Lot of companies dream of getting to the first page of a google search, only a few manage to do it. There is a lot of traffic that you can generate if you land up on the first page of Google for keywords that are relevant for your business. This traffic eventually then converts into potential leads for your business. How, then should you start generating leads for your business using SEO
How do you start generating leads using SEO
Before we jump into the topic, how to start generating leads using SEO, let us examine was SEO is.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, so you are optimizing your web pages or website for performing better on a search engine. A search engine is used by people to search for what they want on the internet. Google today is one of the most popular search engines, so we will equate the search engine to a Google search.
Let\’s explain this with an example – You go to a pharmacy, and you ask for a particular tablet. The pharmacy may be stocking tens of thousands of different tablets, but the moment, you let him know what you want, he brings to you the exact tablet strip within the next 30-45 seconds. The guy at the pharmacy knows exactly how to search for it and has devised some mechanism to ease his search, else he would be searching for every tablet for over 30 mins and his customers would lose patience and decide to go to some other pharmacy. The pharmacy may organize medicines alphabetically, by composition, by manufacturer, by ailment or by some other means. So when you give out the tablet name, he knows exactly where he should search and usually finds it pretty quickly.
A search engine does the same while you type in the search. At the back-end, it has millions of searches indexed and when you put in a search term, the search engine knows exactly what to serve you. It will serve you content based on what is the most relevant and most popular among the search results.
How do you go about improving your ranking
There are 2 clear mechanisms for you to improve your search engine rankings
1. On-page SEO
On-page SEO is almost similar to labelling your web pages. You have 200 novels on a rack and imagine all of them are covered. How do you search for the novel you are looking for. There needs to be a unique identifier, which will help you get the novel, you are searching for. You can compare this labelling to the on-page SEO mechanism. With the On-page SEO, you define the title, description, alt image tags for the web page, in such a way that the search engine can easily find what is there on the page. Google bots do not spend time to consume each of your pages in entirety. They look for these labels so that they can index the pages and make them available, when needed.
The more pages, you have , the more blog posts you have on the site, you have that many opportunities to rank for the search engines. Each page can be optimized for specific keywords and you have that many opportunities to rank in the search engines.
What if you fooled Google?. This is akin to you putting a wrong label. You want to read a Sidney Sheldon novel, named Bloodline. The label says Sidney Sheldon, Bloodline, but the novel is something else. You are frustrated and are angry that the labelling is done wrong. When people are directed to a page by Google and they do not find what they are looking for, what happens.. You guessed it, they will move away from the page, which will increase the bounce ratio for your pages. If Google senses that the bounce ratio on your pages is high, it realizes that it is doing a mistake by sending traffic to the page, as the content there is irrelevant for the search. It learns from its mistakes and starts giving you negative rating. So now, instead of ranking higher on Google, you will start losing rankings, because you have tried to fool the google bot.
When you do the on-page, it is very important that the definitions are in line with what is on the page. Having a good relevancy ensures lower bounce ratio and helps you improve your rankings on Google.
2. Off page SEO
If on-page is what you are doing on the page, off-page stands for what others are doing with your page. It predominantly relates to all the incoming links to your website. Now let us explain this with an example.
you live in a gated colony of 1000 residents. You are an introvert guy, who just cares for your work, your office and then getting back home to sleep. It is quite likely that not more than 10% residents of the colony know you, as you have no incoming traffic and you just keep a low profile. Now imagine, if you are an extrovert and lot of people visit your homes. You are very active and take initiatives in organizing group events within the society etc.. Now your incoming traffic is quite a lot, your door bell rings often and a lot of people know you . Maybe over 50% of the people staying in your colony know you.. Now imagine you are the same guy, who we mentioned in scenario 2 and you suddenly have a plethora of high profile people visiting you including some film stars and prominent personalities. Now not only does the colony know you, but is quite likely that 10 colonies around you know you as well.
Let us put this in perspective. You have a website and you barely have any traffic, It is quite clear that you will do bad with SEO, as you have no way of telling Google what wonderful things you have on your website. You move to the second stage, where you are getting some good amount of traffic. It is interesting for Google, but it is not able to make up its mind. It is just giving you some ratings based on the search traffic that you are generating.
Now imagine if you have traffic coming in from high domain authority or higher ranking sites. Then Google has to start taking notice. If relevant personalities and sites are pointing to you, then you ought to be doing something noteworthy for them to keep coming back to you. This helps significantly in building your score with Google. How important is SEO for a new website success
In short, generating some backlinks is not enough, generating back links from high domain authority sites is important. This can only happen when you truly generate value for the people you serve. Content is one of the best ways to engage with your potential target audience. As you keep building backlinks, keep targeting higher domain authority sites within your space to start generating back links.
With the right amount of effort, you too can start generating leads using SEO. On-page maybe a one-time effort, but you need to keep doing that for every new page, post that you put up on your website. There are a lot of ways you can get your off-page mechanisms right, but do not falter into just generating some back links from some spurious sites. It may be more harmful than being beneficial for your SEO. Search Engine Optimization – 10 tips to do it yourself