We are living in the year 2020. It has been a while since we embraced the Internet as a dominant medium for business, including sales promotion, and pretty much everything we did in the real world, and more. That virtual space enabled businesses to become global overnight and sell their goods all over the world. With online business blooming in the past decade, we are still finding new ways to expand and boost our business.
Today, it is hard to imagine a successful business without a good strategy on building leads and a sales funnel that is bringing you new clients and converting them to prospects. It is only natural that you invest in generating interest in your business while creating a list of potential clients a.k.a. leads. If you want your business to grow and evolve, you need a steady stream of leads, it’s simple as that. Of course, as a business owner, you want your buyers to have a successful journey with a high conversion rate. Creating a sales funnel that ends with a purchase is what every owner dreams of. And since we are in the online business, SEO is a powerful strategy to boost both lead generation and sales funnel.
Identify Your Target Audience
Before building your marketing and SEO strategy, it is crucial to know who you are trying to address. Try to be as specific as possible when you are defining the characteristics of your audience. Pay attention to demographics (age, gender, location, education, income…), and the most popular communication channels they use.
Once you do that, you can focus on converting visitors to leads. Define what actions visitors need to do to become a lead: sign up for an email newsletter, fill out a questionnaire, or try out your products for free.
When you wrap all this up, it is time to talk about keywords.
Know Your Keywords
Everyone knows that keywords are the building blocks of every SEO strategy, and your first step must be a good-old keywords research. You will often hear people saying that your SEO is as good as your keyword research, and this cannot be more true. Therefore, it is very important to identify the main keywords that relate to your business and create a list of terms and queries that might emerge from them. There are a lot of good tools that can aid you with this, and you should not be afraid of using them (Google Keyword Tool, Ubersuggest, KWFinder…).
Note that keyword optimization is a process that is more than just making a list of popular keywords and using them in your content. With careful planning and a good strategy, you can boost your rankings. In order to do that, you need to keep track of related forums, blogs, and Google search suggestions that tell you what your visitors are searching for. Don’t underestimate the power of Google Trends that are telling you the popularity of keywords over time, through numbers and statistics.
Know Where to Use Them
Once you have your keywords and a list of terms you have a great foundation for your SEO content strategy, and you know which terms to use in your articles, titles, and meta tags, to boost your SERP. There are some basic rules about page and content optimization you should follow:
- Your heading (H1) should include your keyword
- Your URL needs to have your keyword
- Meta description need to have your keyword or at least a related term or variation of it
- Try to have at least 3 to 5 mentioning of your keywords throughout the article body
With these simple rules, you are making sure crawlers are picking up the right keywords at the right places and delivering this information to the search engine algorithm, boosting your position in search rankings.
Stay on Top of Your Game
A fast and responsive website is as much as important as the content on its pages. This means that you cannot afford to cheapskate when it comes to design, optimization, and hosting. Responsive design and optimization for desktop and mobile devices must be a top priority to have fast loading web pages that look good and have a positive impact on your visitors. On the other hand, pay additional attention to picking the right hosting plan for your website. Providers like Hostinger offer flexible functionality with a lot of useful options, and upgradeability, that can be very useful later on once your website starts growing fast. Good and fast hosting is a make-or-break factor for your website and should not be overlooked easily. Remember, there is not a thing that will make your visitor leave faster than a slow-loading, sluggish website.
Keep the Flow
Once your visitors realize that the content on your website is useful for them daily, you’ll increase your chance of subscribing for newsletters, signing up for free product trials, or creating an account to access additional content. With regular content flow, you are doing a couple of things: You are having a fresh website with regular updates, your visitors are having new information regularly, you are having a constant flow of visitors with a steady rise in leads, and most important you are creating a great sales funnel.
With media-rich, quality content you are engaging more audience, which reflects into more leads, and eventually more buyers/clients. With the conversion from the audience to leads, you are creating a starting point for your sales funnel. But from here, the lead needs to go through additional transformation: they need to become aware of your products/services, think of them in a way that will satisfy their needs, consider buying it from you, and eventually making a purchase.
Transforming Lead to Buyer
With SEO-oriented content, we made the first and most important step. An additional strategy of speeding up the process of funneling is the use of long-tail keywords instead of short ones. Long-tail keywords are less competitive, and if used right can bring you a much better rank, which is important for every sale funnel.
Long Pages Count
Search engine algorithms prefer pages with a lot of content over those with low word count. The logic behind that is pretty straight-forward. In order to create a page with long-form content, you need to dig in and do more research, which means more relevant information, therefore more value for visitors, and better rank for you.
Don’t Forget About Social Media
Often overlooked, social media pages play a very important part in your rankings and are an integral part of your SEO strategy. It is equally important to pick a social media channel that best suits your needs, as much as using it for your business, so it is very important to know the strengths and weaknesses of individual networks. By using social media to create awareness for your sales funnel, you are further boosting your rankings by driving traffic to your website.
Refresh Your Popular Old Content
We all have some old content that is performing much better than others. By updating that content regularly, you are adding more value to your visitors. If this content is already a part of your sales funnel, then it’s a no-brainer. If it is not, try to alter it a bit to redirect that precious visitor to the right address.
SEO is a Long-Run Strategy
Optimizing your website and content is a vital step in generating leads and building a successful sales funnel. Including a good SEO strategy is a smart way to do it, but bare in mind, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. Changes will not happen overnight, but if you do it right and stay patient, you should see a steady increase in your page rankings, which will boost every other aspect of your website with it.
Having a good pipeline and a constant flow is a vital lifeline for any business, and once you create a functional system, the effort for maintenance will decrease, and your results will become more visible.
