Driving high quality, relevant traffic to your website

Peter: Hello everyone. First of all, I’m very sorry for the late start. We are having a few technical issues so you’ve got myself at the moment and hopefully we’ll be joined by Lilah a little later on. So I’m going to introduce myself and this webinar.

This webinar is all about How to Drive Relevant High Value Traffic to your Website. Today’s agenda is all about; introducing SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), what is it?; Some highly effective actions that can really deliver some serious results for your business; We’ll go over some key takeaways and some easy SEO tips; And we’ll also have a look at some analytics and conversion tools.

So I’m Peter, I’m the Head of Digital Marketing at Lead Forensics. I’ve got a ton of background in SEO and other digital channels that I’m going to share with you today.

So firstly, we are going to go through SEO……what it is and then I’m going to take you through some actions on how we can influence all of those bits and also how it works with the Lead Forensics tool.

SEO is incredibly important particularly in an increasingly digital world. But SEO is also one of the most feared channels in marketing in general. The thing is that it really doesn’t need to be despite the fact that it can be incredibly complicated. There are some really simple fundamentals that can work wonders for you and your traffic.

So something that we get from a lot of our customers and what a lot of customers struggle with is driving the right sort of traffic. So that is high value, high quality traffic and also in the right volumes and its SEO that really helps solve that. So today we’re mostly going to be talking about Google in this presentation. That’s simply because over 80% of internet users use Google as their preferred search engine. Now the principles are the same so don’t worry if you’re sitting there thinking my users prefer to use Bing or I prefer to use Yahoo as my search engine, the principles are the same so they do still apply.

So we’re going to start off by taking a look at Google’s Mission Statement. So Google wants to provide the best possible content for a searcher. So Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. So if you are wondering, the world’s data is your website and Google is asking is this relevant to show my users. The more accurate Google’s results are, the more likely users are to come back and to use them again. It’s really important to Google to show the best possible results for their users. Now, there are a whopping 1.7 billion registered websites, 1.7 billion and Google has to sift through each and every one of those and catalogue or index each of those website pages. When someone enters a query, Google has a process or set of rules to decide which pages get displayed and we often call those ranking factors.

It’s estimated that there are over 200 of these ranking factors but in a nutshell what Google is trying to look for is; how trustworthy are you, how relevant are you to their users, how useful are you to their users, how helpful are you to their users and how good is your user experience. So the key to higher rankings is to answer ‘very’ to each of those questions.

So what? Why does any of this matter to you, why bother trying to get on to the first page? 94% of people who search don’t go past page 1 and on top of that people tend to search in an ‘F’ pattern and that’s to say that most people will click on the first result. People trust Google to provide them with the right result the first time. If they click on that or they read the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), the blue link and it’s not quite what they are looking for, they’ll come back and they’ll click on the second one and the same for the third. But each time it gets reduced, people are less likely to click on the third one than they are the first and ultimately once you get to the third one people are more likely to amend their search than they are to look any lower. So that’s why we need SEO. We need to create content that Google loves and wants to show to their users.

So what do we actually need to do in order to get this done? What are the actions we need to take? Well, we need to answer some of those questions. So how trustworthy are you in Google’s eyes? How relevant are you to their users? How useful and helpful are you to their users? And how good is your user experience? We can do that by going through some easy to implement but highly effective basics. We are first going to look at the words that we use, so that’s the keywords and phrases that we use in our SEO. We are then going to have a look at reading the Search Engine Results Page and I will be referring to that as SERP from now on. So a SERP is a Search Engine Results Page and that’s after you click ‘Go’ in Google or any other search engine, it’s the page that comes up with the results. We’re going to be using the information on the SERP to ascertain the search intent. We are then going to have a look at the 3 Cs of content and finally we’re going to have a look at linking and that’s both internal and external linking.

So words are super important. Now I’m sure you are all already aware……but if you are a marketing agency for example, you probably shouldn’t have any content on chocolate chip cookies recipes. So you obviously want to rank for keywords that are relevant and relate to your business or industry. Now each of your web pages has to have a clear goal and to focus on one keyword. So that doesn’t mean you can’t use other keywords, in fact quite the opposite you should use keywords that are related to your target keyword and related to that topic as it helps Google form a picture of what that page is about. You do need to focus on one keyword or phrase and show Google that you’re the most helpful and useful to their users for that term, as possible. They keyword or phrase should feature in all of the H1 or page titles and also in the SERP blue link or meta title. So if we have a look on the left here (7.26 on video), we’ve got ‘Using website visitor tracking to revolutionise your B2B lead generation’ and that is a H1 or page title of one of the Lead Forensics blogs. On the right hand side we have an example from the SERP of a meta title and that is ‘How to turn website traffic into leads’. These can be different and in fact should be different, if the result on the SERP increases clicks. So no need to change it if it’s not going to help increase clicks from SERP through to your page but if it does then by all means do change it. But the key there is to ensure that you use your keyword and keyphrase within your H1 page title and your SERP.

