By: Braedon Swindler, IT Edge & Valley Crossing Digital
We’ve all been there – we have a simple website, maybe we built it ourselves using platforms like Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace. Maybe we took it a step further with e-commerce platforms like WordPress’s WooCommerce, or Shopify.
We’ve gotten our headshots and created a Team page, added our services, and even added a contact form. It works just fine as a place to direct leads, where they can see a few pictures of our work and see our phone number and email address. But what if I told you that there’s a way to take your website even further, to actually generate leads for your business?
In today’s digital world, IT Edge is proud to be a Gold Partner with the Western Chester County Chamber of Commerce to bring new insights to the technology space for businesses and organizations in this region.
Operating in the technology space for over 30 years, our team at IT Edge is excited to offer new ways for your business to leverage technology in process efficiency improvements, lead generation, and ultimately, more sales and secure market positioning.
Read on to hear from our Digital Marketing Division Lead, Braedon Swindler, as he walks through some of the key steps to get your website working for YOU!
Free Advertising for Your Business – An Introduction to Organic Lead Generation
In general, most marketing/advertising efforts fall into two main buckets – Paid and Organic. Paid advertising simply means that you’re paying for the space, typically for a physical or digital ad to be served to prospects. This is what is typically thought of when someone mentions ‘advertising’.
Alternatively, Organic lead generation is all of the traffic to your business which is free of charge. Non-digital versions of this include word-of-mouth marketing, or someone walking by and seeing your storefront. Digitally, this takes the form of someone seeing one of your digital platforms, being intrigued by what they see, and clicking through your platforms to learn more.
Some of the most popular platforms for Organic digital marketing efforts include a Google Business Profile, social media profiles (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.), and of course, your website.
In this article, we’re going to be focusing on the channel of your website for organic lead generation. There are different techniques for driving traffic to platforms such as your Google Business Profile and your social media platforms that we won’t be addressing here.
So, how does someone find your website ‘organically’? The most common form of this (if not redirected from a social media profile or a local listing site) is to find your website through a Search Engine Results Page, or a ‘SERP’. This is something like Google or Bing search.
In the next section, we’ll explore how potential clients or customers for your business go about searching for your business on Google, and how you can rank towards the top for multiple searches.
Understanding How Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Works for Your Business or Organization
For this article, we’ll assume that you already have a website. As we mentioned before, organic Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, means driving someone from Google or Bing search to your website. So, how do we do that?
Let’s pause here – put yourself in the shoes of a consumer searching for your products or services. As an example, let’s say you own a landscaping company. In this thought experiment, think of all of the things that YOU might ‘Google’ if you were searching for a landscaping company.
This might lead us to think of the following: Landscaping company near me, Landscaping Company in Coatesville PA, Residential Landscaping Company, Commercial Landscaping Company, Landscape Designer, etc. etc.
Our team at IT Edge even has tools to evaluate competitor sites. This means that we would be able to evaluate other Landscaping companies, see which of these ‘Keywords’ work best for them, and how much traffic they drive. This allows us to strategically identify the best ‘Keywords’ to incorporate into our website.
So, once we identify the best relevant keywords for our business, how do we incorporate them into our site to drive traffic?
Ultimately, there are many steps that need to be taken at this point, which is why Search Engine Optimization is typically performed, or partially completed, by an SEO expert. However, there are steps that any business owner can take to increase their ranking.
The most important step is to create designated pages for each of your services, demographics, and the areas you serve. Within these pages, you will want to make sure that the title of the page, as well as the content throughout the page, contain your target keyword(s). These pages can also be blog posts, to address questions that potential clients may have. These blog posts show up in search, too!
Once someone lands on your website via these keyword-driven pages, our goal is to drive them towards actions. This leads us to our final topic – how do we measure success of our organic marketing efforts?
Measuring Success for Your Digital Marketing Campaigns
If we’re going to be taking all of this time in Keyword Research and writing/uploading new webpages to our website, we want to be sure that our efforts are generating results.
Typical platforms for measuring the success of these digital campaigns include Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and the platforms themselves (Google Business Profile, etc.). Tools such as SEMrush can be used to compile all of this information into an easy-to-digest report.
These reports contain information such as how many Impressions your posts and pages had in organic search (how many people saw them), the visibility of individual keywords, and the number of clicks through to your website that each Keyword-driven page generated over a given period of time.
Additionally, rather than just seeing traffic to the site, we’ll also analyze the steps taken after they arrive on your site. This includes time spent on a page, how many pages they visit, and phone calls, emails, and contact form entries completed.
At the end of the day, we’ll have an excellent roadmap for our customer journey. This starts at a simple Google Search for your product or service, ending in a generated lead via a contact form or phone call. If you’re interested in learning more about Search Engine Optimization strategies, website design methods, or any other Digital Marketing effort for your business, don’t hesitate to connect with our team at IT Edge. We hope you’ve been able to take away some valuable insights from this article, and we hope this helps you generate new qualified leads for your business.
To learn more about IT Edge, visit them at www.itedge.com.