These days, more and more businesses invest an increasing amount of time in optimizing their SEO and boosting their lead generation. It’s not hard to see why – both of these tools work wonders for business. When you combine them, however, their cumulative effect is even greater.
So, if you’re a marketer who wants to see your business succeed, what should you do? Should you increase your paid advertising only to get more leads of low quality, or invest in more long-term search engine optimization efforts? What if there was a better way to get better lead generation?
Well, there is – SEO! The best marketing plans are comprised of both good search engine optimization and great lead generation. So, if you want to know how you can meet your business goals using both SEO and lead generation, read on!
First of all, let’s clarify what we mean by some of the key terms we’ll be using:
What is SEO?
As you may already know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Forming a strategy for search engine optimization lets you take your website to the top of Google and other search engines. This means your prospective customers are more likely to find you.
So, what method should you use to be discovered? It’s simple: post content regularly! Making loads of content for your website and optimizing it with keyword research will boost your visibility tenfold.
SEO campaigns generally revolve around increasing natural, or organic search rankings. If you want to increase your website’s traffic, SEO is a key part of any marketing campaign.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation campaigns aim to turn people into customers. These campaigns do this by combining things like paid advertising, calls to action, landing pages, and relevant content. A lead generation campaign’s purpose is to identify the prospective customers who are interested in your product, and then convert them into sales.
In the competitive online business world, a great lead generation campaign is paramount if you want your B2B or B2C business to succeed.
So, how can SEO maximize my business’s lead generation?
How does SEO benefit your business, anyway? Well, the main thing about SEO is that it increases your website’s search engine visibility. So, this visibility then increases your website’s traffic and leads to growth for your business!
Good SEO also makes you more trustworthy – both in Google’s and your customers’ eyes. This reliability increases your credibility and puts you even higher in the search results.
A great SEO strategy simply translates into more business, with a fraction of the effort needed in other marketing campaigns.
Now that we’ve covered how SEO is beneficial for your business, let’s look at some ways you can implement it!
Optimize your content
This is one of the most common pieces of advice and is easy to do. But it is also the most important. We’ve all seen how SEO-optimized blogs rank higher in Google searches. This is because they use plenty of relevant keywords in their posts. They also post on a regular basis, always giving Google something new to chew on.
Another way to optimize your content is to use different types of subheadings. Avoid H1, but use H2, H3 and H4 when it makes sense. You should also make sure your content is relevant to your readers. It sounds simple but relevant, high-quality content is always important.
Use natural backlinks
Isn’t it great when one site leads to another relevant page and helps you on your information journey? The more internal links you use in your article, the greater the likelihood of your post getting noticed by another website. Then, when another site spots you, the more likely they are to link back to your site again.
If you embed quality videos or infographics on your own site, this increases the chances of other sites wanting to link back to you. So, choose wisely and go for it!
Add in some visuals
Did you know that some keywords are more valuable in Google searches when they come with visuals? Indeed, you may have recently noticed search engine result pages beginning to show small image and video thumbnails beside the title and description. But how did those pictures get there?
The secret is in the alt text. A tool for people who can’t see the images you use, alt text also helps search engine crawlers understand what your pictures or infographics are about. If the spider thinks your image sounds relevant to your title, it’ll put it on the page. What could stand out more in the search results than your page and its very own image?
Promote your content using social media
We mentioned earlier how important links are. Well, what better way to link your content than with social media? Just sit back and let Facebook’s and Twitter’s notorious recommendation algorithms recommend your content far and wide.
Of course, you still have to do some of the work. Every time you post a new article on social media, and engaging description with a call-to-action will work wonders. As well as this, using a share button in your blog posts gives customers who come from social media that handy option to share your post.
Why not target long-tail keywords?
We all know by now that there’s a lot more to SEO than keyword stuffing. Using keywords as much as you can, just to rank higher, can hurt your site’s SEO for a long time to come. Instead, search engines are growingly putting reader experience first. This makes sure you’re answering customer questions.
With the importance of using keywords in a way that isn’t mawkish, it’s a good idea to target a few long-tail keywords. Being longer, these keywords are more likely to make sense and should be easier to incorporate into a heading or paragraph. Just make sure you only focus on a couple of keywords for the sake of your SEO.
