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Article

Oct 29, 2019
7min read

A Guide to Boosting Lead Generation With SEO

AB Tasty

AB Tasty

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There are several elements that go into creating a successful marketing plan for our digital era—with two important tactics being lead generation and SEO. 

Lead generation is the process of cultivating an interest in your business to build an ongoing list of potential clients (or ‘leads’). As I mentioned in a previous article on B2C and B2B lead generation—all businesses need a steady stream of leads to grow and survive. 

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of refining web pages to ultimately improve their ranking on search engine results pages. The goal here is to have search engines (like Google) return links to your website when a user types in a relevant question or query. The higher your website ranks, the higher the likelihood that users will click, which not only increases the organic traffic to your website but your company’s online visibility. 

seo

At this point, you may be wondering what the connection is between these two strategies. First, it’s important to clarify that SEO and lead generation are not one and the same. SEO is focused on increasing web traffic. Lead generation is focused on increasing the number of clients/potential clients for your business. However, SEO can complement lead gen efforts by driving awareness for your company via organic traffic to the site. 

In this guide, we’ll cover the ways in which you can effectively utilize SEO to help with your lead generation efforts, as listed below: 

  • Audit Your Website
  • Perform Keyword Research
  • Update Existing On-page Content 
  • Benchmark Your Competitors Performance
  • Create An Ongoing Content Strategy
  • Create a Backlink Strategy

Let’s begin.

Audit Your Website

Auditing your website is necessary to know which web pages are performing well and which need improvement. Which is why we suggest crawling your site as the first step. Luckily, there are various tools available to help with this.

website metrics

For instance, Screaming Frog is a UK based search marketing agency that offers a free version of its website crawler. This tool can crawl your website and find broken links (404 errors), titles and meta descriptions that are over the recommended character limit (or even worse: missing), duplicate content, and so on—so you can fix these issues that are negatively impact ranking. 

Check for Speed

Fast-loading pages aren’t just important for the user experience. Slow load times on desktop and mobile devices can negatively impact a site’s ranking as well, and contribute to high bounce/exit rates. 

Try using Google’s PageSpeed test to analyze specific web pages on your site for speed. It’s a free tool that also offers suggestions on how to improve the performance of those pages—a win-win. 

Perform Keyword Research

As mentioned above, a central element of SEO is having your content surface for relevant keywords. Which is why keyword research is so important for steering SEO strategy and understanding topics of interest for your target audience. 

Don’t create content based on assumptions or abstract terminology that people aren’t searching for—it’s a shot in the dark that more often than not, won’t work. 

Identify the main keyword(s) for your business and build out a list of related terms and queries from there. These keywords should be the building blocks for an SEO content strategy. SEMRush Magic Keyword finder is a great tool, or there are free options like UberSuggest that analyze keywords and generate similar terms to help with this. 

The relevant keyword for an article or blog post should be one of the first (if not the first) word in the titles and meta-description of your content so it’s recognized by search engine crawlers. 

Update Existing On-Page Content 

People want to read content that’s useful, engaging, and accessible. While SEO helps drive people to your website, it’s the quality of the content and the user experience that will get people to stay. 

So, take a look at the existing content on your website. Is the language clear and concise? Does it offer insight or value to readers? A few SEO tips for website content: organize sections with headers and focus on a healthy blend of context and scannability (bullet points, numbered lists, etc.) and include images with alt descriptions, which will help search engines crawling.

Also, analyze page performance with your analytics tool (e.g. Google Analytics) and identify areas of your site that have high bounce rates (anything over 60%). These are the areas that should be prioritized when refining existing content. 

Benchmark Your Competitors Performance

It may seem like a rather complicated task—analyzing your competitors’ performance with SEO lead generation—but it doesn’t have to be. 

Keep a record of your competitor’s positions in search for the same or similar queries and analyze how well that page performs. If a competitor is performing better than you for the same search terms, dig into why this may be. Consider the structure of their posts, how they’re written, backlinks, and so on in this evaluation. 

Understanding how similar content performs will help you parse out effective strategies for your own efforts—and can highlight aspects of your current strategy that may be dated and need updating, or even technical issues that are hindering your ranking. 

Create an Ongoing Content Strategy 

A steady stream of content that provides value to your target audience is key for lead generation. Once visitors realize that your insight can be of use to them in their day-to-day, they’ll be more willing to sign up for regular newsletters or fill out forms to access gated content. 

content digital

This is why it’s important to create a content calendar to help your team stay organized and on a regular publishing schedule. Organize articles and topics by theme based on your keyword research. This will make sure you’re putting out content that people are looking for, which means a larger, more engaged audience.

