Generating SEO leads should be every agency and freelancer’s priority in the new normal.

However, SEO leads can be incredibly difficult to obtain or too expensive if you don’t use the proper techniques.

Lead generation can be an obstacle to doing business for many SEO agencies because it can become a complex process. It’s easy to start a lead-gen effort but often challenging to sustain if you want fast results. You will need to dedicate an incredible amount of time and effort.

The Best Way to Get SEO Leads 

It is usually better to buy SEO leads than to generate one’s own because if we look at the performance of the leads and all the investments you have to make, the choice becomes more straightforward and more transparent.

However, we acknowledge that buying leads may not be for everybody, so here are some solutions that you can try instead.

Feature Thought Leaders on Your Blog

Nothing expands your reputation than featuring thought leaders in the industry. This is also an excellent opportunity for you to reach out to competitors and make beneficial partnerships, as you are all in the same sandbox.

Thought leaders exist in nearly all organizations, big and small. The thought leader has to have some experience and success in the SEO business. Though this is a plus, he doesn’t have to be a New York Times bestselling author (though this is a plus). The goal is to find thought leaders continuously always to have fresh and authoritative content on your blog.

Produce Helpful and Relevant Videos

The formula for relevant videos has always been the same: solve a specific problem. Then, provide workable solutions that people can easily apply. Potential customers want both knowledge and a little entertainment value when reading material online. Such videos can also help you generate reputation management leads on top of SEO leads.

In addition to the competence that you can offer potential customers, solving problems becomes more accessible when the video is well-designed and uses storytelling to move things along. Avoid drawn-out videos that are hard to follow because they’re too dense, information-wise.

If the topic is too complex, consider breaking down the material into a video series and creating a playlist on YouTube. That way, people will stay longer on your channel, and your channel’s relevance goes up significantly, boosting your organic SEO in the process. Don’t forget to maximize the real estate that videos offer you. Add sign-up links in the video and the video description.

Brand Checkpoint: The Many Faces of Marketing Videos

Before you begin filming, you must first pick what type of video(s) you want to make. Check out this list to discover more about all of the video marketing options available to you. The choices are practically endless, and you can also use these videos to generate social media marketing leads.

Demonstrations

Demo films demonstrate how your product or service works by taking viewers on a tour. In the case of SEO agencies, you can show them how you perform general tasks like website audits, and the like. Demo films are especially helpful if you want to convert those app development leads you have been nurturing.

Promotional Videos

Brand videos or promotional videos are typically part of a larger marketing effort to emphasize a company’s high-level vision, aim, or new services and goods. Brand videos are meant to boost brand recognition while also captivating and attracting your target audience.

Event Documentaries

Is your business hosting a conference, a round table discussion, a fundraiser, or something else entirely? Make a highlight reel or make interviews and presentations from the event available online.

Interviews with Experts

Interviewing industry thought leaders is a great way to gain your target audience’s confidence and authority. Find industry influencers who share your point of view, whether they agree with it or not, and bring these discussions to your target audience.

How-To or Educational Videos

These videos can help teach your audience something new or help them gain the core knowledge they’ll need to understand your business and its products better. Your staff can also use these educational videos when dealing with customers.

Explainer Videos

Explainer vids are designed to explain to people why they need your SEO solutions. Many explainer videos depict a fictional journey of a company’s primary buyer persona who has difficulty solving a problem. This persona then solves the problem by adopting or purchasing the company’s answer or solution.

Animations

These videos are best for difficult-to-understand concepts requiring powerful visuals and narratives.

Customer Testimonial And Case Study Videos

Customers want to know that your SEO agency can (and will) solve their site optimization issues. One of the best ways to illustrate your competence and authority is to create case study movies featuring your happy, loyal customers. These clients are also your most enthusiastic supporters. On camera, have them discuss their challenges and how your company helped them address them.

Live Streaming Videos

Through live video, your viewers will receive a unique behind-the-scenes look at your company. Consumers watch live-streamed video content almost nine times longer than they do video-on-demand, indicating that it attracts better engagement rates and longer streams. We encourage live-streaming of events, seminars, and interviews. Your audience, no matter how little or large, should be encouraged to ask questions.

Showcase Testimonials and Reviews

It’s your site, and you can very well do what you like with honest and genuine reviews from customers. Learn to leverage these reviews, whether they were sent thru email or posted somewhere online. No site is off-limits when it comes to reviews.

