There is no more space for mistakes this 2020 when it comes to lead generation and all your efforts must be geared toward improving your bottom line. While COVID-19 continues to be a threat, life and business have to go on, and the competition in SEO just got more hectic. To help you get a good start this month, we’ve prepared 30 common SEO lead generation problems, with their corresponding solutions.

Problem # 1: Your campaign is suffering from the leaky bucket effect, and you’re spending 2x to 3x more on your campaigns.

Solution:

Don’t just stand there – do something about your lead capture forms! Optimizing your forms can increase your SEO lead generation threefold without increasing the costs. The more specific and the more optimized your forms are, the better off your campaigns will be, and you will also be able to quickly and effectively target leads and separate non-leads more easily.

Problem # 2: One channel or strategy is not bringing in consistent results with SEO lead generation.

Solution:

The reason why there are so many variations when it comes to what channel or strategy to use in SEO lead generation is the difference in audiences. The first step to solve this problem is to create a reliable customer profile or avatar, and then determine where your ideal B2B audience is hanging out. Are they on Twitter most of the time? Are the decision-makers on LinkedIn? Only actual testing during a campaign will help you determine this.

Problem # 3: You have identified a viable lead channel, but your results are still lagging behind your goal/expectation.

Solution:  

Always remember that it’s not what channel you really choose, it is how you operate within that channel. There are so many viable SEO lead generation channels to choose from, yes, but if you are not maximizing any of those channels, you won’t get results.

Problem # 4: People are not responding to your campaign, no one is liking, sharing, or retweeting your content. For the most part, you feel that your branding is on the margins, and no one is paying attention.

Solution:

This problem may be due to the fact that you don’t have a substantial content strategy, and people cannot rally around your branding because your content is too generic or plain, or you are talking about things that other people have already discussed at length countless times before.

Problem # 5: You are having difficulty segmenting your leads, and people remain largely unresponsive to your email marketing campaigns.

Solution:  

You may have not fully maximized automation of your campaigns. If your emails are blasted out randomly, and there are no specific triggers that will help you segment leads, you may not be operating at an optimal level at all. Try creating a series of emails that are super packed with value so that people would want to keep and read them, and more importantly, respond to the core message and CTA of each email.

Problem # 6: No matter what you do, you can’t seem to make people return to your website for the regular updates and free downloads you are offering.

Solution:

The reason for this is quite simple – they may not have an insistent need for the information that you are offering.

You can improve your customers’ return rate by increasing the value of what you bring free to the table, or you can follow a page from the book that companies like Crazy Egg follow – create a free tool on your website and release it to the public for free. Crazy Egg provides a free heat map for people who want to use to its free tool.

The tool that you are going let the public use for free must be simple to use and very useful. And since you are in the SEO industry, you have so many options when it comes to creating a new tool. Sure, someone else may have already created a similar tool, but what matters if you are going to put your branding’s own DNA into the equation.

Problem # 7: You have other ideas that are related to SEO lead generation, but you are having a tough time integrating them to your website, which is focused mostly on the services that you offer.

 

Solution:

Why not create another website altogether? Sometimes, branching off to other directions is more effective in the long term, because you have more wiggle room for promotions and for creating new ways to optimize your SEO lead generation efforts. Your company’s branding is still going to benefit from your other efforts, and as long as you are open about collecting the contact information of leads and how this information is going to be used, you won’t have any problems reaching out later on from the mother ship.

Problem # 8: People are not signing up for your free download.

Solution:

This is probably one of the most frustrating events for digital marketers. You have already spent a lot of time and money on the free download, the landing page, the content, and so on. However, none of your efforts are really converting, and you are at a loss as to why people aren’t being hooked by the bait. So what’s wrong?

The thing about lead magnets (like free downloads) is that people are becoming somewhat immune to the idea of free downloads. Let’s put it this way: not all digital marketers put immense efforts to bring a large amount of value in their free downloads. Many digital marketers are delivering reports and white papers that are comparable to your average online content.

The only way to get people to trust the system again is by making sure that what you are offering to people is unique, trustworthy and has is packed with value. Remove any of these elements and people just might turn their back on your free download again.

