“Lateral SEO” A case study on niche key-wording - part #2

PART 2 of 2

Great! I’ve got more traffic… Now what?
Those who subscribe to our online marketing diary would have watched video #2 regarding effectively turning site visitors into leads.

Gone are the days where you can simply get away with an enquiry web form on a contact page. Nowadays you must use a call-to-action.

This call-to-action offers the visitor something in return for their name, email address and potentially their phone number. This “something” can be a free subscription to your newsletter, a free quote, an eBook, a forum subscription, a free video (like ours), or some other deal that doesn’t directly cost your business much to produce.

Figure 1: Bluefreight's simple but effective call-to-action

Based on this enticement, they will submit their details into a web form and then this information is submitted into your database.

Now that you have their details, you’ve successfully converted your site visitor into a lead.

What we’ve learned
A while back, Indietech made a huge strategic sidestep as a result of this particular real world case. We’ve now developed some great tools and methods to help other businesses achieve the same success.

Most importantly, the project has now been so successful that Richard’s business has proven to be more resilient in times of economic downturn.

So, here’s what we can learn from this SEO case study:

• Use web analytics platforms to look for keyword trends.
• Take advantage of any 'lateral' keywords and the search traffic they attract by adding a call-to-action along with a lead capture form.
• A content rich site not only provides a service to clients and prospects, it gives search engines more keywords and phrases to catalogue… Which means that individual pages are likely to draw from different sources of traffic.
• Your home page isn’t the only important page on your website. Ensure that you understand the importance of secondary pages and their content.
• Page headings are critically important. Ensure that your page headings are phrases that people would search for. 
• Use a wide variety of keyword phrases that relate to not just your products or services, but also your industry. 
• Target niche markets by using quite specific niche keywords and phrases.
• Page headings must relate to the body content of the page. Search Engines use algorithms to rate the relevance of heading vs body content phrases.
• Prior to performing any sort of website update, ensure that you understand what effect your changes will make to your page rankings. We were lucky in the above scenario, but changing site content can also have a negative impact.
• Knowledge is power and measurement is the key. I love this phrase. Ensure that your web developer has installed a website analytics tool such Google Analytics. The historical data provided by this free platform will allow you to make educated decisions on how to improve the amount of traffic your site attracts whilst giving you an understanding the common keywords that people are using to find your site.
• Whilst we’ve mentioned ranking #1 in search engines for particular keywords in this article, your rankings are of less importance than the traffic you generate from ongoing online marketing efforts. As long as your site experiences constant growth across a broad range of entry pages on your site, you’re on the right track.
• A website should be content rich, but don’t waste people’s time with excessive data and don’t aim to please the search engines. Your website, above all, must be punchy, concise, and user-friendly.
• Gone are the days of using dodgy SEO techniques to build what’s called “domain authority” in order to increase site traffic. Search engine companies have spent millions of R&D dollars on their search algorithms to ensure they look for natural website structures.

In subsequent blog posts, we’ll talk about how we’ve helped many of our clients nurture these leads into customers by using email marketing. We’re also going to look at how we’ve continued to build the daily traffic and lead conversion rate on the site using real stats.