It does get a little bit more complicated than that. This is where high quality and relevance comes in. Keyword research can be a bit of an art but it really doesn’t need to be. It can be difficult but anyone can do it. Often finding the words can be easy, it’s picking the right ones that can be the difficult part. We’re going to have a look at 2 terms (8.36 on video), they are ‘Leads’ and ‘How to generate leads’. If you are a lead generation company, for example which one would you rather rank for? We have ‘leads’ which is 239,000 searches per month or ‘How to generate leads’ which is a modest 2,500 per month. This is where search intent comes in, there are 4 types of search intent; there’s informational, transactional, investigational and navigational.

We’re not going into those types today but essentially what we are looking at is, when someone searches they have a particular goal or they are expecting a certain result from that search and what we need to do is decide which one they are after and to try to effect that and provide them with the right content. So let’s look at the example here. This is where we have searched for ‘Leads’. On the far left there (9.50 on video) we’ve got some PPC results above the fold or Pay Per Click ads and you can see that they are ads by the small ‘Ad’ in the top left hand corner, signified in the red box. Then just below that we have a definition of the word ‘Lead’, as in lead a horse to water. Below that we’ve got ‘People also ask’, so some suggestions of other searches that people have done around this one from Google. Then we have some slightly confused classic organic results. The reason I say that is, if you look in the yellow box there we’ve got a result there for dog leads or dog leash and if we continue on to the third one on the far right there, we have got some more ads. So what does this actually tell us about the results? What does this SERP tell us? Well it tells us that Google is incredibly confused. The keyword ‘Leads’ is so generic that Google is not really sure what to display, it’s not really sure what the user has in mind when they’ve searched for the word ‘Leads’. So they’ve got a little bit there to do with business leads, they’ve got a definition of leads and they got some dog leads. As a lead generation company, if we go back to that example, yes it’s got a lot of high volume but doesn’t really have the quality so we’ll probably get a bit of traffic that we wanted but we’ll also get a lot of traffic that we really didn’t want. The problem with one is if we put time and effort into this, it’s going to be very difficult to be able to rank for and we’re also not going to get that high quality. So essentially it’s probably not worth the time and effort.

If we move on to the second example. This is where we’ve searched for ‘How to generate leads’. Again, if we look at the SERP on the left there you can see we’ve got a Google feature, called a Feature Snippet……and that’s listing different ways to generate leads. Just below that we’ve got a People also ask, again and then we’ve got organic results. On page 1 and 2 there, we’ve got all of the organic results and if you have a look at those now hopefully you’ll notice there’s a bit of a pattern there……all of the results are on the same topic. The keyword is at least relevant to the business. We know that Google at least sees this as a term where people are searching and they are interested in business leads. It’s important to point out on this one, there are no ‘Ad’ results and that could be a good thing. Obviously, if we’ve got ‘Ad’ results then we’re less likely to get a click because these push out organic results down. But you shouldn’t always be put off by the fact that there’s ‘Ad’ results on a page because it can signal a commercial intent. If another business is willing to put their money up for this particular keyword, then it can signal that there’s some commercial intent and PPC ads (paid ads) don’t necessarily stay on 24/7 either so quite often your organic results might be left to rule unchallenged on weekends or evenings, which can be a big win for you there. Don’t always be put off by PPC results, that entirely depends on your goal.

Reading the SERP in this way allows us to gain an understanding of the relevance of a particular keyword and the intent behind it based on Google’s existing results and what they see as relevant for their users and for that search. So if I worked at this lead generation company, I would be aiming for ‘How to generate leads’ even though it’s much lower volume than the other, simply because it has much more relevant and quality traffic.

So now we come on to the 3 C’s of content. So that is content type, content format and content angle. So let’s use an example, this time, of ‘How to use Google tag manager’ and we’ll go back to reading the SERP again. So we’ve got the SERP in the middle and on the right hand side there. If we have a look we can see there is a step-by-step guide in the form of a blog and we have a big section there on videos as well. That indicates that the preferred way for users to digest this information is using a step-by-step guide in the form of a blog or by watching video tutorials or ‘How to’ guides, that sort of thing. That covers our type and format, blog and video is the type and format is a tutorial or step by step. Then we come to the content angle, so if we have a look at those results we can see that there’s ‘Google tag manager, a simple tutorial’ as the top result. Then we’ve got ‘for beginners’ and ‘Getting started’. So that tells us that Google understands this particular search as a search that a beginner to Google Tag Manager would make, they would only be searching for it only if they were a beginner. So if we work for a marketing agency for example and we’re looking to rank for this particular term and we’re creating something that is ‘How to use Google Manager, an advanced guide’, we’re probably not going to get to the top page, the first page or any of the top 3 results because its not relevant to the user.

Okay, so we come on to links now. I’m going to go through a quick introduction to links…. what they are, why they are important and the difference between internal and external links.

