How to Use SEO for Lead Generation
Before we go into SEO and lead generation, we want to share some interesting statistics:
- There are over 100 billion searches that are made on Google each month
- Of those 100 billion monthly searches, 1.17 billion of them are unique
- More than half the overall searches are made on a mobile phone.
This is the reason why SEO is still an integral part of online lead generation, when people are searching they are much more likely to be looking to buy.
That is what SEO is all about. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is all about creating content which correlates to what your readers (or customers) are looking for on a search engine.
By implementing good SEO practice, your website stands a good chance of reaching the top of the search engine rankings.
The higher your website appears on a search engine result, the better. Recent statistics show that the search engine results that appears at the top, attracts 33% of traffic. Compare that to 18% and 10% for search engine results which appear second and third, respectively.
SEO is not just for websites. SEO can be applied to landing pages, social media profiles, blogs and YouTube videos.
Now that you have come to know what SEO is all about, we would like to share with you in this blog post, how you can run a successful SEO campaign to gain new leads.
(Please note, the SEO campaign outlined below is focused more towards to creating content, not local SEO).
Know Your Target Audience
Before running an SEO campaign, you first need to identify your target audience.
You need to get to know your target audience’s interest and what they like to read. Another thing that you need to know is what search terms your customers are using on a search engine to search for what you provide.
This is key. Knowing what search terms your target market are using will help you figure out what type of content your target market is looking to consume.
In this stage, you need to brainstorm a few search terms that your target market would use to look for content that you intend deliver. Come up with 5 or 6 search terms.
Know Your Competition
Unlike PPC (Pay Per Click), an SEO campaign doesn’t guarantee that your web page will reach to the top of the search engine results. The best thing you can do is to see what your competition is doing and see if you can identify any gaps.
The best way to this, is to use your search terms that you have brainstormed and see what search results come up – usually the search results will be your main competitors.
You can analyse your competition by visiting their web pages and observe how they are presenting their content to their reader. Whilst you are doing this, ask yourself how you could present your competitor’s content better.
Understanding Google’s Search Engine Algorithm
The one thing you have to remember about Google’s search engine algorithm is that the search engine results are not based on the number of times you incorporate a search term into the content.
The search engine results that we see are based on the quality of content and when we say better quality content, we mean having a good working knowledge of the topic.
Create Top Quality Content
Once you know your target audience and your competition, you should start to create your content.
When you are creating your content, invest a great deal of time and effort to ensure your content is of the highest quality.
Remember, you are not writing for a search engine, you are writing for humans.
Make sure you know your topic, inside out. Doing this will not only be of great benefit to your reader but you will do well in the search engine rankings.
A Little SEO trick
A good SEO trick to keep in mind when writing your content, is to add a couple of links back to well-known authority sites.
An authority site is a highly ranked site that is seen as a reliable source. Common authority sites tend to be news sites like BBC, The Guardian and The Times. By adding a link which goes to a relevant webpage on these sites, it will tell the search engine that content is well researched and reliable.
Get Backlinks for Your Content
The beauty of great content is that people are willing to share your content by pasting a link on their social media profile or on their blog. This link is called a backlink, because they go back to the webpage which has your content.
The more backlinks you have, the better.
In order for this to be successful, you need to obtain your backlinks through an organic route i.e. getting people to share your content on social media.
If you deliberately paste backlinks all over the web, then you could risk your website from being blacklisted from the search engine. Google was notoriously known for blacklisting a huge number of websites back in 2012 – when they radically changed their search engine algorithm.
Google still blacklists any website which employ any black hat technique to this day.
Conclusion
The above mentioned SEO campaign really emphasises on the importance of creating top quality content. The quality of the content you produce will directly affect your SEO performance.
If your content is being shared and discussed online, then your content stands a really good chance of reaching a high position in the search results.
The higher you finish on the search engine results, the more web traffic you generate and hence you get more exposure for your brand and you acquire more leads.
