2020 is the year of disruption. In the early months of lockdown, businesses crumbled, and people are thinking along the lines of, “can we survive this?” But through persistence and adaptation, many businesses, especially those dependent on SEO lead generation, have come up with improved and even novel ways of staying afloat.

Just focusing on your website is no longer enough. The approach has to be multi-platform and multi-angle to maintain a secure connection with your audience and to improve its receptivity. Here are some survival-level SEO lead generation strategies in the time of COVID-19. We hope you and your business are well in these trying times.

Overhaul Your Communication Strategy

People are in hardship. Maybe 1% of the world isn’t, but the rest of the world is feeling the burn of the pandemic. Even after the lifting of the lockdown in some places, people have yet to recover. The danger is still there. So how can you talk about business or branding in a time like this? Do you show off your case studies? Do you prioritize that?

We believe that the best solution right now for content and engagement is to improve your communication. By “improve,” we need to change how we view our customers, our clients. This applies most especially in SEO lead generation. People who are approaching your SEO agency are likely in the neighborhood because they struggle with getting leads and clients themselves. Or customers, if they into e-commerce.

So what’s the magic ticket? Ask them questions. Ask them a lot of questions. Treat your customers as if they were your close neighbors. Now is the time to do away with the idea that customers are statistics, or just profiles with tendencies. It’s different now, with the pandemic. Organize a phone call or video call with them and be as insightful and thoughtful as possible. Delve into their mindset to find out what they want to achieve with their web presence. Inquire about the current challenges that they face and how they are going about their daily business. Things change so rapidly now that the problems they faced two weeks ago may have evolved and they now have a couple more problems to deal with.

Giving time to talk to people starts potential relationships that will pay off eventually. Not every video call or teleconference is going to yield results. Instead, view each opportunity to talk to potential clients as an opportunity to show them that your SEO agency has what it takes to innovate and adapt in challenging times like this.

The Challenge of Facebook Leads

Since the lockdown, people have been spending so much more time on Facebook. This created a peculiar situation where Facebook advertisers now have the opportunity to get more people to sign up and download offers and reports. The question now is how can we maximize the impact of Facebook ads for SEO lead generation. Here are some quick steps to achieve that:

– Select the Higher Intent type of form. The Higher Intent type of form creates an additional step for customers filling up details and sending them to you. While the More Volume option is excellent for mobile sign-ups, we believe that the Higher Intent type of form is a better choice because it gives the customer time to review what they are sending to you.

Those who read the lines firmly may not hit the send button, that is true. Those who do want to work with you will commit to the idea and send their details. By using the Higher Intent type of form, you are already improving the method and increasing the quality of Facebook leads by adding just one extra step.

– Add intro form copy to qualify leads even more. Facebook ads have an intro section with title and subheading fields. Customize the text and inform potential leads who you want to work with. This will narrow the funnel and make people committed when they sign up. People have a thing for perfect matches, and if your text shows that they are a perfect match for your offer and vice versa, the results of your Facebook SEO lead-gen efforts will be that much more fruitful.

We recommend taking advantage of the bullet points format, so the intro copy is more readable and more comfortable to absorb. You can introduce your brand to customers and indicate the specifics of the best possible clients for your SEO agency. It’s not going to be easy, but this process will allow customers to self-select so the more qualified leads will sign up instead.

– Use the custom questions function. The basic questions field contains the run-the-mill fields like name, email, contact number, website, etc. These are basic stuff that gives us nothing about the customer. Since they’re already there, you might also provide custom questions that will give you a bit more information about the lead. There are two kinds of custom questions.

The first type is more comfortable to answer and is a whiz for data analysis: the multiple-choice option. Simply indicate your questions and populate the drop-down menu. The second type of question requires a bit more effort to analyze but may provide more in-depth insight as to the specific motivations of potential leads in wanting to work with you. Enter the questions, and there will be a corresponding blank field where the customer can enter the details of their answers.

Facebook often warns advertisers that adding too many questions might reduce the chances of landing leads. This is true, and it has nothing to do with your intent or the quality of your questions. People have shorter attention spans on the Internet, so it’s common for them to shy away from electronic forms that have more questions than usual. However, in our experience, the process is much more complicated than just “want or don’t want” when it comes to generating quality SEO leads.

