SEO for Lead Generation

SEO plays another role.  As well as getting you further up the search engines, it encourages more web traffic so directs the right audience (the people interested in your product or service) directly to your website.

Then, assuming you have the right buzz words and calls to action, you’ll hopefully convert those leads into sales.

Online is fluid.  It is never static, it evolves and moves on – fast.  That’s because technology is so advanced it always moves at a fast pace. So SEO is an evolving science, it never stops.  If you want to devise an SEO campaign, you need to understand that it is an ongoing process.  Bear in mind that it can take a few months to deliver results, because Google needs to recognise your SEO results and push it upwards as it gains more traction. Once you’ve got encouraging results, that doesn’t mean you should stop your SEO project.  SEO should be a part of your marketing campaign; it’s not a one-off project.  Big companies and those growing rapidly use SEO as a part of their day-to-day business.  It’s also area-focussed.  So, you might have a particular service or product that you want to rank highly for.  It’s best to address that area first, get your results and then move onto the next. It’s like a circle, you keep going around the circle and re-addressing your focus areas, improving the keywords, introducing new phrases and keeping it “alive and kicking” on Google!

Of course, alongside the search results, you’ll notice to the right hand side other search results come up, separate listings.  These are paid SEO Google ads often referred to as Google AdWords (other search engines also include their own).  Businesses and individuals pay Google to display their ads at the top of page one, and for every “click” they get from a potential client or customer, they are charged.  These aren’t the same as SEO optimized listings, although the ads do use keywords to encourage clicks.

What we’re concentrating on today is helping you to get a grip on search engine optimization, what it means in depth and how to conduct it properly.

Local SEO

What’s really exciting is that SEO can be conducted on a local basis, a national basis and an international basis simply by adding in your area.  That’s why “marketing agency in Los Angeles” is specific – it mentions the locality.  You can fine-tune SEO to wherever you’re located, even down to your street, town or city, it’s that intuitive.

If you’re a business owner, you know your market already which is a great start!  You can learn even more about your market for online SEO purposes and here’s how:

• Talk to your customer base, find out how they describe your business, your brand, your products or service (try creating a surveymonkey.com survey and sending it out to your database)
• Think like a customer – what words would they use to describe you and what type of product or service would they be searching for in that Google search bar?
• Visit forums and online communities that do something similar to you. Look at the threads and see what people talk about, it gives invaluable insight into what they might be searching for.

What are Your Topics?

By topics, we mean what do you do – what do you sell?  It might be you sell T shirts, that’s a topic!  Perhaps you offer plumbing, that’s a topic!  What do you want to rank highly for?  Women’s T shirts?  Cropped T shirts?  Sports T shirts?  They’re topics where you want visibility!  For a plumber, it might be new tap installation, bathroom plumbing, leaks, kitchen plumbers and to really get the best results, add in your location.  Bottom line, choose topics that are relevant and important to your business.

Now it’s your turn to study the search results from your chosen keyword research tool.  Think about why people are searching and what they’re searching for?  They might be asking a question, in which case you might have the answer – it could lead to selling a service or a product.  When you do this, it helps you to fine-tune your keywords and get a better match which all helps move your website up the search engines.

Check Out Your Competition

You likely know who your competition are.  See what type of wording is in their content.  Do they blog?  If so, how often?  Blogging is a great way of inserting your keywords and longtail phrases and generating traffic.  Are you blogging?  If you are, are you doing it with enough frequency?  Perhaps you need to start a blog – more on this later.  When you study what your competitors do you could also identify keyword gaps, these are opportunities that you could leverage and use in your SEO strategy to be ahead of your competitors.   You can do a keyword search on your competitors but you will likely have to pay for this (try searching research competitors’ keywords for results).

What Are Your Goals

What do you want to achieve?    More web visitors (perhaps if you’re a blogger)?  More sales (most definitely!)?  More subscribers?  This will give you direction for your SEO plan and help you determine content marketing (more on that later but very important for SEO!).

This is wear a good keyword research tool comes into play and helps you to refine your list.  This is when to use Google Keywords Planner but there are other keyword tools as mentioned before.  These tools will help you narrow down your list and pinpoint other keywords you may have missed.  You just type your keyword topic that you’ve generated yourself into the search box that these research websites have and you’ll generate a list of alternative keywords.  You will also generate a list of questions that people might search for and prepositions.

Get to Grips with Your Longtail Keywords

As discussed earlier, you need to elongate your search terms to include more specific words.  This generates longtail keywords, as you know, they’re very valuable.  Yes, they get fewer clicks but they get the type of clicks that lead to higher conversions.