Lead Generation Tips from an SEO Expert

We’ve already shown you the benefits of Lead Generation SEO. Now, we’re going to let you in on a few SEO best practices that you can put to work to benefit your organization. If you’re thinking about using lead generation SEO tactics, a little bit of background knowledge can go a long way. Sure, you want to use search engine optimization for higher traffic to your website and to generate more leads for your business overall, but where do you start?

Well, of course, the best initiative you can take is to partner with a team of SEO experts like us here at 1Digital^Ⓡ Agency for your SEO project. We have a long history of success in building traffic for our customers so they can reap the fruits of more conversions and better business. Speaking of success, keep reading to learn more about some tricks you can use to improve SEO for lead generation, proven by success in our endeavors.

Create Content That’s Original

A large part of using SEO to capture leads is to publish a reliable stream of original content. Publishing high-quality content to your web pages can have quite a range of benefits for your organization in terms of search engine optimization.

The first is the fact that with the right keyword strategy and tailored, original content, you can attract the attention of search engines as they crawl the web. These search engines will then rank you based on the length of content and the keywords that appear therein.

It’s also valuable to post interesting, relevant and original content to keep your visitors engaged. Whatever you decide to offer visitors to your site should also be informative and cast a persuasive light on your products and services. It has to be directly relevant to your business, to your products or to your end users. Users that share or link to your site will help you generate traffic. Moreover, giving a potential customer a reason to visit your site will give you a better chance at converting them.

There’s more than one style and type of content that you can publish to your site. It can be written, audio, video or combinations thereof. The more information you include on your website that uncovers and presents the value of your products or services, the better your chances are of generating leads that will reach out,, leave their information on your website, or visit your store.

Don’t Publish Content You Find Elsewhere

We’ll be more specific about the fact that content doesn’t just need to be engaging and contain the right words and phrases to drive traffic. Speaking to the end that it must be original, search engines will recognize content that you’ve found elsewhere and posted on your site. It’s called duplicate content and it can actually hurt your rankings and thus your visibility.

It might be easy to find some engaging or interesting copy elsewhere, but resist any urges you have to use it. It won’t help you and might even hurt. Now, we recognize, however, that creating a constant stream of original content in and of itself is a difficult skill to master, which is precisely why 1Digital^Ⓡ offers content marketing services.

For some perspective, our team at 1Digital^Ⓡ creates a steady stream of original content for businesses that take on several forms of blog posts, other onsite material like product descriptions as well as offsite content. It is more than just original. It is optimized, unique and diverse, but on top of that all it is also consistent. It works in conjunction with our technical SEO practices as part of our projects to increase our customers’ visibility online.

The content you publish gets attention and is also a great way to capture leads to your business, whether it’s online or brick and mortar. Ask customers for contact information in exchange for access to content, for example. It could be the difference between converting a customer or missing out on a lead.

Create Landing Pages for Your Services

On the same note as content production, it’s very important to connect your potential customers with all of the products and services your organization offers. When it comes to offering services, especially services that must be rendered in person, that can get a little tricky. You can’t really have a product page for a service that can’t even be rendered over the internet.

What you can do, however, is create landing pages for your services to inform visitors to your site about what you offer, how it is valuable and what problems it can help them solve. You can even offer some insight to the problems your services have solved for clients in the past. Allow customers to leave reviews (more on that in a moment) or solicit and advertise client testimonials on your landing pages for services.

You might not be able to close a deal for services online, but you can welcome customers to offer contact information in exchange for a deal or for more information on some of the services you can provide. Both of these tactics can help you build up a register of interested leads, who, though they might not be purchasing today, might become brand evangelists with time.

For example, consider our client Waterfront Gourmet’s lead generation landing page on their catering services. One might otherwise visit the website of a chain of gourmet restaurants without even knowing if catering was an option, but Waterfront Gourmet’s Catering page is easily accessible from their homepage and even calls visitors to action to contact the closest location:

Use Google My Business to Generate Leads

Google My Business is a great resource for online businesses looking to ramp up business and drive lead to their stores. Whether for better or worse, Google has largely replaced other avenues by which most consumers start their searches for a product or a service they feel they need.

A step as simple as ensuring that your contact information in Google My Business is up to date and accurate can help to make your business more visible for interested customers. Think of it as real world SEO. If your business shows up when a customer searches for keywords associated with it and subsequently visits your website or store, you’ve just generated a lead right there.

Google My Business can be an invaluable tool for businesses in even more ways. Not only can you make it easier for customers to get in touch with you, but you can allow them to leave reviews and offer experiences and feedback regarding your business. You can interact with your customers through Google My Business and you can even build a website for free with their website builder.

