Beyond Basic SEO: How to Get Inside Your Sales Prospect’s Head with the Right Marketing Tech
You’ve launched your site and learned the basics of good on-site SEO. Thanks to that hard work, your prospects are starting to find you on their own. But now what?
Are you able to derive the maximum business value from the prospects who find your online content? And more importantly, what would it mean to your bottom line if you could read your visitors’ minds and give them exactly what they need before they even know to ask for it?
Seventy percent of the customer journey now takes place before your lead ever contacts a human at your company – so publishing useful advice is a critical piece of the puzzle. If someone finds you, but can’t find the information they need from you, you’re dead in the water before you even get started.
But with the right strategy, the right intelligence and the right marketing tech to support it, we can help you get past this hurdle and start really nurturing your prospects.
A Quick Review of SEO Basics
Before you start adding on marketing tech, let’s make sure you’ve got the four key pillars of good SEO in place.
- Keep your site fresh. Always keep your website up to date; when search engines know you’re actively providing fresh information to readers, you’ll rank higher in the search results. Fresh, relevant content also helps keep people on your site longer – if they find old or outdated info, they won’t stick around.
- Post unique content. High-quality, non-syndicated content matters to the search engines. If you post content that’s been published elsewhere, Google will rank the first site they see the content on, which isn’t going to be yours. It’s okay to refer to existing content for ideas, but add your own thoughts and ideas to make it as relevant as possible to the value proposition of your own brand.
- No keyword stuffing. Your keywords and phrases should fit naturally into the content – meaning they don’t sound awkward, and shouldn’t be used every other sentence. Use a good plugin like Yoast as part of your blog’s SEO building blocks to make sure you’re within acceptable limits.
- Build links. “Offsite SEO” matters too, so make sure you’re getting inbound links from only high-quality websites. This tells Google and other search engines that your website has authority. Make sure the pages you’re linking to from your blog, both on and off your site, are loading correctly. If they’re broken, they could do more harm than good for both your readers and your rank.
Of course, there’s much more to good SEO than this, but these basics will get you started in the right direction.
Converting Visitors to Leads
So you’re ranking and traffic’s coming in. Now, how do we turn those visitors into sales leads? There are a ton of lead generation strategies out there, and it’s a good idea to use several.
Here are a few ideas to get you started.
- Add a form to every page. Give your visitors opportunities to connect. Whether it’s to sign up for your newsletter, or download a report, make it easy to gather information with an online form. Use an email marketing platform like MailChimp to help you create custom forms and integrate them into your mailing lists.
- Create lead magnets with solid calls to action (CTAs). A lead magnet is any kind of content that your customer wants, whether it’s an internal tool that could be useful, a special report with solid industry data, or a long form workbook. If you don’t already have something like that, think about what you could create. By giving away high value content in exchange for contact information, you are building the foundation of a solid customer relationship.
- Add videos to build trust. Video puts a face and personality to the words on the screen – making it easier for people to build a connection. Use videos that share information that makes things easier, better or more understandable for your prospects, and encourage them to subscribe to your YouTube channel or newsletter for more.
The Big Hairy Problem with On-Site Lead Gen
Putting these ideas in place can definitely help you begin to gather leads, but it’s not enough. The biggest problem is, on average, only 2% of site visitors do what you want them to do – leave their contact information to make themselves official “leads.”
The other 98% leave without a trace. Or do they?
Google Analytics (GA) can provide basic information, like what country the visitors are coming from, what platforms sent them and what they did on your site.
It can’t, however, tell you critical information like what they did on multiple visits, what companies or industries they are with, or if they called for more information.
This is where marketing tech can make a huge difference in your lead generation efforts. If you have Google Analytics set up for your site, it’s already gathering all the information you need to create viable leads. Sales intelligence tech tools can use the information gathered by your GA account and can parse it out into lists of companies that have visited.
You can then filter the results by area, industry, type of company, etc., and feed those results right into your customer database (CRM).
Once there, you’ll be able to see:
- who you already have in your CRM from that company
- who might be in your funnel already
- who you’re already connected to on LinkedIn at that company
LinkedIn, moreover, can help you get access to the decision makers within a company, if you’re already linked to someone working at the company. Every time you link to a contact in your existing accounts, you’re opening up access to hundreds of new connections.
You’ll also be able to see not only what pages your leads visited, but what actions they took. Our content choices reveal our deepest needs; you now have the ability to know exactly where your lead is in the sales funnel, and be able to reach out and offer the next piece of content or information to move him or her ahead. This is how you leverage data to build a solid relationship.
Conclusion
When you reach out in real time to real people anticipating their needs, it’s like being able to read their minds. Good SEO and content strategies are important for driving traffic, but you lose all that good traffic if they don’t leave their contact info. Smart technology added to your marketing stack will make a huge difference moving your leads through the funnel to close.
