SEO is universally accepted as an effective means of driving traffic to a website, but few sales and marketing teams consider it a tool for generating leads or driving conversions. The reason: only about 10% of site visitors arriving through organic search are ready to purchase. However, by utilizing search optimization solely for the purpose of increasing site traffic, marketers are ignoring the potential to turn the other 90% of incoming organic traffic into promising leads.
Modern SEO is more than just conducting keyword research, acquiring links, and optimizing site content and metadata for targeted terms. Good SEO enables businesses to attract buyers in every stage of the purchasing journey, provide valuable content that enables those buyers to move into subsequent purchasing stages, and ultimately convert organic traffic into customers.
How? By shifting the way sales and marketing teams think about SEO. Keyword research is more than a method of finding a frequently searched term to plug into an existing landing page; it’s a means of analyzing consumer intentions. Quality content is more than just link bait—it’s a means of providing valuable resources to people who are in need of guidance.
If you take the time to employ best practices, SEO can become a highly effective lead generation tool.
Research the User Intent Behind Your Keywords
Consider how your organization currently uses keyword research. Is it a means of discovery, or is it an afterthought used to find popular phrases to plug into metadata and content? If the latter, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to uncover the intentions behind the queries that drive organic traffic to your site.
Say you have a landing page listing the features of your automated social media publishing software that brings in a lot of traffic for the keyword “social media marketing.” In reviewing your analytics, you discover that your bounce rate for that page is very high. It’s possible that the content of your page may not be what searchers are looking for when making that query. To reduce your bounce rate, you need to determine the intentions behind that search query.
The easiest way to discover those intentions is to study the SERP for the keyword in question. Google is heavily invested in providing the most relevant results, and their algorithms are at work 24/7/365 to determine what pages answer users’ intentions.
A depersonalized search for “social media marketing” produces a robust SERP—with the maximum number of paid ads, a featured snippet, news, etc.—and a list of organic search results that all provide information, not products.
Source: http://www.business2community.com/seo/generate-leads-seo-01761713#2xU4SeaXS0hJ0BGk.99
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