords, it is vital to create a list and research them more in-depth.
When someone searches on Google, their keywords will get highlighted in bold letters. For example, if someone searched “how to lose weight,” then keywords like “weight loss” and “weight loss” would be highlighted in bold letters. It means it’s essential to include those words on your website so that as people perform searches, your website appears. Include these keywords throughout the content of your website and make sure each page has one or two headlines with those keywords included in them.
Step-2
The next step in the process is to use tools like Google Adwords Keyword Tool or SEMrush to find out how many people are searching for those keywords on Google and which ones are most popular. It will help you figure out which ones are worth your time and focus.
Let’s use ahrefs for conducting keyword research.
If we search for “weight loss” in ahrefs’ free version, we get results:
KD represents keyword difficulty, which means how hard it would be to get ranked for the keyword. And volume represents average monthly searches for a keyword. We try to find low KD and high volume keywords, like “weight loss clinic near me”.
Ways to Use SEO for Lead Generation
1. Use Keywords in your Title Tag and Meta Description
The title tag gets used when someone shares your content on social media or sees it in their Google search. The words you use there are important because they may be the only thing someone sees before clicking away from the page. And if another searcher enters that same term into Google while on your site, then they will see your site again as a result of your SEO efforts.
2. Optimise your Website Structure
Along with using keywords throughout the content of a web page, it’s important to make sure that you are structuring the pages so that users can find their way through quickly and efficiently to whatever information is relevant for them. It includes adding navigation links at the top of every page and ensuring all links go to relevant content pages, not other irrelevant pages or other sites. It is essential to provide potential customers with what they are looking for as soon as possible, so they don’t leave without contacting you or purchasing.
3. Optimise Your Landing Pages and Website for Search Engines
Landing pages are the first pages visitors see when they click on a search engine result. It is crucial to optimise these pages to get the best conversion rates from visitors. There are two types of landing pages: one for people who have never visited your website before and one for people who have visited your website but didn’t convert into a customer yet. You need to optimise both types of landing pages differently to get the best results.
Websites play an essential role when it comes to driving brand awareness and leads. For your site to appear at relevant keywords search, you need to optimise it accordingly. Check out this article to understand better- How To Improve Website Ranking on Google: 5 Tips For SEO
Marketers should start by analysing the keywords you want your landing page to rank for and use these keywords throughout your content, headlines, and images on the page. Businesses should also make sure that you are using relevant anchor text links so that visitors can easily find what they are looking for on your web page.
Conclusion
SEO for lead generation is a marketing practice highly underutilised by businesses. The time has come to search for the right keywords and align your marketing efforts toward success. With the right tools, knowledge, and constant efforts, you will get stable results from SEO, unlike any other marketing strategy that can fetch you traffic only for short durations.
Don’t have the time or money to invest in marketing from scratch? We have the answer for you. How about starting from a landing page template. At 99Landing Pages, we have landing page templates that are conversion-focused. You can customise your targeted keywords and build an effective marketing workflow in no time. Head over to our inventory to check out our templates: 99Landing Page Inventory
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