SEO and lead generation aren’t complicated concepts in the world of online marketing. In fact, they’re as simple and as divine as a bright star that shown in the sky two-thousand years ago, humbly leading royals, nobles, and shepherds to the promised Messiah. Although both marketing concepts overlap in application, they are different in their functionality. This article discusses how “Tis’ the Season” for learning how to leverage and apply the best SEO practices to your online marketing efforts. In the process, you’ll also learn how those SEO applications can help increase lead gen impact.
Discover the joy in knowing the difference between SEO and lead generation marketing concepts.
Since the start of the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic, we’ve seen how difficult it has been for companies to figure out where to put their business focus. Should we concentrate on lead generation or start working to increase SEO performance?
From our standpoint, however, the application of both concepts is vital to any successful digital marketing campaign. We’ve also learned that connecting the two concepts and how they matter to companies is not as easy for business owners to understand fully. So, allow us to explain here.
Search Engine Optimization – SEO
SEO is a marketing method that helps businesses improve their website visibility and inbound traffic as people search online for solutions to problems and seek opportunities. Companies can increase their SEO efforts organically or through SEM (Search Engine Marketing); paid advertising. Search engines like Google, for example, help rank each keyword search based on how people seek information online. Basically, SEO is the process of refining website pages to increase their rankings on a search engine results page. Again, the milestone of SEO is to increase website visibility and traffic visits from people looking for answers to problems or seeking opportunities.
Lead Generation
Wondering how lead generation works? Well, its focus is to effectively capture the interest of online visitors to products or services and ultimately produce a sale. Lead generation is an essential process for all B2B and B2C companies, and we help companies learn its five irrefutable laws for success. Overall, lead generation does three critical things for your company:
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- It helps support healthy business growth
- Lead generation helps attract qualified leads to your website, and
- It provides a transition from business prospects to loyal customers
Tis’ the Season to connect SEO with lead generation to help generate traffic to your website and drive qualified leads down the sales funnel.
Experienced marketers know how to apply SEO best practices and produce the most significant impact on generating qualified leads. However, the connection involves specific steps to sales funnel success:
Know Your WHY & WHAT
The first step to connecting SEO to lead generation is to know why your company or business exists. To answer this, you must know what product or service solution your business offers to the ideal customer. Does the potential buyer or customer know that you exist and how you can help them? How does your company help improve the lives of those who patronize your business?
Apply Superb CONTENT to Improve Lead Generation
The second step is to apply exquisite and relevant content marketing about your product or service solution. Divine content is what captures the right kind of visitors and leads to your website. Consequently, it would help if you also learned your ideal customer’s search behaviors and what keywords and phrases you need to connect their searches to your solution. Then, when you create content for your website landing pages, blogs, and email marketing, it matches what they’re searching for online.
ENGAGE Your Site Visitors
Thirdly, you should always engage your visitors online. Once they’ve reached any page on your website, you must ensure that they immediately find their solution. To keep visitors engaged on your site, you’ll want to make page content, calls-to-action, purchasing and download options, lead magnets, and additional invites to seek more information readily available. Prospective leads will likely stay on a site that offers relevant quality content and a user-friendly experience.
Overall, this is a high-level description of how SEO can affect lead generation.
So, which website errors can kill your marketing SEO efforts and leave no impact on lead generation?
Unfortunately, there are five critical website mistakes or oversights that businesses commonly make, which can destroy SEO performance. They are as follows:
1. Creating content that doesn’t connect with users’ intents or what they’re searching for online
It’s one thing to research high-volume keywords that pertain to your product or service and then revise your site content with relevant keywords. And it’s an entirely different thing to utilize SEO keywords that visitors are actually looking for as you move them through your sales funnel. Content relevancy is vital in helping drive traffic to a website and closing sales. In fact, it’s the most essential SEO ranking factor.