The options that Facebook has set and some of its standards in what constitutes an optimal form during a lead-gen effort, are not as optimal as we’d like them to be. The challenge is weeding out customers who may not be a good match and identifying people through self-selection. This is one of the most accurate and direct ways to do so.

LinkedIn Lead-Gen: What’s Up?

When it comes to B2B lead-gen environments, no other platform is more focused than LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is another beast to master; it doesn’t function exactly like Facebook or Instagram. The people here are professionals in their professional personas. CEOs, managers, headhunters, and directors spend more time on LinkedIn than on any other platform. It’s time to hunker down because if you are not dominating LinkedIn now, when are you going to do it?

– Do the marketing – literally. No lead-gen plan is going to be complete without a clear idea of marketing and how you want to do it. “I want to make more sales” is not going to cut it anymore. First, identify your specific objectives. Be as specific as possible and create milestones along the way so that you are accomplishing your objectives.

Next, think about your offer. The customer knows that SEO agencies in general offer SEO services, but what specific offers do you have? How are you going to dress up your offers to make them attractive to your target niches?

If you want to increase your chances of success, you have to break down the different types of services that you have at the moment and create a specific campaign for each one. That way, people will latch on to something precise because they need it for their business. Simply saying, “SEO services” is not that effective. However, if you break it down to “website optimization for dentists,” for example, the message is more precise and more powerful.

Third, figure out what your USP is or your universal selling proposition. The USP differentiates you from a thousand other SEO agencies who can just as well do the jobs that you are offering. The USP has to be concise and relatable. The USP also has to be consistent with the branding that you have in mind.

And finally, be sure that your team is ready to process leads. Video calls a day in and day out can be taxing for just one person. If you get 500 leads that want to talk to you, you may need to bring in more people on board. Or perhaps it’s time to outsource to a call center with a few seats to handle all inquiries.

– Know your audience very well. This isn’t something of a cheap marketing book. Knowing your audience in the age of digital B2B marketing means you need to rely on customer segmentation. To do this, you must create a customer avatar based on existing data and relate it to your continuing campaigns. The LinkedIn Sales Navigator wants you to succeed in your campaigns, so it offers a plethora of filters that you may not have been paying attention to before. Some of these filters include – geography, keywords, industry, relationship, company, company headcount, and title. There are over 40 million head honchos on LinkedIn at the moment, but if you don’t have a plan to segment them, you will be going nowhere.

– Optimize your professional profile or business profile. If you run a business, have a business page on LinkedIn. If not, you have to make your profile as professional as possible to make this work. We have a couple of suggestions that will help you achieve this.

• The headshot has to be 100% clear and professional. Don’t put a selfie or any other strange shot, like one where you’re holding a tequila or a glass of whiskey. That is not going to work, and people will shy away from your profile. Creative shots are excellent, but please don’t overdo it and remember that you need to impress people in the first three seconds that they land on your LinkedIn profile.
• Add your most significant achievements in the summary. This is no time for modesty. You need to be upfront that you have some excellent services to offer, and you are willing to share proof of your success. The summary is the only space in the profile where people can read the long-form text, so it would be best to put your best foot forward.
• Update all items under the experiences list. You don’t have to list down everything. It is best to curate this list to show your best achievements. Think of this section as an extension of the summary.
• The power of social proof cannot be understated here. Ask previous clients to give you recommendations if possible. People are going to look for recommendations, and if they see gleaming or at least good reviews, they will likely take a few of your offers.
• Create a message script. The first script will be the connection message or what they will see when connecting with you. Then proceed to create three more scripts: one for a negative response, another for a positive response (this will branch out to more scripts depending on your current campaign), and another for a neutral response/non-committed response.

– Launch wisely. Do not perform too many clicks on the platform while doing your campaign. Do not send too many connection requests at once. Keep the number of connection requests to a maximum of 150 per day. If your profile has only 300 connections or less, keep the connection requests to just 50 per day to be on the safe side. We do not want to be banned by LinkedIn on the most crucial portion of your campaign.