Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

SEO Optimization: Generating Leads

February 10, 2011, Troy Adamson

SEO Crash Course: Get Found to Generate Leads & Sales (GF102)

SEO is the most important marketing strategy to generate leads and conversions. By making your site more search engine friendly, it will rank higher in search results – meaning, better visibility and better results.

Get found through the words you use

Keywords are the words that exist in the minds of your target audience. Which words are they most likely to use when searching for your product or service? Coming up with solid keywords requires getting to know the needs of your audience well. In order to rank high in search results, you need keywords that are relevant – words that best describe what you have to offer. Optimize your content for the keywords you target. Remember, keywords matter…a lot!     

Search engine friendly sites are easy to find

You can’t make it easy for customers to find your products unless your content can be found easily by search engines. Web crawlers index text, so you must use results-driven keywords in your content. Add fresh content regularly to reinforce your keyword vocabulary. Site architecture is also important. Search engines can find you more easily if your site structure is logical and easy to navigate. To drive traffic to your site, you need to demonstrate to search engines that your site receives good search results.   

Links, links, and more links!  

To boost your search engine rankings, you need lots of strong inbound links. A strong link is one that ranks high in search results. One of the most effective ways to attract links is to create remarkable content and promote it on social networks. If people find your content useful, they will link to you. Schmoozing with the big boys pays off – affiliation with reputable links will do wonders for your rankings!       

How does your site perform?

Optimize your site by monitoring its performance over time using analytics. It’s useful to pay attention to several key performance indicators. Some important ones include number of indexed pages, rankings, quality and quantity of inbound links, social media traffic, and conversions. You want to maintain a positive user experience on your site – if visitors run into crawling errors, they’re likely to become frustrated and move on to another site.       

Professor: Lee Odden, TopRank Online Marketing

 

Topics: Lead Generation, Inbound Marketing, SEO