Problem # 9: You have more dead leads than live ones – what should be prioritized?

Solution:

In the grand scheme of things, it is actually a better investment to re-engage and bring those dead leads back to life. Re-engagement campaigns cost less, and everyone does them, like software company Grammarly. Re-engaging customers is also the foundation of efficient customer retention. If you already have their contact information, what’s stopping you from providing relevant offers?

Problem # 10: My promotions do not impress my leads, period.

Solution:

It has been found that 70% of consumers prefer to make decisions through self-education. What does this mean? Well, the traditional content on your website may at times hold more water than what you are providing to your leads through email marketing blasts and landing pages. So it’s obvious that there has to be balance between the two, so people can self-educate even after encountering your promotional materials.

Problem # 11: Your blogs are not drawing in crowds; people are not commenting and sharing them. You also get very little organic traffic to your older blog posts despite you having done your keyword research and you have implemented the best SEO practices to make the articles or blogs as attractive as possible to people searching online.

Solution:

Maybe the problem is not that you don’t have content, but what kind of content you are offering your customers.

One of the more important changes that have occurred in the past year is Google’s focus on content that provides more than just the average amount of information per post. So what we suggest is that you ensure that your content (even the old ones) are providing in-depth and useful information.

Turn old content into guides – consolidate them into longer resources where people will be able to find everything they need in one place. This will help reduce bounce rates and also great improve dwell times when someone comes to your website organically.

Organic traffic is reliable for SEO lead generation, but only if there really is something of value on your website. If your website is mostly empty, there’s no reason for people to stay.

Problem # 12: You have a powerful new free download that you know will interest people, but new downloads are slow in coming. What should you do?

Solution:

There is an easy solution to this problem, and it involves creating and posting dynamic CTAs throughout your website. So your home page is going to have the CTA, but through dynamic insertion, it’s going to appear on every piece of content that you have on the website itself.

So whether some is reading the Contact Us page or an old blog from 2017, they’re going to see it. Feel free to adapt this method whenever you have a new lead capture form or free download.

The important thing here is that people will get to see what you are offering and they will gain access to it whatever they may be surfing on your website at the moment.

Problem # 13: My text content is not pulling as many leads it used to. Is there any way to boost textual content for the purpose of generating leads?

Solution:

Yes there is. Existing textual content can always be improved and lengthened, and made more in-depth. Also, now would be a good time to start creating exclusive video content for your website.

Use this opportunity to get people to sign up. You can either distribute the content through the sign-ups, or you can place strategic lead capture forms below your exclusive video content. Engaging videos are usually enough to improve your chances of getting more sign-ups and SEO leads.

Problem # 14: People in my lists are barely responding to my new content, what’s happening?

Solution:

If we go back to our discussion of B2B audiences, you will easily see what’s causing the holdup in new sign-ups and activity. B2B audiences come in all shapes and sizes, and they have different interests.

Content segmentation is important primarily for those who rely on email marketing to engage and re-engage old customers. Your current content strategy has to take into account the differences in the interest of your different segments.

Problem # 15: I’ve been told that my content and free downloads are not engaging. How do I make my content more relevant?

Solution:

2020 and beyond is the era of statistics and infographics. People want to be in the know, and they want to understand what is happening to the market at the present time, especially now that the world is experiencing a reboot because of COVID-19.

Problem # 16: What’s the best way to reignite interest in what you have to say as a brand?

Solution:

There’s this fiery concept called data journalism and a lot of Fortune 500 companies are doing it because it’s sensible and it keeps everyone in the loop. In order to carry out data journalism, you have to be abreast of all the changes in the industry at the moment and you need to love statistics. But that’s not all – you need to be able to compile your data and use it in your own storytelling efforts to make it a powerful tool for advancing your objectives as a brand.

Problem # 17: You are drawing in traffic that mostly does not convert.

Solution:

This may be due to a shift in what Google allows when setting keywords targets in PPC some years ago. So what makes sense right now is to set negative keywords so your ads will not be shown to certain users typing keywords that are not really related to the type of content and action that you want people to take. Being more specific nowadays is more important and keyword targeting is essential to your success.