If you are familiar with digital marketing, you know that paid ad campaigns, email marketing, and advertising on social media marketing contribute to your sales. However, SEO is a task that anyone hardly considers for sales. It is only considered in bringing the website to the top in search engine rankings. We are here to break that myth. Read through to know why you should do search engine optimization to increase sales.
SEO Fills the Top of Your Marketing & Sales Funnel
“70% of marketers say SEO is more effective at driving sales than PPC” – Databox
Before knowing what SEO is and how it works, know this – In any digital sales cycle, the first step is finding Leads.’ If you want to take the shortcut, you get many dealers that hand over you the data of leads matching your requirements, but no one guarantees that data’s authenticity. Buying out leads is never a good choice. It is unethical as well. Good marketers know that any lead generated from the website or social media accounts is authentic, which is the right way to do it.
Getting Leads from Website through Search Engine Optimization
To make a customer reach your website, you have to please Google first. And, to please Google, you need to please the users. There is a correlation between the users and Google.
A website having top rank always has the chance to get more visitors. And, to have a good rank, your website must comply with all the Google guidelines. Every website’s webmaster needs to follow this guide to make the website ready for promotions. Google has set the guidelines so that internet users or Google search engine users can get desired results and websites when they search for any query. These guidelines majorly include making changes to the website to make it more user-friendly.
On-page SEO checkups
- Internal link structure
- Keyword Research and Refining
- HTML Document for fast page loading
- Sitemap Creation
- Robots.txt file optimization
- Rewriting SEO Optimization Title, Description, keywords
- News keywords integration
- Image Alt tags
- Fix the broken links
- Code verification
- Set up Google Analytics, Establish Conversion Goals and Funnels
- Set up Google, Yahoo Webmasters Tools
- Duplicate pages fixing
- User-friendliness
- Duplicity in the content
- Canonicalization
All these are checked and corrected to make the website comply with Google guidelines.
Off-page SEO techniques
In Off-page SEO, tasks such as article submission, blog submission, classified ad submission, bookmarking, blog commenting, guest blogging, Quora Answers, Press Release submission, Web 2.0 submissions, photo sharing, video sharing, business reviews, PPT sharing, PDF sharing, among others, are performed. All these are considered ‘link building’ tasks in off-page SEO. The more good quality links you have towards your website, the better the chances of staying on top of search results and getting more visitors.
Note: All the content is submitted on the website having high PA/DA – Page Authority/Domain Authority than your website. Backlinks from those websites are considered good quality links. Each such link is a +1 vote to your website.
Lead Nurturing through On-Page SEO
Performing all the off-page SEO tasks will fetch you a good amount of traffic. Now, let us move a step further, i.e., lead nurturing. People visiting your website need to know how good your product/service is, how reliable your brand is, and something that would want them to initiate contact with your business.
- Your website must have interesting, informative, engaging, original content. The content’s job is to develop a user’s journey from an unknown visitor to a customer.
- The web pages must be visually appealing to the visitors. A website with pleasant visuals has the power of visitor retention.
- Easily accessible information is user-friendly as well. Google measures the user-friendliness of the website. It is an important ranking factor.
- Place proper Call-to-Actions at different sections of the website that drive the visitor toward the next action they should take.
- Giving a freebie is a good way to attract visitors. Ask for an email and give away an informational document or an industry report that users love to read. You can even give a free limited trial of your product – that always works.
Once you have their email address, you can pitch those visitors some customized offers through emails or anything through your email campaigns.
Marketers plan to reduce the steps in the journey of a potential customer. That is where the brainstorming sessions take place. The lesser the steps more are, the more chances of customers making the purchase. That is why marketers keep looking at the website analytics to know more about the target customers. From where they are making the purchase, which website pages they are visiting the most, and which content they are reading the most, all these factors contribute to making a better decision.
Follow the numbers
We all are aware of real-world scenarios. If you get 1000 visitors a day, you do not convert all of them. You may convert 50 or 100 or 500. Now, increase the 1000 visitors to 10k visitors a day. You might convert 1000 or 2000. The more you drive your targeted traffic toward your website, the more you convert. And, traffic comes from – you got it – it comes from SEO efforts.
You see that marketers sow the seed of sale during the Search Engine Optimization of the website. That is the biggest reason why you should do search engine optimization and never underestimate the power of a well-built, well-maintained website.
SEO indeed is the first step in your sales process and an important one for sure.
Stay tuned for more insightful stuff on sales, marketing, and business development.
