Lead generation is an essential aspect of web marketing. Like the broad term “internet marketing,” lead generation, as one aspect of that, is another umbrella term that covers a wide set of strategies within that niche. At its core, lead generation is everything you do to identify prospective clients or buyers and everything you do to help prospective buyers and clients find you.
There are many ways to do this, but we will focus on search engine optimization (SEO) in this piece.
SEO’s purpose within lead generation is to make your company more visible to prospective clients or customers. As more people and businesses have come to rely on their own initiative and Google to find the goods and services that they need, SEO has become an increasingly central part of lead generation.
The first three results on the search engine results page get about 65% of all the web traffic for those searches. The top ten easily get about 95%. Because of this, being ranked above your competitor for the correct keywords can be vital.
Your search engine ranking speaks to the quality of your website and your product, but that is where the promotional aspect of SEO has to end. SEO is not about promoting your brand or even your product. SEO is about staying in Google’s good graces.
Looking at SEO through the lens of content marketing can trap a person in the mistaken assumption that SEO is, like most marketing, about making more consumers seek your brand. This is wrong. SEO generates leads by gathering all those people looking for a product and placing your brand at the end of their search for that product. That searcher never looked for your brand. A searcher already looking for your brand is likely to find out whether your website is properly optimized.
It is important to see this difference to be the most effective and generate the most leads through your SEO strategy because it affects how you do off-site SEO.
Creating a large, authoritative, and natural backlink portfolio requires looking beyond self-promotion. If you only post links in articles designed to make your brand or product look good and only on websites that are friendly towards you, then you are missing a huge chunk of the relevant sites to which you should be linked.
Plenty of authoritative websites might have less favorable views of your type of product. If you are doing guest posting, for example, there are health blogs that like vitamin supplements and health blogs that love them. There is no reason why you can’t be linked to both of them, with one as an example of the vile poisons that corporate America wants you to ingest and the other as an example of the next miracle cure for cancer. It is a very natural link on two relevant websites, and there is no reason why you can’t be the one to place both of them.
Both links are equally valuable in boosting your authority in the search engine and will generate leads for your business effectively.
