Let’s face it, the importance of SEO in lead generation is unparalleled. Undoubtedly, without lead generation, your business chances of survival are slim. Lead generation entails attracting prospects by aiming to transform them into loyal customers. SEO and lead generation work hand to hand to boost your marketing strategy and skyrocket your sales.
While the budget of big companies can procure professional SEO services, many small businesses may have to empty their wallets to do such. If you own a small business or startup and would like to generate leads via SEO, this article is for you. By reading this article to the end, you will learn how to generate leads via SEO for your Small business.
Know Your Customers Search Intent
SEO services are built around a simple objective, to make your company appear in the search results of potential customers so that they find your business. For this to be possible, you need to know what they are looking for.
Imagine this situation, a solar panel manufacturer dedicates enormous effort to appear on the first page of the search engines for “alternative energy sources”, but in the real sense, her potential customers are looking for “how to lower electricity costs”. She has the solution, but it won’t show up in the results!
So, it all starts with finding out what are the searches that your potential customers do on the internet. These searches, in the vast majority of the time, are associated with the real problems and desires of your client. In short, to do SEO right, you need to know your customers.
An interesting tool that can help is the Keyword Planner from Google Adwords. It allows you to enter a keyword and, by association, suggests several similar ones. For each keyword, it indicates the search volume.
Adequate Keyword Research
Defining keywords to work on your page is not easy. There are many issues involved: relevance, specificity, search volume, competition. let’s say you’ve come up with an ideal keyword to generate a lot of traffic (and a lot of leads) for your company. Is the keyword enough?
Certainly not! If you create content with that keyword, but you don’t make it the best content possible, then you’re not exploiting the opportunity well in your hands. Keep in mind that SEO is not an end in itself. It is a way of showing search engines that your page deserves to be seen by users, and it will not work if this premise is not true.
Now, how can you make your content the best it could be? To put it briefly, it must be original, relevant, well written, and updated.
You can use a tool like BuzzSumo to find out what is the best performing content on the topic you’re going to cover. So, read each one and try to find their weaknesses, that is, find out what is missing (or, what could be even better) in them. Use this analysis as a basis for producing your content.
However, be careful and stay away from copying or, as it happens a lot nowadays, spinning (paraphrasing) the texts that already exist. Doing so only detracts from the SEO potential of your blog or website. You must be inspired by good content to make new, original, even better content.
Do On-page SEO: Focus on the 7 Essential Points Below
Once you have the keyword relevant to the searches performed by your potential customers and you’ve built quality content around that keyword, the next step is to do on-page SEO. For those who have little knowledge on the subject, the summary below is what SEO optimization entails.
- URL
- Title
- Subtitles (at least one)
- The first paragraph of the text
- Paragraph of the text
- Title Tag (the title that appears when the page is listed in search results, which is not necessarily the same as the title displayed within the site itself)
- Meta Description (the brief description of the page that appears in the search).
Your keyword needs to be present in the points above. It can appear more often, too. For example, in the alternative text of the images (the texts that show when the image could not load). It will also be better to include the keyword in the image description.
One of the most used tools to correctly practice on-page SEO is Yoast, a WordPress plugin that analyzes your page and indicates the points that need optimization. Thus, you don’t even need to be an expert in the subject to score 10 in SEO.
Conclusion
Lead generation in a business can be seen as an artery that draws blood to the brain. It is the fuel of a business, always feeding it with more energy to keep moving the “car” (business). If you own a small business, don’t be discouraged that you can’t generate high leads. Small business doesn’t imply small lead generation. If you play your cards right with SEO, you can attain what big businesses fail to achieve with lead generation.