An ongoing content strategy, combined with keyword research, will significantly assist any SEO lead generation campaign as creating content people are looking for will increase brand presence in search and bring in those all-important leads.

Create a Backlink Strategy

Backlinks are created when different websites link to one another. These links are crucial in improving ranking, as it’s seen as a vote of credibility for your content by search engines. However, not all backlinks are ranked the same. These inbound links need to make sense (not just linking to a random, unrelated piece of content). Getting a backlink from a trustworthy site with a high domain authority is key. 

Also, for a backlink to have a positive impact on your web page ranking, it needs to have the tag ‘rel=follow.’ This essentially is a signal to site crawlers that they should follow this link to the corresponding website. No follow links (that have the tag ‘rel=nofollow’) tell search engine crawlers the opposite, and prevent the link equity from being passed through. 

While backlinks are a huge component of SEO, building these inbound links can be tougher than it sounds. Remember that Google is highly suspicious of any artificial linking activities and will penalize sites that have backlinks that don’t appear to be organic or link to irrelevant content—we do not recommend buying links or resorting to shady strategies when it comes to inbound links. More likely than not, it will backfire and hurt your ranking. 

Instead, look at your website’s current backlink profile and see if there are any broken links that need to be fixed—this is an easy way to improve SEO while you work on getting high domain authority backlinks from other sites. On that end, consider existing relationships your brand has and if there are any opportunities for there to gain a backlink—perhaps with a guest post or if you spot an article of theirs that could benefit from linking to one of your site’s articles (to provide additional context to the topic). 

Key Takeaways

Creating an SEO lead generation campaign is not only going to ensure your ongoing marketing efforts stand a great chance of succeeding in an oversaturated market, but it will also help future-proof your web content by maximizing the opportunities to gain new leads with a strong online presence and a great user experience.

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Article

Oct 28, 2019
10min read

How and Why to Use Video in Your Email Marketing in 2023

AB Tasty

AB Tasty

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Every day, the average office worker receives more than 121 emails.

As a marketer, your job is to ensure that your emails stand out from the other 120.

Adding a video into your emails can increase click-through rates, conversions, brand awareness, and help educate your customers.

In fact, including a video in an email can lead to open rate increases of up to 13%.

Videos are engaging, entertaining, and allow you to quickly and effectively communicate with your audience.

Why Use Videos in Email Marketing?

If you’re not yet convinced, check out these six key benefits of video in email marketing for your business.

#1 Increase Conversion and Click-Through Rates

The effect of video on conversion and click-through rates in your emails is impressive.

Take a moment to consider these statistics:

  • An email including a video can increase your email click-through rate by up to 300%
  • An email including a video can reduce your unsubscribe rate by 75%
  • Emails including a video have been found to have a 96% higher click-through rate than those without

If you had any doubts that video is an important part of your marketing arsenal, those stats should squash them.

#2 Increase Email Open Rates

Remarkably, studies have found that just including the word “video” is enough to increase email open rates — by a whopping 7% to 13%.

Why?

Because people are naturally curious. 

As well as simply conveying the core message of the email, adding “video” to the subject line piques a reader’s interest, compelling them to open the email.

Simply put, they want to know what’s in the video.

#3 Build Trust and Authenticity

Using videos is a great way to build trust and to establish a connection with your audience.

It puts a face and a personality to your brand, allowing your audience to get a feel for the person or team it is dealing with.

You can establish trust by sharing tips, insight into your business operations, or just fun videos to build rapport. It’s also a great way to warm up your audience to a product or service.

To build trust using videos, consider implementing the following tips:

  • Have the same person present the videos consistently: Over time your audience will start to feel like they know that person. This helps to establish a personal connection to and trust of your brand.
  • Create useful and free video content for your target audience: You’re perceived as a credible and authoritative expert in your industry, which builds deeper trust and creates a (future) desire to pay for your expertise.
  • Create videos that show positive and negative brand experiences:  Consider using personal stories or a sneak peek of your office. Be genuine and human and you’ll earn people’s respect and trust.

#4 Social Media Shares and Boosts to SEO

A huge bonus of using video email marketing is its indirect effect on your search engine rankings.

Videos that are engaging are highly likely to be shared on social media. In fact, videos generate 12 times more social shares than both text and images.

Video

This increases your social engagement, which in turn boosts your brand in the search engines.

While social media engagement itself is not a ranking factor for Google (it is for Bing, however), it does amplify other ranking factors that Google does use.

Social sharing increases the visibility of your content. The more people that view your content, the more likely it is to get shares.

Links are hugely important for SEO.