Be sure to put them in one place and make sure they are visible to all new visitors. Find a way to feature testimonials and reviews so potential leads will naturally want to work with your SEO agency. SEO leads can come from so many channels, yet SEO agencies depend on the more ‘classic’ methods. This year, it’s time to change tactics and get more leads.

Engage in Intelligent Email Marketing

There is regular email marketing, and then there’s email marketing that works. Email marketing has delivered results for two decades now, and there is nothing like the direct approach in communicating with prospects. But, of course, it’s not just about sending emails to as many people on your list.

People have become intolerant of spam, and if your messages are spammy, your emails will be ignored, or worse, your emails may get flagged as spam. Eventually, your entire operation may take a hit, and your emails may end up getting flagged for good.

Use a variety of email forms on your site. Forms work whatever their function as long you can get a genuine and working email from potential leads. Whether the potential lead is signing up for a newsletter, free update, or whatever else you have to offer, you win every time someone signs up. Check the placement of the email form and experiment with different styles to see which type works best.

Instead of sending regular emails, venture out to design individual newsletters. HTML emails are beautiful, they’re easy to read, and they make emails look more authoritative. While plain text continues to have its place, well-designed newsletters can generate more leads and reduce resistance to branding.

Everyone begins with Excel sheets and regular email. However, as you expand your business, you must use a professional email marketing platform with high deliverability rates.

Perform lead segmentation. Your audience should eventually be divided into segments, and a different approach should be prepared for each piece. Lead segmentation can be performed in various ways, but the simplest is to segment based on sociodemographic profiles.

Use Quizzes to Improve the Quality of Leads

Numbers always have an impasse in digital marketing. Should businesses prioritize numbers over lead quality? How can you improve the quality of leads, anyway?

The simplest way to improve lead quality is through quizzes. Yes, quizzes. Quizzes help sort your leads, so you can find out where they fit in the big lead segmentation puzzle.

Using quizzes can make the lead generation process more fun for your customers. Quizzes make leads want to interact with your brand and provide information. In addition, giving small incentives at the end of every quiz can motivate more to open and answer the quizzes on your site or landing pages.

What is truly remarkable about quizzes is you can place them virtually anywhere on your site.

Some marketers maximize the potential of well-designed and well-timed pop-ups (exit-intent pop-ups are hot right now). You can also design unique quizzes for essential pages on your site, like the “About” page or “Contact Us” page.

Brand Checkpoint: B2B Insights in the Era That Stopped the World

COVID-19 affected how B2B worked (especially for the SEO industry), and it also changed how customers interacted with businesses and presented both groups unexpected challenges that chilled a lot of sectors, including those who depended on Pay-Per-Click (PPC) management leads.

To further understand these shifts, social media giant Twitter collaborated with Bain & Company on one-year-long research. Marketers and buyers were asked how the pandemic affected their operations and lives.

After over a year of constant pivoting, both groups are getting into a groove. However, certain businesses have fared better, and a closer look at the study results gives a clear picture of how B2B marketers may prosper in the new normal.

How B2B changed, or didn’t change, during a year of upheavals and transitions

Both customers and marketers gained a burst of energy as the new year began. For example, 76% of buyers were actively making new technology purchases. That’s a 20% increase over the previous year.

Some Things Have Remained Constant in An Ever-Changing World

There’s a natural tendency to focus on how much has changed, but what’s fascinating about this study is that it demonstrated how little has changed in the B2B market. For example, purchasers regularly told us that they rely on their own community insights above all other potential sources for purchasing assistance when it comes to new purchases.

A whopping 99 percent of people trust their peers beyond all other sources. As a result, B2B marketers must go beyond directly addressing a few key decision-makers and instead establish more excellent knowledge and trust in the B2B community.

A gap in B2B marketers’ awareness of making crucial choices on the buyer side was another recurring issue. While B2B marketers frequently focus on contacting top decision-makers, buyers constantly tell us that intermediate managers influence purchasing choices.

When it comes to technology purchasing decisions, half of the B2B buyers we polled stated their manager-level colleagues hold a lot of clouts. This was a constant motif during the pandemic, and it’s unlikely to go away any time soon.

…But Yes, Certain Things Did Change

The demand for marketers grew during the epidemic as a result of economic instability and rapidly fluctuating budgets. Since Q2 2020, more than half of marketing respondents reported their pipeline and campaign targets have increased. Furthermore, their strategies must change: With an entire buying community working from home and live events and conferences being a distant possibility, B2B marketers had to become much more agile in their approach to reaching buyers.

