As a business owner if you want to build a successful digital advertising plan for your business you need to pay attention to your digital advertising lead generation strategy and SEO (Search engine optimization).
Let me explain what lead generation marketing is if you are new to digital advertising.
Lead generation strategy is a marketing process of providing your potential customers with valuable resources in exchange for their contact information for future marketing purposes.
Any business that wants to succeed will need to have a marketing strategy that will produce a steady stream of leads from target customers.
Search engine optimization (SEO) on the other hand is the marketing process of optimizing your website to rank higher in the search engine so that your target customers will find it easy to locate you.
With an effective SEO strategy, your target customers will be able to find you easily anytime they need your service by typing in keywords that are related to your business in the search engine.
The higher your website rank in search engine results pages (SERPs), the higher your website traffic will increase, and online users will click on your website links.
Now, let’s talk about the connection between these two digital strategies.
Before I dive deeper into the connection between these two digital marketing strategies you first need to know that SEO and lead generation are not the same, the two digital marketing strategies are entirely different strategies.
Search engine optimization (SEO) focus is to increase website traffic and rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs), while lead generation focus is to increase the number of potential customers (Leads) that are interested in your business products or services.
Although these two digital marketing strategies are entirely different.
However, search engine optimization (SEO) can complement your business lead generation campaign by bringing awareness to your business through organic traffic in search engines.
In this article, I want to talk about the 7 ways you can leverage an effective SEO strategy to boost your business leads.
1. Audit Your Website
The first thing you need to do if you want your marketing efforts to be fruitful is to do a website audit before executing any digital marketing campaign.
Auditing your website will let you know how well your website is performing, which of your web pages are performing well and the ones need improvement.
With the improvement of digital tools, it is now easy to do audits for your website.
There are numerous digital available tools that will help you audit your website, these tools will crawl your website, and detect any problems that affect your website to not convert effectively.
An example of a website audit tool you can use is SE ranking.
SE ranking is an all-in-one SEO tool that is considered to be one of the best website audit tools.
This tool can provide you with an in-depth report that will demonstrate all your website's weak points from an SEO point of view.
SE ranking basic website audit report comes with the following analysis;
2. Check the Speed of your website
It is really important that you check your website speed.
A fast-loading website will increase your sales and provide a great user experience to your website visitors unlike having a website that loads slowly which will increase your website bounce rate and decreases your search engine ranking, and sales.
If you want to check the speed of your website, you can make use of Google’s PageSpeed test.
This tool is a free website performance tool that Google created to analyze websites for speed.
It also offers suggestions on how you can improve your website performance.
3. Perform Keyword Research
Search engine optimization (SEO) is content oriented, to increase your website visibility through SEO you will need to create content with relevant keywords that your target customers are using to find you.
This is the reason why it is a necessity to perform proper keyword research so as to know the search phrases that your target customers are using to search for your business.
You need to target the right keywords that are related to your business if you want to increase your business visibility in the search engine.
Don’t create web content based on assumptions of what your target customers will like or based on what you want.
Your web content should be based on what your target customers want, you are online to serve them not yourself.
You need to identify keywords that are related to your business; these keywords will consist of high-volume and low-volume keywords.
These keywords will be the foundation for how you will write your web content.
If you are new to online advertisement you can make use of SEMrush to find keywords that will help your website rank higher in search engines results pages (SERPs).
SEMrush keyword magic tool lets you perform keyword research based on your country of origin.
The business-related keyword that you used for your website article should also be added to your content titles, subtitles, and meta-descriptions so that search engines can understand what the content is all about.
4. Update Existing On-Page Content
Your website visitors will increase if you have educational, engaging content on your website.
As I said earlier SEO is content-oriented, and creating SEO content with relevant keywords that are related to your business will increase your business rankings and traffic.
Meanwhile, it is not enough to just write anyhow content; if you want to convert your website visitors into leads you will need to publish quality content on your website.
Your web content must be educational, resourceful, and engaging so as to convert your visitors into qualified leads.
If you already have existing content on your website, you need to go back and re-optimize it, make sure your content adds value to your website visitors, because it is the value that will keep them coming back to your website.
If your website content contains images you need to add alt description to it so that search engines can understand what those images are all about.
It is also necessary for you to analyze your website performance with Google Analytics so that you can identify the problems your website is facing.
Google Analytics will give you a deep insight into all that is happening on your website.
5. Keep Track of Your Competitors Performance
To increase your business leads you need to pay attention to the performance of your business competitors in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
You need to keep record of the position of your business competitors in search results for important keywords that you will also like to rank for.
You need to analyze how well your business competitors are performing in search engines.
If you do your research and found out that a competitor is performing better than you are performing for the same keyword query, then you need to dig into the situation and know why the website is ranking higher than your website.
Look properly at their content, how valuable is it? How many word counts is it? How many images or videos are included in the content? How many backlinks do the content have? And many more.
You need to understand why the content is performing better than yours so that you can improve your content if an adjustment is needed.
If adjustment is needed, then you need to adjust your content properly and make sure that it is more valuable than that of your competitors.
6. You Need to Have an Ongoing Content Strategy
You need to create a steady stream of valuable and quality content for your potential customers if you want to consistently generate qualified leads for your business.
People love to visit where they can see the value and if your website is full of valuable content your website visitors will always come back.
This will allows them to willingly provide you with their contact information in exchange for any valuable resource you want to provide to them.
Creating consistent content if you are the one handling your website content yourself, this is why you need to have a content calendar to help you stay organized and publish content consistently.
To get the best out of your content you need to organize your website articles and topics based on your business-related keywords.
This tactic is to make sure the content you publish on your website is the content that your potential customers are searching for online.
Combining your content strategy with keywords that are related to your business will have a positive impact on your business SEO lead generation campaign because you are creating content that your potential customers are actively searching for online.
This will increase your brand visibility in search results which will, in turn, generates qualified leads for your business.
7. Create a Backlink Strategy
Links that your website earns from a third-party website are called backlinks.
Backlinks are essential search engines ranking factor, they are seen as a vote of credibility to your website.
Earning backlinks from third-party websites is a proof that your website is valuable, credible, and trustworthy enough to link to, these backlinks will earn you more trust in the eye of search engines.
Meanwhile, you also need to know that all backlinks are not ranked equally; getting backlinks from a trustworthy website with a high domain authority will give you more search engine credibility than getting backlinks from websites with low domain authority.
You also need to know that for a backlink to have a positive impact on your website, any backlink that is coming into your website from any third-party website must have the “rel=follow.” Tag, this ‘follow’ tag is telling the search engine that your website is a quality and trustworthy website.
While building your website backlink profile, you need to make sure that you don’t involve yourself in any black hat SEO techniques.
Search engine giant like Google monitors backlinks activities, and they will penalize any websites that generate backlink that is not natural.
Although getting backlinks from third-party websites might be hard, it is not a good SEO practice to buy links because you want to increase your website rankings in the search engine.
You can naturally earn backlinks from third-party websites if you consistently publish long-form valuable content on your website.
Another way you can earn backlinks from third-party websites is to reach out to website owners that are related to you asking them to link to any of your website content that complements the content on their website.
You can also earn backlinks through guest blogging.
You can write valuable content for a third-party website and get a link from that website to your website