Using SEO for your lead generation efforts is one of the most cost-effective ways to drive organic search to your website, and increase the chances of converting a browser into a lead by doing so. What do I mean by organic search?
Organic search is natural – this is what occurs when someone is using specific keywords to target a product or service that they’re looking for in a search. With a well-developed SEO strategy, this click and/or conversion will cost you essentially no money. However, with pay-per-click ads, you’re paying a pre-determined amount of money each time someone interacts with your content – which would you rather utilize for your online marketing?
Why is Organic Search Important?
Back in the day, cold calling was the holy grail of sales and marketing; cold calling gave businesses opportunities to interact, make connections with, and attempt to sell their prospect on a product or service that they offer. The thing is, cold calling requires you to specifically target an individual that may or may not be interested in what you have to offer, engage them, and maintain their interest while also attempting to make a sale – this is a lot to balance, and nowadays, is almost impossible to do.
Not only were you most likely interrupting someone’s workday, or worse, cutting into their free time with their family after hours – they didn’t come directly to you for help, meaning they aren’t exactly a qualified or good lead.
Organic search takes the guesswork out of what you’re doing. When someone uses keywords that directly apply to your company’s services, this means they were looking for someone just like you, and have at least some intentions to capitalize on things that you offer. This involves no persuasion or clever sales and/or marketing tactics to draw their attention, and maintain it – your only responsibility from here is to simplify the conversion process while ensuring that you’re high enough in the results for them to see you.
It sounds easy, but SEO is extremely competitive. In addition, you can’t just implement any old strategy – you need to know exactly who you’re trying to attract, along with what will attract them. You wouldn’t be trying to sell luxury yachts to a college student, much like you wouldn’t try to sell an older person on trendy, new-age fashion. What you’re going to do is create your buyer personas, which are made up of a few key factors that you’ll refer to throughout the marketing process.
Pinpointing Your Audience
What Are Their:
- Pain Points
- Hobbies
- Values
- Interests
- Challenges
Be as specific as you can when looking at your target demographic, and finding what would drive them to buy. Aside from those initial things listed, you’ll also want to look at:
- Their financial status
- Gender
- Do they have children?
- Their biggest concerns
- What social media platforms they’re using
- Who they are – are they parents, executives, are they young/older?
- What kind of information are they typically searching for?
- How do current trends influence their needs and/or decisions?
Finally – what are the top problems your content can solve for them? If the content you’re providing your prospects with is irrelevant to their needs or doesn’t properly meet their needs, you’ll have a hard time coaxing anyone naturally through your sales funnel.
Clearly Defining Your Leads
Now that we’ve established your buyer personas, you have to be very clear on what precisely defines a lead for your company – for you, maybe a lead is a website visitor that fills out a sign-up form to become a subscriber to your e-mail list – at the very least, you’ll have this person’s e-mail, and can begin to build a healthy business relationship from there.
Maybe they sign up for a free trial for your services, or a webinar your team is putting on in order to attract the right clientele, and showcase your knowledge to new prospects. Maybe it’s as simple as them downloading an e-book, and you getting their information in exchange for this valuable piece of knowledge.
Identifying Your Target Keywords
This is huge for SEO! In order to direct your target audience to your content, you’ll need to identify the words they’re already searching for, and utilize them as much as possible throughout your content.
You can utilize Google Analytics as a tool to see what keywords are driving people to you, giving you opportunities to capitalize on those and continue to be effective in your efforts. Finding out what long-tail keywords your audience is using proves to be extremely effective when it comes to writing and publishing content – long-tail keywords are highly specific, and they tend to rank well. Not to mention if a prospect is searching for a product or service with a very specific phrase, chances are they know precisely what they want and are motivated to buy.
SEMrush is also a great tool for keyword research – the thing is, it can get a little complex if you haven’t experimented much with it. Here are just a few things you can utilize the program for when it comes to your keyword research:
- Find rankings for a specific keyword or keywords
- Find keyword suggestions for keyword research
- Find keywords with a specific number of search results
- Find keywords to enrich your content with the use of the content template
Targeting popular keywords will help to draw traffic to you – however, it’s important to remember that this process requires continuous evaluation. As we all know, SEO is constantly evolving, and the trends and patterns follow suit – sometimes changing at the drop of a hat. Performing your keyword research once won’t ensure that you’ll secure high rankings indefinitely – develop an appetite for trends, and stay on top of them!
Create an Appealing Meta Description
A meta description summarizes your content beneath the title as it appears in the search results, as a way to describe your content to the searcher – this acts as a preview for them, and is often the deciding factor in whether or not they choose to read or interact with your content.
A compelling meta description that leaves the reader wanting more has the potential to raise the click-through rate of your organic search – however, it can take a little while to come up with something effective, so make sure you’re spending an appropriate amount of time writing one.
How Do You Write a Compelling Meta Description?
A meta description works best if you incorporate one or two of your most important keywords, but only one or two. Don’t make the mistake of repeating your keyword over and over thinking that this will prompt the search engine to better optimize your content – stuffing your content full of keywords will simply have it marked as spam and will appear to be spam to the searcher. This rule applies to not only your meta description but all content you publish.
Write a legible, readable description that gets right to the point. You want to provide enough information in your meta description to capture the interest of the searcher, but not too much to deter them from interacting with your content. Some more established websites neglect to write a meta description for their content, leaving Google to write it for them – you can opt for this route, but you most likely won’t like the result. How can you stop Google from rewriting your meta description?
- Make sure your description isn’t too short in length
- Make sure it describes your content accurately enough
You want to accurately summarize your content so the searcher knows exactly what you have to offer them, without providing too much information that will eliminate the need for them to click on your website.
How Do You Make Your Meta Description Appealing?
Google doesn’t use your meta description for ranking your content, but your potential customers will be reading the description. You don’t want to write too long of a description and risk having it cut off, making for a bad user experience, but you also don’t want it to be too short and provide a general lack of important information, which can hinder the user experience in a different way.
Meta descriptions experienced an increase in expected length after November 2017, with Google suddenly showing around 275-320 character descriptions in the search results. Presently, meta descriptions are shorter again, reverting back to their original length prior to the end of 2017 at 150-170 characters being displayed. Why? Because if Google wants it, Google gets it. Google changes its’ algorithm around 500-600 times in one year, and if you want to keep your SEO strong, it’s important to change with it.
To sum it up, lead generation for SEO is all about organic traffic and finding effective methods to drive that traffic to you through the use of relevant, specific content. You don’t have to pay for attention – if your content hits the spot, it’ll get the attention it deserves!