Moving forward into 2017, lead generation and SEO will continue to work together to bring the largest amount of inbound traffic to a website. Ever since Google initiated their Panda and Penguin updates, many website owners have worked with a handicap. Therefore, figuring out how to give the search engines and people what they want is the golden ticket to prosperity going into next year. Here are our best ideas:
1. High-Quality, Relevant Content
You’ve probably seen “content is king” everywhere, but we beg to differ. Not just any content will do. Today, you need fresh content that is both original and compelling. When done properly, it draws in users, allows you to capture lead information and gives your website a boost with the search engines.
Capturing leads is one of the most important parts of content marketing. You can set it up easily with an email marketing tool like MailChimp, which is free up to a few thousand subscribers. In order to capture leads, you need to have a hook. This is an offering, like an e-book filled with important information that you offer in return for them subscribing to your site. Make your e-book a treasure trove of great information, and people will stay tuned to what you have to say.
Keep in mind, content is more than just text. You can use images that get your point across, as well as videos.
2. Webinars
As lead generation tools go, not much these days beats a webinar. You are able to speak directly to your users, give them information and teach them what you know. Give them great training and show them real-life applications. Do a bang-up job on a webinar, and you will have an abundance of leads for your products or services. Better still, these are warm, targeted leads interested specifically in what you offer. Webinar tools are plentiful, but we like Meeting Burner because it is scalable and offers a free platform for beginners.
3. Social Media
We will continue to see indexing of social media posts like Twitter, as well as new forms of social-like hosting of instant articles and live streaming on Facebook. When you do a search for a topic already, you will see social media posts that are relevant to your query, and we know that crawling and indexing will increase in the future.
Additionally, even though the search engines have never admitted as such, they are using social signals to rank web pages and websites. Though good quality links will remain important, social media mentions will gain traction next year as well.
To capitalize on your social media prowess, be sure that you build a specific landing page for your website to capture leads. This would be a good place to fall back to the content plans we mentioned above.
4. Mobile
Anybody working in marketing in 2017 must be a mobile fan. Mobile search is growing by leaps and bounds, and it surpassed desktop usage in 2016. You must optimize your website for mobile platforms. It’s not too difficult to make these changes if you are on WordPress, as changing to a responsive theme would do it. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, expect to lose a good portion of your traffic.
As you can see, there are many ways to increase your lead generation and SEO for 2017. It’s critical to understand that no one strategy works for every business, so let us help you decide which methods might offer you the best return on investment (ROI). Call Sprout Media Lab today for a free consultation. (800) 617-6975.
