Leads, especially qualified, ready-to-buy leads, is the holy grail of marketing. And, if you are anything like most businesses, you want to get these leads without spending a ton of money.
Having a well-designed, conversion and search-optimised website can help you generate a regular stream of qualified leads. The best part is, customers discover your business without any extra effort on your part.
For this strategy to work, however, you will need two things:
- An easy to navigate, conversion-focused website which converts every visitor.
- Search engine optimised website to tap into the massive traffic from organic search.
Here is why these two elements are crucial for getting more leads from organic search results.
First, people are using search engines like Google and Bing to search for things. They are looking for information, entertainment, and services.
According to Internet Live Stats, on average 3.5 billion Google searches are made every day, this volume keeps growing by roughly 10% year on year.
Traffic from search engines accounts for more than 53% of site visits for most businesses, a new report by BrightEdge claims. It becomes crystal clear that having an SEO-optimized website combined with social proof from ProvenExpert alternatives is a sound marketing strategy to earn organic leads.
To receive a bulk of these 53% organic visits from search engines; however, your business website needs to rank well on search results pages (SERPs). You should target having your web pages on the first three positions for keywords that are relevant to your business.
Data from different studies have shown the top three positions on SERPs get as much as 75.1% of the total clicks on the first page. Interestingly, pages on the first position get over 31.7% of all clicks while the second and third positions’ shares come in at 24.7 % and 18.6% respectively.
And the share of clicks for the other remaining positions tamper off as the graph below shows:
The second leg of the strategy to get more leads from organic search results involves optimising your website in such a way that it becomes easy for visitors to convert to customers.
Ease of navigation, design, copy, and a clear call-to-action all play a role in users continuing on your site. The alternative is that they leave the site as it is to hard to navigate.
Site speed influences whether visitors to your website convert or not. According to 12 case-studies shared by Skilled.co, 47% of customers expect websites to load in 2 seconds or less. 79% say they are less likely to buy from the same site again after a lousy website performance experience.
That said, here are specific, actionable tips you can implement right away to rank your website top of SERPs and design tweaks to optimise conversion.
Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website
The more people reading your content, the higher the odds of converting them. However, the idea is not to get any passing traffic, but to target people who want what you offer.
Hence, the first place to start is to understand search intents and the kind of phrases they use when searching for related services and products.
Free keyword research tools like Google’s Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest Hubspot and WordStream can help you uncover profitable phrases to optimise.
Organise these keywords in a spreadsheet and try to understand the searchers intent. To gain insight on search intents behind each phrase, copy and paste each keyword in the Google search bar.
Analyse your webpages already ranking for the keywords. What kind of content do they produce?
Are they:
- Listicles?
- How-to articles?
- Product reviews?
Identifying the type of content will guide you when creating as it gives you a sneak peek into what consumers expect when they search for those keywords. It also gives you creative license to repurpose your blog and improve local SEO.
Optimise Website and Content for Search Engines
Make it easier for search engines to rank your content. Consider also optimising for your local community. To do that, you will need to improve your local search engine optimisation.
Here are some actions you can take to optimise the post:
- By formatting your headings H1, H2, H3 tags in this order, you make it easy for search engine bots to identify the most critical elements on the webpage. The H-tags also helps you divide your content into subsections which is suitable for better user experience.
- Add keywords in sub-heading: Including keywords or related phrases in the sub-headings helps search engines identify what the page is about.
To optimise for local SEO, consider using geo-specific keywords. Add your location plus a keyword, “KW + Location” in your headings.
- Optimise images – Images, when optimised right, is another often overlooked source of organic traffic. When using images be sure they are wrapped with the right tags <img></img>. Resize large photos are they can impact load speed. TinyPng is a nifty online tool to reduce large images.
- Boost site speed – Google uses load time as a ranking signal; this means a slow loading website can be penalised with a low ranking.
Use Google’s Page Insight or GtMetrix to test your site’s speed. These tools analyse webpages and score them. Switch between mobile and desktop to see how your website performances on different devices.
Scroll down the page to see recommendations on how to improve the website load time.
Though the points above are not exhaustive, they are a pretty good place to start. To learn more about other actions to optimise for SEO, you may want to check out this infographic from Brian Dean.
Use Video to Boost Engagement
Video is the new resource for a reason; our brain processes video content 60,000 times faster than text. And if you are wondering how to justify using video on your page, here’s why:
- According to Tubularinsights, 64% of consumers make a purchasing decision after watching a video.
- Your website is 53 times more likely to rank on the top page of Google if it includes video.
- An Unbounce report found that including a video on your landing page can boost conversion rate by up to 80%.
- 97% of marketers say video has helped users gain a better understanding of their services.
- · 85% of consumers say they want to see more video content
- You can create and edit interesting video content using an online video editor to boost the engagement.
Implement Intuitive Design to Boost User Experience
When users land on your page, they expect to access information quickly and seamlessly. Ensure the navigation bar is clearly marked and uncluttered. Use falling tab design to render the menu for mobile screens.
Be creative but do not try to reinvent the wheel by using unfamiliar elements in your design or move icons from positions where they are traditionally placed.
For instance, consumers are used to seeing shopping carts at the right-hand, top corner of their screen, leave your shopping cart there.
Also, use lots of white spaces to draw attention to specific design elements. Avoid the temptation of fitting several components on limited spaces as that could distract users from the main goal you want them to take.
Simple, clean, functional design can boost conversion as it forces users to focus only on the thing you want them to.
Publish Engaging, Compelling Copy
The copy on your webpage is the most critical element that will persuade, inform and entertain users. When done right, it will draw readers in, educate them about your products, engage and compel them to take action.
Sometimes changing a text or sentence could be all that’s required to boost conversion as this case study by L’Axelle showed.
In a bid to get more browsers to click add to cart button, L’Axelle set out to test different versions of the copy on their homepage.
Original Homepage
Test homepage
The result
L’Axelle found that the test copy converts at 38.3% – a 93% better conversion rate than the original.
Add Clear Call-to-Action
No matter how convincing your copy is if you do not tell users what the next step is, they will not know.
Your CTA is the most critical interactive element on your page; it is probably the only way users can engage with your copy.
Tell them in a bright, bold fashion what you want them to do. Do you want the user to download a PDF?
And while at it, make the CTA prominent and hard to miss. A proven way to make your call-to-action stand out is to use colour contrast or make the copy bigger than the surrounding texts.