In today’s competitive world, the need for SEO-friendly lead generation is more important than ever. Taking ahead of your competitors means having a solid SEO strategy in place that goes hand in hand with your lead campaigns. A multi-channel strategy is the best way to make sure that your efforts are rewarded, allowing you to bring in new leads and keep ahead of the competition at the same time.
Despite the importance of SEO in lead generation, many campaigns are planned and implemented with little or no thought to the role that SEO plays in bringing in leads. Many do not look at ways of ensuring that lead campaigns can bring in organic traffic, either. In this guide, we will be sharing some tips on how you can get your campaigns ahead in the SERPs naturally.
Effective SEO-Friendly Lead Generation Tips
These tips are a great way to not only improve your various lead pages and content’s ranking but also improve your overall campaigns as well. Without a solid strategy in place, it is very hard to develop campaigns that hit their target. Needless to say, this means reducing your chance of bringing leads into your funnel. The bottom of the funnel is especially important when it comes to SEO as this is where you will attract new leads and get them to move upwards through your funnel – hopefully to conversion. To get you started, here are a few tips to keep in mind.
1. Identify potential areas for improvement
Before you can improve your various on-site lead campaigns’ ranking, you first need a clear idea of what is working and what is not. Without insight to how your efforts are currently going, it will be very difficult to know what needs to change. You may be getting in traffic already or you may be battling to get traffic to key pages. You may find that some pages are doing better than others. A comprehensive digital marketing audit will help you get an accurate idea of exactly how your lead pages are doing. This will allow you to identify potential areas for improvement. You can then move onwards from there once you have a clear idea of where you need to focus. Relying on guesswork is the best way to lose rankings – especially if you have not been paying much attention to your SEO as a whole.
2. Develop a comprehensive content strategy
Content, SEO and lead generation go hand-in-hand. Content remains one of the most important elements across every digital marketing channel. In the case of lead generation, content needs to be SEO-friendly, genuinely useful to leads and able to attract leads. Contents need to be able to solve your audience’s key problems. At the same time, it also needs to be optimised. This balance can seem a bit challenging at first. When you have a comprehensive content strategy in place, it becomes a lot simpler. There are a few ways that you can plan out optimised content that is designed to nurture leads and get them into your funnel. One way is to repurpose content that already has a fairly good ranking or content that is hyper-relevant to your current lead campaigns. Repurposing content can help greatly – especially if the content has already begun to rank. Creating new content is also important. Regular content is always great for ranking. Even one or two blog articles a month can help to build traffic organically. If those articles are also designed to attract leads, with elements such as lead forms, strong CTAs, and a problem-solution focus, it will be even more valuable.
3. Optimise lead pages to drive more traffic
Updating and optimising your landing pages for SEO is also essential. Not too long ago, lead pages were a little like a used car salesman trying desperately to make a sale. While a strong sales approach is certainly useful in lead generation, it does not always attract leads. This outdated approach seldom takes SEO into account, either. Consumers are subjected to a huge amount of links, paid ads and other information daily. To get their attention AND get found in the SERPs, you need to have optimised pages that work for readers and search engines. To use an example, if you have an online pet supply store, you might create specific pages for cat products and dog products or special offers. Without optimising these pages, your choice would be to use paid ads or battle to have your pages get found online.
4. Keep your funnel in mind at all times
For the most part, you will be focusing on the bottom of the funnel. This is the point where prospective leads discover your products or service. Using our online pet store, a dog owner may find your store from a search for dog beds or puppy chew toys. At this point, they are likely not quite ready to buy. They are, however, looking for information. If you have SEO elements in place, such as FAQ or long-tail keywords that relate to products or linked blog articles, you will have a far better chance of your page ranking better. But you’ll also have a far better chance of getting that pet owner interested enough to want to look more closely at those dog beds. If you have a lead magnet in place on how to choose a dog bed or mistakes to avoid when shopping for chew toys, you will be able to get that customer into your funnel. If you’re trying to push brand new customers to the middle or top of the funnel, they are likely to leave very quickly.
5. Invest in a digital marketing dashboard
Finally, something that can greatly help all of your lead generation and SEO campaigns is a digital marketing dashboard. Getting real-time reports on all of your campaigns will help you consistently improve and grow your campaign results. You will be able to see exactly how many leads you are getting for each campaign and determine how many are coming from organic searches. You will also have the chance to get insight into things that may not be working anymore, which keeps your campaigns agile. You can track your lead funnels at every stage, identifying more ways to reach and target leads more effectively. Dynamic filtering can further help, determining things such as location, which will help you create targeted local SEO campaigns for lead generation. This is a great way to grow your ranking if your online pet store is based in a specific city or country. You could look at lead offers such as free shipping within your physical location. You can also get more insight into your audience, which will help you plan personalised campaigns that are far more targeted and relevant.
The Link Between SEO and Lead Generation
You could think of SEO being the thing that brings leads to your lead pages and site and lead generation as the thing that makes them take the next step. Going back to our pet store example, you will battle to bring in leads to your store organically without SEO-friendly lead campaigns. Essentially, these two strategies are made to work together. Used within an integrated multi-channel strategy, you will have the best chance of seeing results for your lead generation campaigns.