They did this by investing more in digital channels such as social media and leveraging them for brand building and compassionate messages. Another option was to move their in-person meetings to a virtual environment. They employed social media platforms as the host ground for worldwide conferences in several cases. Virtual events have seen an increase in investment from 87% of marketers, a trend that is projected to continue due to their success.

Try Deep Personalization

“Personalization” has been a buzzword for years now, but what does it truly mean for digital marketers?

At the surface level, personalization is doing things like addressing a customer by their first name. However, birthday promotional emails are an even better way to connect to a customer beyond the usual promotions.

You use the information you already have, and you try to warm up to the customer the way people nod heads on the bus or train.

But there’s more to gain from deeper personalization. Deeper personalization requires using a customer data platform and several changes in how you interact with customers when they arrive on your site.

One of the most straightforward and ideal examples of customer experience customization is chatbots that harness customer data to deploy different scripts. The live chat tool adjusts automatically depending on the customer’s input. The adjustments significantly reduce friction during the interaction.

Experiment With Dynamic Text Replacement

DTR (dynamic text replacement) can help marketers craft more relevant and clickable content based on specific parameters. The most common parameters are country and city. Consider this message:

“Top Brass SEO Services Wants Your Business to Succeed, 24/7!”

DTR can modify this message in this manner:

“Top Brass SEO Services Wants Businesses in Los Angeles, California to Succeed, 24/7!”

Statistics show that DTR, even the most basic replacements, can reduce acquisition costs by as much as 50% and improve a business’ bottom line by at least 5% to as much as 15%. DTR can also fine-tune marketing campaigns, reducing costs by as much as 30%. However, it’s not that easy to get positive results. Only 12% of marketers who focused on DTR reported that they experienced pretty good results with this approach.

What Should We Expect from Approaches Like DTR?

DTR should be combined with other page optimization efforts and tweaks. And as always, make sure you are split-testing vital components on your home page. Your decisions should always be based on analytics and data. While the data will not tell you which direction to go, you will have the basis on what changes must be made to your site in the name of generating more SEO leads.

Be On The Lookout For Networking Events

COVID-19 has certainly limited opportunities for physical networking, but don’t give up. As restrictions ease, make it a point to plan and attend conferences, meet-ups, and other networking events.

Nothing beats physical networking and talking to managers, thought leaders, organizers, directors, and all manners of big wigs in actual events. So be sure to have your business cards ready and make safe contact with potential leads which might be interested in signing a contract for search engine optimization services.

Prepare An SEO Audit Function on Your Site

Everyone loves free. It’s possible to create an SEO auditing feature on your site that people can use for free. This strategy is used by the biggest names in the industry, including Alexa.

It’s the fastest way to engage potential leads in a meaningful conversation while showcasing your technical skills and your breadth of understanding about SEO. It’s up to you to design the free SEO auditing tool, ensure that it provides accurate data, can collect emails quickly after the user has used the device.

Typically, results are mailed to users, so they will have to provide a working email address. It is a far exchange, and you can vastly improve your lead generation efforts by simply fine-tuning your site’s free auditing tool. It may not be your priority initially, but nothing compares to generating more leads.

Make Special Offers They Can’t Resist

It’s a fact of life that people will jump at the first opportunity when they see special offers. Whether it’s getting more value for their money or reduced cost for a service they like, we all could use some special offers in our lives. People don’t want to miss out on special offers, either. They beat themselves up when they miss a great discount or a freebie.

A special offer doesn’t have to cost a business much at all – you have to be wise about what you’re offering. First, however, make sure that the offer is genuine and provides real value that targets the kind of audience response to your business.

Combine Success Stories with Your Offers

This is connected with “reviews and testimonials” that we mentioned earlier. Whenever you make an offer for a free download, a free consultation, call, or whatever, make sure that you immediately follow the recommendation with snippets to longer narratives from people who have succeeded with your brand of search engine optimization.

The goal here is to constantly show your audience that you have real-world accomplishments backed by people who have worked with you in the past. At the end of the tunnel is an impressive case study, which you can chunk down to even more content emphasizing how well your optimization systems work.

Rethink Your Landing Pages

Your landing pages are the lifeblood of your online presence. Sometimes, it can get confusing as to what you should be prioritizing in terms of design. We certainly don’t want to crowd the landing page with too many unnecessary elements, and we also don’t want to give too little.

Some essentials for redesign include:

• Typography, color scheme, and use of white space
• The type of copy on the landing page
• Prioritizing items on the top half of the page