When the main purpose of your business website is to generate high-quality leads that stand a high chance of converting, there are lots of different things that you can do with content to help attract new traffic to your site but also filter out website users who either aren’t ready yet to convert, or who aren’t a good match for your service and will therefore never convert.
For those website visitors who aren’t yet ready but might be soon, you still want them to have a positive experience on your website, so that they’ll come back to you (rather than one of your competitors) when they are ready to make a decision.
In this article, we look at five different types of content that can be optimised from an SEO point of view, but also to help ensure that the leads generated as a result are those which are most likely to convert into revenue for your business.
1. Properly optimised product and/or service-led pages
Most businesses trying to generate online leads will already have pages on their site dedicated to their individual services or products, but many brands use an SEO approach for this which isn’t necessarily focused in the right way to attract the most relevant visitors.
It can be tempting for businesses to focus all of their attention on trying to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs) for the top generic search terms in their sector. Appearing in the first three search results for terms like this will undeniably send the largest proportion of traffic to the site, but when lead and traffic quality is a big consideration, it can often be more straightforward and rewarding to change this approach.
Focusing on incorporating intent-led keywords into your SEO strategy for product or service pages is a much better route to ensuring you attract the visitors to your site who are most likely to become customers or clients.
Ensure that you not only choose the right balance of keywords for a service page, but that you also get the on-page implementation of that content spot-on. Utilise the page title, meta description, H tags, strategic internal linking and make sure that any images, graphics or video content you use on the page are also optimised.
2. Highly detailed service FAQs
Having a detailed frequently asked questions section on each of your product or service pages is a great way of attracting highly relevant traffic.
Framing some of the questions about the product or service type as well as brand specifics means that you can gain visibility for non-brand questions too, with people who are highly likely to be looking for something similar to what you offer.
For example, if you are a legal firm offering family law advice to individuals, your FAQs on a divorce service page can include questions about things like the various stages of the divorce process, timescales and costs, as well as questions and answers that are specific to how you do things as a firm.
Optimising these FAQs for featured snippets and Google’s ‘People also ask’ results feature can be a good way to increase relevant traffic coming through from search results, as can ensuring that you mark up these pages using FAQpage schema.
3. Offer free tools
It can sometimes feel a bit counter-intuitive to offer potential customer or clients something for free, but the principle of giving a little of the good stuff away for free and then leaving the visitor wanting more is a solid one.
Whether it’s a freemium model that provides a limited service for free on an ongoing basis, a free trial so that people can test the value and fit of what you offer before they commit, or a free tool that solves a common problem or answers an important question for your target audience, it can be a great hook to show potential customers what you can do for them.
This can look quite different depending on what you do, but some notable examples include:
- Free compensation calculators for legal firms offering this kind of service e.g. National Accident Helpline
- Free templates and guides for small businesses for a firm offering various services to this audience e.g. Simply Business
- A calculation of how much a product, service or solution could help you earn/save etc. e.g. Energy Saving Trust
4. Features matrix page
If you offer several kinds of package or options, then a features matrix page showing what benefits or features are included in each option is a great tool to help with the decision-making process.
People will always want to check out pricing before they make a purchase decision, especially if they are comparing several businesses like yours. Brands that make a visitor enquire and give up all of their details before they can work out what a service will cost them have a tough challenge in an industry where others don’t ask for this.
It’s important to consider SEO in all of this, so there will generally be some copy required on the page as well as the visual display. This example by Sparktoro, an awesome audience research tool, clearly outlines the multiple benefits of choosing one of their paid options over the freemium version.
5. Thought leadership and exclusive data/insights
Having something that there is demand for but that can’t be found anywhere else online is the holy grail of marketing and SEO.
Journalists and writers are always looking for credible sources for statistics, opinions backed by expertise and industry insight. Producing content like this, whether research reports, interviews, whitepapers or webinars/slide decks, attracts links as people credit the source, which is very beneficial from an SEO point of view. However, this side of things is unlikely to bring you leads as a direct result.
It’s important that this kind of content is highly relevant to your intended audience and optimised accordingly because it’ll help to ensure it draws organic traffic with a good chance of converting too.
Other considerations for lead quality
When it comes to stacking the deck in your favour for the quality of relevant traffic you are attracting via search engines, ensuring your content is very clear about what you offer, who it is for and the problems it solves is essential.
If there are sliding scales of the audience you want to convert e.g. high net worth individuals wanting family law advice rather than those who might not be profitable clients, you can use your content to indicate this in both your keyword choices and the way the copy is written.
Another often overlooked area is the contact or enquiry form. We all know that the fewer fields the better when it comes to maximising enquiries. However, that strategy can result in a mountain of unsuitable enquiries that will never convert, which is a waste of time and resource for the business to process and could mean that they miss genuine new business in all of the noise.
If there is something simple that automatically negates a large number of your current enquiries from being a convertible option for your business? For example, many legal firms in England can only deal with enquiries from people or businesses based in England and Wales, as the law in that area is often different in the other home nations.
Having a field in the form that forces the visitor to confirm they are based in the applicable locations before they can submit might cut down your enquiry rate, but those who do make an enquiry are much more likely to be convertible.
If you would like any marketing advice for improving your online lead generation or in relation to SEO, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch using the form below.
