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How SEO can be a sustainable way to generate more leads for your business
From Tik Toking to banner advertisements, the Internet offers a myriad of opportunities to draw attention to your products and to drive inbound sales.
But in this digital minefield, which avenue should you go down? All of them, sure. But which option is the most important? Where should you be asking your marketing team to focus today in order to generate new leads?
When your potential customers go online to search for something specific, they will, of course, start with a search engine. Your website – properly optimized – should generate half of all Internet traffic to your site ORGANICALLY – that is, without paid advertisements to boost your ranking. In the B2B sector, this figure rises to three quarters of that total traffic.
So, what is the most important tool in generating inbound sales to your business?
Search Engine Optimization.
The importance of SEO for Lead generation
This is the single most effective tool for driving potential customers into your sales pipeline. SEO is how you can push your site to the top of search engine results and be the first person your potential customer sees when searching for a service or product.
Studies like Brightedge.com revealed startling results – showing that 53% of website visitors are coming to your website through organic SEO (figure 1). When you compare this to other website drivers, this makes it the highest-ranking traffic driver channel for websites.
You can have great content, great imagery, pay thousands to host it, but if it’s not optimized, your customers won’t find you, but they may find your competitor.
While we can say that today, SEO is having the biggest impact on the number of visitors to your website, its importance will only continue to grow, it absolutely cannot be ignored, or put off.
Over the last five years, Google has significantly enhanced the tools to optimize a user’s search experience. They provide increasingly accurate and relevant search results. Because of these efforts, consumers trust Google and rely on it more and more.
SEO measures deliver a better ROI than most other advertising channels. This is because SEO traffic, once set up, has no recurring costs, or advertisement costs. Once you have set it up correctly, all your measures will have a direct and ongoing effect on your website’s performance.
So here are 5 tips for effective SEO activities that will drive lead generation for your sales team
- Use structured data (schema markup) on your website
- Register your Google My Business profile
- Index your site via Google Search Console
- “Sales promotions for click throughs” throughwell-written meta titles, meta descriptions and URLs
- Offer high-quality and informative content with added value on your website
#1 Use structured data on your website
Structured data (also called the “schema markup”) is a code you enter on your website so that Google can show searchers more information in search results. This is the text found under your link when you search for something in Google. It makes your listing stand out better, especially from those who have implemented no schema markup on their website.
Installing schema markup is a user-centric improvement – it allows searchers to see at a glance if your website contains the information they are looking for. It helps your website rank better for many types of content, like articles, local businesses, events, products, reviews, etc.
#2 Register your “Google My Business” profile
Registering your business with “Google My Business” can help your website appear near your business location for relevant searches. Meaning if someone is searching for a business like yours locally, your business would display.
Once you’ve registered, Google will send a postcard with a unique PIN to your business address – this will verify your business with Google. Verification increases your chances of showing up in search results, as Google now recognizes your business as a legitimate local business.
Verification also increases your chances of appearing higher in Google Maps and local search results.
#3 Index your Websites via Google Search Console
Google Search Console, formerly known as Webmaster Tools, is a service from Google that allows you to submit your website and sitemap to Google for indexing. But that’s not all.
In addition, you can use the tool for many other purposes, such as
- Checking backlinks to your website and making sure there are no bad or “spammy” links
- Identifying and removing links you don’t want to be linked to your website, ones that might be harmful to your brand or image
- Showing the average position for the search terms that Google thinks you should rank for
- Viewing the search queries that visitors used to find your website
- Making sure Google doesn’t detect any crawl errors on your site (when a search tries to find something on your page but fails at it)
The biggest advantage of Google Search Console is that you tell Google that your website exists. Signing up your website (and choosing which version to display in search results, e.g., https://www.example.com vs. https://example.com) is a fundamental aspect of Search Engine Optimization.
#4 “Promotion for the click” through well-written meta titles, meta descriptions, and URLs
Google search results have three components: the page title, the description, and the URL of the page. All three are customizable and should be optimized to ensure that customers will visit your page via a click.
Google monitors the “click-through rates” that your pages generate in search results. Meaning higher click-through rates suggest a page answers a particular search query well. So, Google takes this into account when showing a page. The more often someone clicks on your link for a particular search query, the more likely it is Google will display the page again in the next search.
No matter how much CTR affects ranking, a high click-through rate means you’ll get more visitors to your website. For this reason alone, it is important to promote the “click” in the search results.
For maximum effectiveness, the meta descriptions should be 70-156 characters long, while the page titles should be between 45 and 65 characters, including spaces.
Meta description and title should be concise and include your best keywords. Make sure that each page of your website has its own unique title and meta description.
Also, make sure your URLs are structured correctly. In the optimal format, e.g.: https://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword
Well structured URLs provide a better user experience and can increase click-through rates if the URLs contain keywords. In addition, URLs with keywords can generate effective backlinks because the URL can serve as its own anchor text when copied and pasted into posts on the Internet.
#5 Offer high-quality and informative content which adds value to your website
High-quality content that applies to your business and the search terms you want to rank for in search results will benefit your website. The more relevant your content is, the more likely it is that people will find the information they are looking for and that they will stay on your site longer, come back, and become customers.
As people come to your site, flip through multiple pages, and read your content, Google will consider their actions and these positive user metrics will affect your site’s ranking.
The reason for this is that the length of stay is also a decisive SEO factor. A high bounce rate is, most times, a negative sign. Here, the loading speed can also affect the bounce rate, as many searchers will leave a page with a long loading time.
High-quality content is not only good for your search engine ranking, but also for the user experience on a website and the entire brand image. In the long term, high-quality content also impacts sales.
Is this all you have to do to generate more leads?
For sure, there are plenty of other important things that are part of effective SEO, but it’s a good starting point. It must be said as well, that it takes some time for SEO measures to take effect, especially with “fresh” domains. The first results become visible after about three months, and it can take at least six months for the full development of the effect.
You may not want to wait that long to generate more leads and that’s where Search Engine Advertisement (SEA) comes into play. You pay to have your website appear at the top or bottom of the search engine results pages so searchers can find your page. Search engine advertising is one of the fastest ways to get visitors to your website or landing page. But today, our focus is SEO.
If you want to increase the amount of leads for your sales team, contact your marketing team, or, better yet, if you are looking for a professional partner for these complex tasks, please contact us.
After analyzing the current state of your websites, followed by a workshop to determine your business goals, we can start right away bringing more inbound sales leads for your team and more profit.