It gets better. With Google My Business, you can even track how customers interact with your listing and what actions they took. That can go a long way towards helping you establish the channels by which interested parties find your business and help you refine your approaches to marketing to a more clearly defined target audience.

Use Goal Tracking in Google Analytics

You can also use Google Analytics goal tracking to track qualified leads, figure out which leads converted into paying customers and even to help you better define the members of your market you want to target.

There are a few ways you can go about doing this. The first is to set up a page on your website encouraging visitors to offer contact information in exchange for something, be it specials, news or otherwise. You can then set up a goal in Google Analytics to track form submissions from interested customers. This method will enable you to receive contact information from leads as well as determine the avenues by which they arrived to your site, but you can’t directly see which of those leads if any becomes a paying customer.

If you have customer relationship management software to tie together information on sales,website activity and interaction, you can go a step further. The first few steps are the same and you still need to track form submissions as a goal, but CRM software can then coordinate the data to associate the leads that convert into customers and those that don’t. That functionality can not only help you identify tactics to pursue for converting leads that haven’t become customers but it can also help you gain a better grasp of where most paying customers come from and what they buy.

Emphasize Locality In Digital Marketing To Drive Traffic To Your Store

If your goal for using SEO as a lead generation tool is to get potential customers interested in your local business, then you can’t miss an opportunity to mention the fact that you’re local. In fact, search engines will display different results to different markets based on a variety of factors and one of them is location.

Don’t assume, however, that clients will know you’re local just because they’ve found your website. Local means different things to different people, after all, so make sure you list your locations as well as the markets you serve. That could be the difference between getting a visitor to your store or not.

It’s also a great way to offer potential customers a call to action. Inform them of sales or specials that are ongoing. Give them a reason to visit you. They may visit your site and then bounce forever. Or, they may visit your site and bounce, only to remember your name the next time they’re in your neighborhood.

Don’t Forget To Include Contact Information!

If a potential customer visits your site, and you’ve informed them of your locality and the services you provide, you’ve won a part of the battle. If your site is designed to offer the best user experience it can as well as the freshest original content, you’ve won some additional battles. But what are you missing?

Well, we’ve already told you how customers will leave your site in a hot second if they don’t see it as credible or authoritative. Unfortunately, one of the ways to come off as disreputable is to fail to include adequate contact information, even multiple channels, for customers to reach you.

Include information on your business, such as where it’s located, what markets it serves (as we stated above) or how you can be contacted. And don’t forget to include multiple channels, it’s not 2019 anymore. Let them contact you by phone, by email, or encourage them to follow you on any of your social media accounts. That’s capturing leads right there. Consider for example, one of our partners, KM Herbals, that partnered with us for a BigCommerce redesign project:

Their “Our Story” page is easily accessible from the homepage and includes multiple lead generation opportunities. There is an invitation to join their newsletter prominently listed at the bottom of their information page and two more channels visitors can use to contact them, by email and phone. The effort might seem redundant but it is clear and effective.

Encourage Reviews

Allowing for reviews is potentially another great way to capture leads, and at the very least it will help improve your brand image. A positive review in and of itself is also a call to action. It spurns those on the fence into converting if they trust the reviews.

And they do, overwhelmingly. A huge number of customers will check online reviews before making a purchase. If your site is laid out in an easily navigable fashion that engages visitors and you have the option to leave positive reviews, you’ll be giving yourself a channel for new leads not only to learn about you but to encourage them to patronize your business.

Check out how our client J Devlin Glass Art encourages users to leave reviews:

They offer a 20% discount in exchange for a review that, in all likelihood, is going to generate even more business to their online store. In a way, it’s like a double barrelled initiative. It can help to generate new leads and aims to improve customer retention. It even gives customers a way to feel more valued and involved. It’s a good strategy all around.

---

Capturing leads is always important in any market, because it enables you to filter interested participants through the funnel and end up with more customers at the end of the day without letting them slip through the filter. That being said, lead capturing is more important now than ever given the conditions that have forced many businesses to halt or restrict commerce. The online market is still booming, and now is a great time to take advantage of the opportunities in eCommerce. We’re extending our hand to help any looking for a free SEO audit, online brand appraisal, a free development evaluation and more.

These tactics are a good start for those looking to get the most out of eCommerce SEO for lead generation. The truth is that a lot of what we’ve suggested here is easier said than done, as they say, but when it comes to website design and SEO, we’ve got years of experience that we’re ready to use to help you get results. Website design and SEO tactics often go hand in hand, so if you want to put the experience of SEO experts to work for you, contact us here at 1Digital Agency via info@1digitalagency.com or by calling us at 888-982-8269.