Your Search Engine Optimization efforts can improve your rankings in search engine results pages and are vital to bringing traffic to your website. You can generate qualified leads with SEO if you focus on techniques that will bring potential buyers to your site.
Read on to learn more about the top strategies you can implement to turn SEO into a channel that continuously brings quality leads to your sales team.
Targeting the Right Audience
When optimizing your content, targeting keywords that express an intent to purchase products or services can result in a higher quality of leads.
Identifying the Buying Intent
Keyword research can help you identify the searches prospects are likely to issue once they’re ready to make a purchase.
There are obvious keywords to target, including variations of ‘your product name or product category + buy.’ For brick-and-mortar businesses, keywords with ‘near me’ and similar variations can also help you connect with potential customers through local SEO.
Going Beyond the Obvious Keywords
The typical buying journey is becoming increasingly complex as prospects research the different available options. For complex products, there is a lengthy process of researching potential solutions and assessing which one will address the pain points the prospect is experiencing.
Potential B2B buyers will consume 13 pieces of content on average during this process. You can use SEO strategies to reach out to this target audience and deliver educational content that will help prospects progress through the different stages of their journey.
You can conduct keyword research to identify the searches that prospects are likely to issue earlier in the sales funnel. These searches might focus on a pain point, refer to an entire product category, or focus on specific product features.
Optimize Your Content to Generate Qualified Leads with SEO
Now that you have a better idea of what prospects are looking for, you need to develop content that meets their expectations and delivers a good user experience.
Create Quality Content
You can use your keyword research to identify topics you should write about. Publishing blog posts regularly is one of the best strategies for consistently ranking higher on search engine results, since Google and other search engines value fresh content.
If you decide to optimize a page for a keyword, make sure visitors will find relevant content for this search on your landing page.
Encourage Content Discovery
It’s best to focus on a single topic for every page or blog post you create. However, you can encourage visitors to learn more by encouraging content discovery.
You should focus on link building to capture traffic from other sources and help visitors find more blog posts and pages that will be useful for their journey. Sharing links on social media is a great place to connect with your target audience and generate repeat visits to your site.
Be Smart with Keyword Placement
Keywords are an essential element of your search engine optimization strategy. When you create content, you will use your main keywords naturally in your copy.
However, you need to go further to optimize your content:
- Use your main keywords in your headers and page title.
- You can also add keywords to your URLs, meta description, and meta tags.
- Remember that search engines can’t determine if visual and interactive content is relevant for a search. Use Alt tags with strong keywords to describe this content.
- Google and other search engines feature text snippets, bullet-point lists, and tables directly on SERPs. You can target these featured results by optimizing your content with long-tail keywords formulated as questions followed by a direct answer.
Optimize Your Pages Beyond Keywords
Search engines look at many factors when indexing a page and determining how it should rank in search results.
For a successful SEO and lead generation campaign, you’ll need to go further than adding relevant keywords to your content:
- Your page loading speed matters. Google has some tools you can use to find the elements that might be slowing down your site.
- Google is now using mobile-first indexing and prioritizing results that will load and display properly on smartphones. You can start by using a responsive design.
- Link building will help establish authority for your site besides bringing more traffic. Always look for new opportunities to share links to your content, whether on social media, a guest blog post, or a news site.
Turning a Visit into a Lead
Search engine optimization strategies can help you target the right audience, but your content also needs to turn visitors into qualified leads.
Build Trust and Suggest the Next Step
When a visitor clicks on one of your links, your landing page should deliver what you promised in the page title or via the keyword you decided to target.
Once you have answered the visitor’s questions, you can suggest the next step to connect with them, whether it’s your email list, a social media profile, or a contact form.
Use Calls to Action
A call to action is a few sentences that encourage a visitor to perform a task, like signing up for your newsletter or contacting you to request a quote.
Your calls to action should be immediately noticeable when a visitor finds one of your pages, and they should also reflect the information you delivered on this page.
For instance, if a keyword indicates that a visitor is in the early stages of researching a purchase, focus on connecting with them via your email list instead of pushing for a sale.
Connect and Nurture
You can use SEO and calls to action to generate leads, but you need to keep nurturing these leads by delivering more high-quality content.
Your goal should be to create content to help your qualified leads find enough information to make the best purchase decision possible.
Final Thoughts
As the best digital marketing strategy, you can generate qualified leads with SEO by focusing on the right keywords and optimizing your content.
It’s also important to keep in mind that search trends can change over time, so you should always look for new opportunities to develop more content and optimize your website.