So, business owners should always consider how potential customers are searching for solutions rather than providing content filled with keywords that pertain to what they do or offer. For example, if you’re busy providing more informational content about a product or service, you could miss opportunities to close sales. Although your SEO and lead generation efforts get visitors to your site, it doesn’t matter if you don’t make sales. For instance, if you don’t offer a buying option to those looking to purchase your product or service, you’ve missed an opportunity to increase revenue.
2. Site structured data problems
One issue that can cancel out your lead generation efforts is the structured data on your website. Data structure is the technical way businesses present their information on a particular webpage. Google describes this as the standardized way of providing page information and how its content is classified.
In its simplest state, structured data denotes code in a specific format. However, what’s most vital is that search engines like Google can decipher the structured data on a website. Reading code helps them determine what each page is about and categorize it to simplify someone’s online search to find it. So, poorly-coded structured data can result in a site not having a review snippet if it even shows up on a search page. If you’re looking to get your structured data correct and include a review markup, check out Google’s structured data testing tool.
3. Boring Metadata or Lack of Meta-descriptions
In case you didn’t know, metadata is crucial to both SEO and lead generation concepts. Therefore, you must provide excellent and enticing information about each page of your website. Web developers will program your site to send metadata from each page to a search engine; this is a top SEO best practice feature. So, when someone pulls up a page from your website, that brief data will appear in the search [head] section.
Metadata can also come in various forms, like meta titles – which help determine page ranking and the meta-description. Above all, you’ll want to make sure your metadata immediately captures visitors’ attention and pulls them onto your website. If the information is uneventful, typical, or ill-written and lacks the vital words visitors are searching for, visitors will not click over.
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4. Multiple primary site pages with content targeting the same SEO keyword or keyword phrase
Similar keyword focus on the key pages of your website can hurt SEO efforts; and, in turn, will do nothing for lead generation. When this error happens on a site, each page essentially competes against itself, and search engines have a hard time ranking page content – even if the content is relevant to the user’s search.
Focusing on the same keyword can also dilute the positive effects of keyword link building. Overall, you don’t want your pages to have lower CTRs, diminished authority, or lower rankings on search engines. In the end, this form of page competition within your site will cause substantial missed opportunities and nullify lead generation efforts.
5. Slow and sluggish page loading times
How long would you wait for a website page to load after you’ve clicked on it for more information? If a site’s pages take more than 3 seconds to load, visitors will promptly leave that website without engaging with its content. Thus, page speed is an important search ranking factor. Consequently, Google won’t even rank a site when its pages take longer than 3.2 seconds to load, or if visitors often leave the site after a few seconds because it’s not responsive or user-friendly. All of these factors directly affect SEO and lead generation by extension. Check out these web page speed statistics from Google!
See how your business can start benefiting from the best of both worlds.
In the story of the nativity, the bright star would have represented the role that SEO plays today in generating quality leads and guiding people to their need for a solution. Christ’s birth was a gift to the entire world, offering the solution of salvation, joy, and peace to all of Mankind on earth. SEO offers visible information and inbound marketing tactics that guide users to relevant quality content and solutions that meet their needs.
Overall, we believe that when you combine SEO best practices with lead generation strategies, it will result in both generating and getting more leads to your site. As digital marketing continues to evolve, companies can learn to utilize SEO better and see it as a critical aspect of their sales funnel, streaming in more qualified leads. At the same time, when you set it up correctly, SEO can turn your site into a great lead generating tool because it helps prospects find you online.
In case you didn’t know, professional marketing partnerships still matter when it comes to your online success.
If you run your business like most, you have a host of important things to focus on to continue growing. So, why not let us help you? SEO is the one concept you cannot ignore if you need more effective solutions and tactics for generating quality leads.
Revamping your on-site SEO and lead generation efforts isn’t as easy as you may think. You’ll need a trusted marketing partner with expertise and technical assistance to ensure improvement and help you reach your goals.
BUILDINGBLOCKS is here to help you develop or polish-up on SEO best practices that result in quality lead generation. We’re ready to work with you to help improve your online marketing efforts. So, if you’re ready to discuss keyword research, content marketing, on-site SEO, link building, and even how to correct SEO errors, connect with us online or call 281-203-0529.
