Did you know that 70 – 80% of searchers ignore paid ads and only look at organic search results?
Meanwhile, 75% of these users never scroll past the first page of Google.
In order to capture the attention of searchers, drive traffic to your website and get high quality leads, your links need to be shown as close to the top of the search engine results page (SERP) as possible.
Creating and optimizing high-quality content (e.g., blog posts, infographics, lead magnets) is an effective inbound marketing tactic to get found on SERP.
However, your goal isn’t just to drive traffic to your website. You also want to make sure these visitors turn into high-quality leads.
Otherwise, you’d be investing in content that doesn’t yield a high ROI.
Here’s how to get high-quality leads to your website with SEO:
Start With an SEO Strategy
SEO has many moving parts and without a solid strategy, you could easily get sidetracked and miss the mark.
First, get a clear understanding of your audience by constructing buyer personas that illustrate your ideal customers’ demographic information, sources of information, and key challenges.
Next, you need to create a lead magnet that speaks to the specific challenges faced by your audience.
Depending on your business model, the nature of the topic, and the preferences of the personas, your lead magnet could be a piece of content (e.g. whitepaper,) a resource list, an interactive tool, a video training, a discount code, or a free trial.
Last but not least, you should define KPIs (key performance metrics,) set goals, and establish baseline metrics so you can monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Research and Optimize For Keywords
Based on your buyer personas, you can then identify relevant keywords to optimize your content for SEO.
Since you have already narrowed down your audience and identified the lead magnet, you can hone in on high-value conversion keywords to target prospects that are searching for the exact phrases.
You should also talk to your sales team and customer service specialists. They interact with your customers every day and know exactly how your ideal audience talks about their problems and challenges.
Leverage these insights to help identify keywords for optimization so you can attract the most qualified leads.
In addition, use long-tail keywords to get found by prospects that are looking specifically for the solution you offer and include high-intent keywords to capture those who are ready to take action.
For lead generation purpose, you’re probably looking to attract visitors in the “awareness stage” of their buyer’s journey so map your keywords to this phase to get the best results.
At this stage, your audience may not have identified the solution to their problems yet and probably doesn’t know about your brand, products, or services.
Consider the challenges they encounter and the questions they may type into the search box to inform your keywords strategy.
Use Keywords To Guide Lead Magnet and Landing Page Creation
Use the insights from your keyword research to inform the creation and positioning of your lead magnet so it’s relevant to your ideal customers and helps generate high-quality leads.
Incorporate these keywords into the landing pages’ title, meta description, sub-heads, and body text to improve on-page SEO.
In addition, take LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) keywords into account when writing the landing page copy to signal relevancy to search engines.
You should also make sure the messaging on the landing page is consistent with the meta description and the keywords you’re ranking for to deliver a consistent user experience that’ll increase conversion.
If you have multiple buyer personas with different priorities, you can increase conversion rate by creating a dedicated landing page for each one so you can position the lead magnet appropriately.
Each landing page can have a different focus and be ranked for a unique set of keywords to ensure a message-audience match.
In addition, you can use this information to segment your list and send targeted content to nurture your leads in the future.
Evaluate and Optimize Existing Content
If you have been creating content for a while, you can review the metrics of your existing posts to find out what topics or keywords are driving the most traffic that converts.
Besides using the insights to inform your keyword strategy, you can also give these posts a facelift to drive even more traffic:
- Revisit on-page SEO to ensure that relevant keywords are incorporated in the title, subheads, body text, meta description, and image alt tags.
- Add images, infographics, or videos to increase engagement, boost dwell time, and attract backlinks.
- Include internal links to your other content and make sure the post is linking out to high-quality external resources.
- Update the content and formatting to optimize for Google’s answer box and featured snippet.
- Add an inline link or callout box to your lead magnet.
- Create a content upgrade to capture and get more high quality leads with SEO.
Don’t forget to actively promote your content (e.g., to your email list or on social media.) Search engines will interpret the website traffic as a signal of relevancy, which will help boost your SEO ranking.
Improve Local SEO
If you have a local business, one of the best ways to get found by prospects is through local SEO.
Local SEO gives you a better chance of being shown on the first page of search results and puts you in front of potential customers who are looking for the exact products or services that you offer.
