Using Search Engine Optimization to Generate Leads
So have decided to start a business around lead generation or maybe you want to add a blog to your current site to help generate more leads huh? Well, join the club and welcome to the millions of sites out there doing the same thing. Most likely you will have limited budget, resources, and initial direction so hopefully this post will help you.
As we all know, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is great way to generate leads for near nothing. I have worked on sites that employed 500-600 employees and 99% of all leads generated were through SEO and I have also seen lead generation based companies looking for investment and/or purchase for over 200 million because of their success with SEO. So how do you start?
Keyword Research
Anybody who knows anything about SEO will tell you “Content is King!” and I agree but without a keyword strategy behind it and driving it you might as well not even bother. One of the biggest flaws I see when working with companies is this and it is madding to me. They have a dedicated writer for the project and they are serving quality, relevant, discussion-engaging content and yet nobody or very few are seeing it organically. You need a keyword strategy in place prior to developing your content!
Start off with a list of 50 keywords in their plural form that are about the product or service you are trying to develop leads for. I call this the brainstorming stage. Let me use my token example “golf equipment” for this exercise. Here is a short list:
- Golf
- Equipment
- Clubs
- Irons
- Drivers
- Putters
- Wedges
- Shoes
- Balls
- Taylor Made
- Callaway
- Cobra
- Cleveland
- Nike
Now it is time to get more granular with these terms because you are not going to get high placement for the terms above in the way they are currently listed. These terms have way too much competition and sites that rank well for these terms have a tremendous amount of incoming links and have age of domain on their side.
Next, arrange your terms into 3-4 word phrases, what I call the refinement stage. Look at this from a few perspectives:
1) The more specific the phrase – the less the competition – the better the chance of ranking and driving traffic.
2) Web visitors are getting smarter and their searches are telling us this. They are using more words per search than ever before and this creates higher relevancy of the search engine results and better usage of their time.
3) You will have a higher conversion rate – At this stage of the game you want this as it will give you additional income to pour back into the business.
We are off to the refinement stage now and here is an example:
- Golf clubs
- Taylor Made golf clubs
- Callaway drivers
- Nike gold shoes
- Cleveland golf equipment
Let’s move on to the discovery stage. There are a lot of great keyword tools out there to choose from such as; Wordtracker, Spyfu, SEMRrush, Keyword Discovery, Wordze, Google Trends, and of course Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Most have free versions and I would suggest using at least 2-3 of these tools to get a good sense of the landscape. Make sure you are performing these searches in “exact” mode as any other way could lead you down the wrong path especially with the Google set of keyword discovery tools. What is great about this stage is that you will discover keyword phrases that you did not think of or related terms to target. I would use a simple Excel spreadsheet that showed all keywords, amount of monthly exact searches, and the amount of pages Google shows for that search. Also allow this spreadsheet the ability to expand as we will use it again to keep track of content.
Installing and Optimizing Your Blog
There is a variety of blogging platforms out there and depending on what type of technology your site is being hosted on will limit the type of blogging system you will use. I am a firm believer that your blog should reside on the domain of the business website you are trying to promote. There was a time a few years ago that company blogs were being used on their own domain and then links were pointed back into the business website. It was a good theory then but “domain trust” is something all major search engine use in some way to determine your site’s authority and by including the blog in the business site it will help the increase the domain trust as the blog does. This also gives other pages of the business site to rank higher and convert more overall.
I recommend WordPress as it offers tremendous design flexibility, SEO friendless, and endless amount of plug-ins to help you blog grow and convert. Before we go into what plug-ins you should install for search engine optimization I would like to talk about “themes” first. Themes are really templates for the most part. Some are more design related but some do offer a good balance of design and development already included. I recommend DIYThemes’ “Thesis” theme as it is set up for SEO from the start while offering outstanding design flexibility. Some of the top SEO guys out there are using this theme such as Matt Cutts and Patrick Gavin so it must tell you something!
I would also recommend the following plug-ins:
- Google XML Sitemaps – creates a site map in XML form easy inclusion into your Bing, Yahoo, and Google Webmaster accounts.
- Sexy Bookmarks – has all the primary and secondary social media sites that visitors can bookmark your posts.
- Insights – allows you to quickly search and insert links from your posts or other sites.
- HeadSpace2 – gives you complete control over all SEO needs. Thesis takes care of most of these already but the auto suggestion for tagging posts is worth the install.
- Contact Form 7 & Really Simple CAPTCHA – add a contact form in a snap while not being SPAMED.
- Redirection – manages all your 301 redirects and 404 errors.
- SEO Smart Links – provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more
Once this is all set up and working correctly it is time to get that spreadsheet out again and start using it as a guide to the type of content you are about to create. Make additional columns for Title, Description, Heading, and Page Name. This will give you a nice 360 degree overview of the SEO direction you want your content to follow.
Keyword Linking
By far the hardest part of the game and yet one of the top 3 most important. Start off with a few major directories like Yahoo, Business.com, DMOZ and All The Web. These will cost you around $800 a year (except DMOZ – but for DMOZ you just hope and pray to get in!) but well worth it. Your social media profiles like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, MySpace, SlideShare, and others you can get a link from as well and this will help some.
Get involved with communities and help answer other people’s questions on sites like Yahoo Answers, Linkedin Q&A, Answers.com, and other related blogs. Send out 1-2 press releases a month and this will give you enough of a push to start on your link building campaign. Remember, your link building is only as good as your last day! It is a never ending battle and the dedicated will survive and prosper. Make a commitment to do an hour a day! I really can not stress this enough.
Expectations
Honestly it depends on the type of keywords you are targeting and the competition. I have seen blog posts from here obtain top 10 ranking within a few weeks for very competitive terms (“paid search tips” & paid search marketing tips”) with just a few links and I have seen some of my posts with little competition not show up at all. Expect 3-6 months on average competitive terms and 12 months for the very competitive terms. Your mileage will vary based on how aggressive you are in your link building and content creation.
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