One of the most persistent myths in business is that SEO is bad for business, that SEO messes up your company website with tricks and gimmicks that turn off visitors, create a poor user experience on your site and make a terrible brand impression.
Frankly, these things are true only if your SEO execution is poor.
If you execute properly, SEO not only generates sales leads, it has a ripple effect that improves many aspects of your business and detracts from none.
Let’s see how this plays out.
- Using keywords in content forces you to use language familiar to customers and prospects — keywords are, after all, the most popular phrases people use when searching on Google for the items or services you sell. Using the language of customers improves clarity and credibility.
- Using keywords in meta descriptions, title tags and URLs has a similar effect, improving clarity and focusing user attention on what is most important for them.
- SEO forces you to create a customer-driven, logical breakdown of your products and services, since SEO requires specific, focused and sometimes hierarchical site pages for each important piece of your overall offering. Besides forcing intuitive site navigation — extremely important in itself — clear and granular product/service navigation menus and sub-menus enable customers and prospects to understand at a glance what your business is all about, and what it isn’t about.
- Since the goal of SEO is conversions, you need strong incentives on your site to persuade people to submit an inquiry form or phone you. This exercise forces you to think long and hard about why people buy from you — not only that, it forces you to test different incentives, which will enable you to find even more effective ways of generating leads.
- Link building allows you to create relationships with influential bloggers and website owners in related businesses, because they are the people most likely to link to your content or want you to write an article for their sites. Thus, link building facilitates referrals, improves the stature of your brand, and exposes your company to thousands (if not millions) of new potential customers. What does all this add up to? More leads.
- For many companies, SEO has been the catalyst for developing a mobile-friendly website. A rock-solid mobile site is definitely crucial for SEO, but it’s also important for so much more. Mobile Internet usage continues to surge; it’s possible that a large percentage, if not majority, of your website traffic is mobile-based. A mobile-friendly site creates a strong brand impression and drives conversions no matter the source of your site traffic.
What’s Good for Google Is Good for Sales Prospects
The common thread in these examples is alignment between what Google wants for SEO and what you want for attracting business and strengthening your brand.
Google wants its search engine users to find exactly the content they’re looking for, and to visit websites that are logically laid out and easy to use on any size screen or device. SEO is not about manipulating search engines; it’s about creating a website experience that attracts as many of the right people as possible and then does the best job of turning visitors into customers.
If Google likes what it sees on your website, prospects will, too. It’s as simple as that.
Is there room for improvement in your online lead generation efforts? Contact us now to learn how a professionally executed SEO campaign can make a difference.