To optimize for local SEO, be sure to include local search terms (e.g. “[ city ] + keyword”) and take advantage of online directories such as Yelp, Merchant Circle, and Citysearch.
Good reviews are critical to improving your page rank, which determines where your snippet falls on SERP and improves your business’s visibility.
Don’t forget to claim your business on the Google My Business directory.
This allows your business to be shown prominently on the first page of search results on a map that displays the location of businesses near the searcher:
You can also attract more potential customers by promoting a special offer. For example, ask them to sign up to your mailing list to receive a special discount.
In addition, since many shoppers use their smartphones to look up local businesses, your website and landing pages need to be mobile-friendly.
Track and Analyze Your Metrics
SEO is an on-going effort so it’s important to track your results and fine-tune your tactics.
Remember that you’ve defined a set of KPIs in your SEO strategies? Use those metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your campaigns.
When reviewing these metrics, make sure you’re looking at traffic from organic searches only.
You can then generate an SEO report to show the top landing pages for search traffic, keywords driving the most traffic, the top exit pages, and more.
But driving traffic is only half the story. You need to make sure the traffic is turning into leads that will eventually convert.
You can look at the Assisted Conversions report (Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions) to determine if you’re driving high-quality traffic to your website.
Generate this report every month to help fine-tune your keywords and strategies, and evaluate the quality of your traffic.
In addition, keep tabs on how well your leads are converting into customers by using other marketing technologies, such as a centralized customer database and a customer relationships management (CRM) system, to track their interactions with your brand throughout the customer lifecycle.
Ask Your Visitors Qualifying Questions
When a visitor comes to your website, it is often the first time they have ever heard of your business. In order to determine whether they will become high quality leads for your business, you will have to determine whether the products and services that you offer are right for them or not.
One way to do this is by asking them qualifying questions.
As they browse through your website, you want to have opportunities for them to engage with your business through either call to actions, contact forms, or survey questions (often popups).
These questions should be geared toward learning more about your visitors, what they are looking for, and what your business can help them with in the future.
This can include getting more information about their business (how many employees they have, how long they’ve been in business, what their budget is) or even questions like, “What’s the biggest problem you face in your business?”
Questions like these help give you and your sales team a better idea of what the visitor is looking for and whether they are a high quality lead to focus on in the future.
Scoring Your Leads to Determine Quality
Many businesses actually score their leads to determine if they are getting high quality leads through their website. If a visitor comes to your website and immediately leaves, they will receive a very low score.
However, if a visitor comes to your website, clicks to 5 different pages, clicks on your social media profiles, then signs up for your newsletter, each of those actions will be added to their score. The more actions they’ve taken on your website, the more likely it is that they are a high quality lead.
This allows you to spend your time focusing on your high quality leads rather than remarketing to people who immediately bounced from your website.
Nurture and Improve Your Relationship With Your High Quality Leads
If you notice that a particular visitor engages with every blog post you put up, interacts with all of your posts on social media, and replies often to your email newsletter, pay attention to this person.
They are already showing interest in your business and by acknowledging and recognizing that interest, you can begin to nurture and improve your relationship to turn them into high quality leads.
Often times, businesses will not pay attention to the amount of engagement a visitor is showing toward their business and the opportunity often gets overlooked.
By paying attention to the way visitors engage with your website, social media, and email, you can determine who is most likely a high quality lead which will allow you to build the relationship and convert them from a lead into a paying customer.
Conclusion
Search engines reward high-quality, relevant, and engaging content that searchers find useful.
To win the SEO game, adopt a customer-centric approach to your keyword strategies and content marketing to bring visitors to your site and then tracking and building your relationship with them.
As search engine algorithms evolve and new features are added, it’s important to make sure you’re following the latest SEO best practices to bring as many high quality leads to your website as possible.
For many businesses, keeping up with SEO can be overwhelming and optimizing for the wrong audience can impact your sales and revenues.
Unless you have all day to read up on and tinker with SEO, it’s a smart investment to engage the service of an SEO expert to make sure your website is always optimized for generating high-quality traffic from search engine results.
Curious how your website stacks up in terms of SEO score? Get your free audit to see how it does!