#5 Timesaving

Nowadays people live busy (and distracted) lives. Plenty of people would rather watch a one-minute video than spend 15 minutes reading a long-form article.

youtube

A benefit of videos is that they can quickly and easily get across your core message and grab the attention of viewers. Even complex subjects can be made easier to understand.

Videos are more interesting and engaging (when compared to text alone) and can have a bigger impact on your readers.

Videos can go viral quickly and viewers respond more positively to a product after watching related videos.

#6 Stay Out of the Trash

There’s nothing worse than spending hours of your valuable time building an email campaign for it not to be read, chucked unceremoniously in the trash, or worse still, marked as spam.

Luckily, good-quality, interesting, and engaging videos capture the attention of the reader and reduce the likelihood that your email will go straight into the trash.

When done well, it’s also a valuable opportunity to give an excellent impression of your service or product.

How to Incorporate Video Content into Emails

Now you know the benefits of using videos in your emails, here’s how to add videos to your email marketing campaigns.

Technique 1: Embed Videos into Emails

You can embed videos directly into emails.

The reader should be able to view a playing video without leaving their inbox, which, in theory, sounds like a great user experience.

But despite the fact this technology has been around since the ‘90s, videos embedded into emails come with a host of serious flaws.

  • Due to spam and security precautions, many email clients do not support embedded videos.
  • Not all email clients (even the big guys like Gmail, Hotmail, or Outlook) can support the more recent video format, HTML5.

In other words, when you embed a video directly into an email, there’s a chance that the reader won’t be able to view it as you intended.

Does that mean you should abandon using videos in your emails? No, the benefits of using them are too high.

Rather, you need to use a technique that is guaranteed to work, every time.

Technique 2: Use a Video Thumbnail Image

To counter the inherent downsides of videos embedded into emails, marketers often use a video thumbnail image within the email which links to a landing page where the video lives.

video conversion

Inside the email, create an image that looks like a video. When the image is clicked the reader is taken to your website or YouTube to view the video.

The video isn’t hosted in the email, which actually comes with some powerful benefits:

  • The video will definitely work (unlike Technique 1)
  • The video can be set to autoplay on YouTube or your website, meaning as soon as the user clicks the video, it plays
  • More traffic is converted from your email to your website, meaning more page views and more website interactions
  • By adding CTAs on the video landing page, you can move the reader through the sales funnel

Types of Video Email Marketing Campaigns

Data shows that video in email is effective and hosting a video on YouTube or your website is so easy to set up, what are you waiting for?

Here are some effective ways to start incorporating more video content into your marketing emails today.

Personalized Emails for Sales

Creating personalized videos is an excellent way for sales teams to convert leads. Plus, with tools like Wistia, it only takes a minute or two to record, edit, and send a video.

Wistia’s Google Chrome extension allows you to record your screen and yourself at the same time, edit the video, and then easily send it over to your customer or prospect.

You can add a personal greeting to the recipient, allowing you to personalize your sales efforts and significantly increase your response rates.

Plus, with companies finding a 36.9% higher close rate when using personalized videos with email, it’s got to be worth a try.

Use Videos to Tell Customer Stories

Take a moment to consider what is more genuine:

  • your brand telling a customer why they should buy, or
  • a customer talking about their positive experience with the brand.

It’s a no-brainer. Potential customers are far more likely to trust customers than the brand itself.

video conversion

Some 76% of people believe that content posted by customers is more trustworthy than brand content.

Using an existing customer to explain their experience on video is an excellent way to sell your services or products. It’s genuine, personal, and highly trustworthy.

To increase conversion rates, go one step further and include these videos in your email marketing campaigns.

Consider Using GIFs As Well As Videos

In general, videos perform best when they are short and sweet.

Consider your audience and your product or service. Is your audience younger and tech savvy?

If so, it could be worth considering using a short GIF instead of a full-blown video.

GIFs are easy to insert into emails, quicker than videos to make, and can be equally engaging.

Consider these questions before adding GIFs to your campaigns:

  • Does it reinforce your message?
  • Does it highlight the most important parts of your email?
  • Does it emphasize the features of your product or service?
  • Does it add some fun or excitement to your message?
  • Does it offend your audience?

If you do decide to use GIFs, make sure you don’t overdo it. They can be distracting and annoying, so a general rule of thumb is to only include one or two per email.

In the example below, the GIF makes the email design more interesting, grabs the attention of the reader, and delivers emotions in a more personal way.

video gif

Over to You

Now we’d like to hear from you.

Are you going to use embedded videos or send readers to your website?

Either way, let me know by leaving a comment right now.

If you want to learn more about using video for marketing, head over to our blog, 7 Ways To Make Your Testimonials More Persuasive.

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