It only takes 1 visitor to generate 1 lead.
To date, I have not found a direct correlation between high search rankings and higher conversion rate for lead generation. There is a correlation between rankings and volume of traffic, but poor quality or non relevant traffic absolutely generates ZERO Leads. I know that I am going to piss off the SEO community by making such a bold statement but this conclusion comes from years of auditing websites with seo campaigns failing to generate leads.
The reason that high rankings does not mean more leads is because you are not in control of the keyword that generated the ranking. Every time a visitor inserts a keyword into a search engine, that query is scored by the algorithm and a new set of results is populated. In addition, Google will base results off of the individual’s on behavior on the internet. And more, location, I.P. address, user language settings and even the technology used to access the S.E. can and will alter the rankings.
Now first, you need to know that I am an entrepreneur. Even as I write this blog, I am expecting that it will create a small ripple on the internet and I expect that it will generate at least 1 phone call or website form submission. In addition, my time is valuable and I expect a return within a reasonably period of time. It does me no good to write on this subject today, when I could be writing on other subjects that have proven to generate leads.
In the sequence of a marketing plan, I never perform SEO before first testing each and every keyword to see if it will result in a volume of leads. SEO is time consuming, eat’s up resources, and ultimately the algorithm will change within the next few months in a way that I can neither predict or control.
Therefore, I spend my time writing blogs and setting up marketing campaigns to catch potential customers that are most likely to need my help. I choose keywords based upon pain points that my customers are expressing such as Google Analytics Reporting 100% Bounce Rate.
I dont care if someone is just interested in the topic of bounce rate, I chose a long tail keyword that I have previously tested and have proven to monetize into a long term paying client.
The Truth Behind Keywords
Most keywords will never, ever bring in a visitor that is needing or wanting your service! In 1 of my client’s Adwords’ campaign we have identified 1,566 potential relevant keywords. However, less than 34 of those keywords have proven to generate leads. 22 of those have only ever produced a single lead.
Despite hundred’s of A/b tests, many of those keyword’s brought in poor quality traffic. As a result, we turn off all of the keywords that do not generate leads and only work with those that have proven to be profitable. Optimization occurs next and only to 12 of the potential 1,566 keywords. It does not matter how you generate traffic to your website, if you do not know the profitability of every keyword, you will be losing money.
SEO vs. PPC
There has been a war of words waging for years amongst the internet marketing community with each side claiming SEO or PPC is better than the other. My experience has been that you do not need thousand’s of visitors to generate leads and the ultimate problem with SEO is based upon lack of control.
For that same campaign mentioned above, we have 41 keywords on the first page of Google search results, and guess what, less than 2% of the total amount of leads come from those 1st page rankings. Why, because those page rankings are brining in visitors using keywords that we have previously proven do not generate leads. Yet, we are still rank high because Google believes these pages are relevant and provide a good user experience because they are somewhat relevant.
From 0 to 5 clicks – we landed the first
With this site www.alexfender.com (only 2 months old), we generated the first lead from a CPG branding agency in California within the first 5 clicks. The second lead came after the 7th click to the site from a law firm in New York.
Lead geneation is in discriminate of SEO vs PPC traffic, it is solely based on: the relevancy of the keyword to the subject matter vs the motivation of the user.
Your website can generate traffic without every optimizing the site or paying for an SEO service and this site should prove it. You do not need to publish an encyclopedia worth of content on your site to generate leads. In fact, too much content often generates less leads than a site that is clear and concise and your Google Analytics will prove it.
The heart and sole of any good lead generation strategy is based upon user experience. And the brain power behind Google’s algorithm is ranking the the sites with the best user experience at the top of search results. The problem with the internet is that most website’s suck and have a very poor user experience. Google will reward websites with great user experience at the top of search rankings.