To fill your sales pipeline and convert customers, you must first attract and nurture leads. But how do you get leads in the first place?
Lead generation strategies are designed to attract and warm up potential customers in preparation for getting them to make a purchase. Whatever method you choose, the goal should be to have potential customers engage with your brand and make the transitioning from stranger to a customer more natural.
You can use various lead generation strategies to keep customers moving along the sales pipeline, but not many are as effective as search engine optimization.
In this quick guide, we explore simple yet effective SEO tactics and practices you can employ to skyrocket your lead generation results and drive more customers to your business. Let’s dive in!
Increase Your Website’s Speed
Your website’s speed determines how well or poorly it ranks on google. Higher speed results in better user experience, low bounce rates, return visits and ultimately higher conversions.
The average time it takes for a normal page to load is 2-3 seconds. Anything slower than this and your website’s bounce rate jumps several folds with every additional second delayed.
You can improve your website speed by using a fast hosting provider. Another way is to compress files like images, which drags down the loading speed.
Tools like Pingdom, Google Pagespeed Insights and YSlow are excellent at evaluating your website’s speed.
Conduct Keyword Research
Keyword research helps you know which search queries are popular and how difficult it will be for your business to rank for those keywords.
When you conduct keyword research also, you discover what problems people have and what kind of solutions they’re looking for.
To find suitable keywords, it’s important that you first come up with a list of “seed” keywords. You can then use keyword tools such as Ahrefs to identify more refined keywords. Once you have relevant keywords, create useful content optimized for those keywords and publish them on your website.
If done properly, you should start seeing increased traffic and ultimately more qualified leads streaming to your business.
Create SEO-Optimized Content
Your blog’s content needs to be SEO-optimized if it’s to bring traffic and generate leads. For starters, you need to publish regularly so the content stays fresh. You should also go through older content and tweak it, update statistics, images and fix broken links.
Other ways in which you can optimize your content for SEO include:
- Use H2, H3, and H4 subheadings to make your content easier to scan
- No shallow content. Cover the topic in depth but avoid stuffing it with keywords
- Add images and infographics to engage readers
- Avoid optimize different pages on your website with the same keywords as this might lead to keyword cannibalism and result in loss of rankings
Invest in Link Building
Link building is the process of acquiring links to and from your website. These links are known as backlinks.
A good link building strategy includes both inbound (from other sites to yours) and outbound links (from your site to others).
The former is probably more important and of course the more difficult to do. Luckily, with a strategy like guest posting, you can build high-quality backlinks that help you rank better on Google.
What’s more, when you write captivating content for another site, chances are you will get some direct traffic from readers that click through your link in the guest post.
Incorporate Strategic Video Marketing
YouTube helped grow the video marketing model and now more businesses are adopting it due to its high engagement level with audiences.
The goal of your video marketing campaigns should be to promote your brand’s product or services using videos to get customers’ attention. While at it, be sure that whatever video you produce and promote adds value and helps your audience solve their problems.
Finally, don’t forget to distribute your videos across multiple social platforms for a wider reach and hence more leads.
Maintain an Active Social Media Presence
Your social media channel needs to be active to generate leads. How you do this is by posting quality, useful content on topics your target audience is interested in. You can also take advantage of the advertising features on various social media platforms to launch advertising campaigns.
An effective social media marketing campaign should also entail sharing testimonials of customers who have benefitted from your brand. This helps to build trust and attract even more leads to your business.
Finally, remember to engage your audience by answering their questions and concerns in a timely fashion.
Conclusion
Your lead generation strategies determine how profitable (or lack of it) your business stays. If you’ve decided to use SEO to fill your sales pipeline, it’s important that you implement the simple strategies we just shared with you here to get started.
An often overlooked factor is website loading speed, which can stop potential customers from reaching you if it’s too slow.
You should also do keyword research to ensure the content you put out is exactly what your ideal audience is interested in. of course, don’t forget to add link building and complement that with signals from social media.
If you can implement these strategies, there’s no way you can completely fail at filling your sales pipeline with quality leads. Good luck!