Links are like the roads of the internet. I’m sure that there’s not going to be many of you on the call here that have heard of Whittier, Alaska. But Whittier is a small town in Alaska with one road going in and one road going out. I’m sure that everyone on the call has heard of Paris and that’s simply because it’s a huge name, a huge city, a very important city on the world’s stage and there we have Paris. You can see there are hundreds of roads going into Paris and that’s because it’s an important city, lots of people want to go there from other cities and that is like ‘backlinks’……so back links are those roads. Now quality backlinks, so linking from one site to another, have a double benefit. They drive quality traffic but they also signal to Google that you are a trustworthy site. So if Google trusts a particular site and it sees that you are being trusted with their user base because they are sending them to your website…… Google sees that as a massive, massive signal of your relevance and your trustworthiness. The problem is that backlinks are incredibly difficult to obtain but there is a quicker win that you can do while you are trying to earn those backlinks……and that is internal links. So just like backlinks are the external roads leading into a city or a website, internal links are the roads that connect the city…… the interconnecting. When Google catalogues your website, it goes through each of your webpages and it wants to follow each of those links that are on a page. Google assumes a few things about your website through your structure and your internal links, it assumes that the most valuable pages are only one or two clicks away from the homepage. It also assumes that if a page is important it’s likely to have links going to it. So one page has links going to it from different pages, you are trying to send traffic there, Google sees that as this page must be important because you’re sending all your users there. There is a caveat to this of course and that is the pages have to share relevance and also they must be high quality pages. So don’t come off the back of this webinar and jump on to your CMS (content management system) and start creating lots of pages and posts just so that you can link back to a page you want to rank. We have to have that quality and the relevance to be linking there.

So when Google has a look at your page it will create an idea about the topic of your content or at least what it believes the topic to be. When you link, Google thinks okay so this page that I’m heading to must be related in some way to the page I’m coming from. For example, if I have a blog ‘How to generate more leads for beginners’ and I want to link to the top 5 lead generation tools for marketers, Google is starting to build up a picture of that page as building a subject authority on lead generation tools. We can actually take that a little bit further. So lets say that the target keyword of that blog, ‘The top 5 lead generation tools for marketers’, our keyword is ‘lead generation tools for marketers’……we can signal even more relevance by linking from our original blog post by using text we call ‘anchor text’. That is essentially hiding a link behind word(s) and making that word clickable. So if we were to do that with ‘Lead generation tools for marketers’, we are literally saying to Google ‘hey, this is what my page is about’.

One really important thing that we need to consider is that if you are putting a lot of time and effort into your SEO, one of your really important things is your return on investment. So SEO is all about driving quality traffic to your website, Lead Forensics is all about identifying your website visitors. The more visitors you can identify, the more opportunity you have to convert and to increase your return on investment. Only 2% of your website visitors go on to enquire so if you are wanting to increase your return on investment, it’s really important that you have the tools in place to help you do that and Lead Forensics is one those tools. We actually have an offer at the moment of a free trial of Lead Forensics so that you can see how this would work on your sites for yourself, there is no catch or commitment so it’s certainly worth a look. Lead Forensics software, as I said, will identify the exact businesses that are coming on to your website so all of that work that you are doing driving traffic to your website we can identify those businesses for you and let you know where they are coming from, what they’ve done on your site so it really helps you understand what’s working and what isn’t. So I’m just going to put a poll up there for you and give you a chance to have a look at that (21.51 on video).

I just want to recap on what we’ve covered so far.

We need to focus on the keywords that we pick. Not just whether they are relevant to the business but also what search intent does that particular keyword have. Does it match our page goal, is it relevant to the business?

We covered reading the search engine results page, its free information direct from Google and it really helps to understand what the search intent is and also whether there is any commercial intent there signalled by any other businesses as well.

The 3 C’s, that is content type, content format and content angle. So produce content with a single goal in mind and match that type, format and angle to that you find on the search engine results page.

Linking – there is a lot of opportunity there if you are internal linking to your existing content and it sends a clear signal to Google of what you prioritise on your own website and you can help that with anchor text using the keyword for anchor text.

A couple of additional tips there for when you are putting these actions in place and that is to;

…….write your content for humans. Don’t try too hard to please Google and other search engines. Google’s main goal, remember, is to provide the best experience for their users and it will know if you are trying to cheat the system and write it for the search engine. So write for humans and don’t try too hard to please Google.

…….don’t force your keywords either. So don’t stick a ton of the keyword on a page if its not natural. Only use it where it’s natural and if it’s too difficult to fit the keyword or supporting keywords into the copy naturally, then it’s either not the right place for it or if it’s impossible across the entire page then maybe is not the right keyword for that particular page.

…….give it some time. With SEO you can be waiting for up to 3 months to see any results. You are not going to see, or very unlikely to see results overnight so make some changes, put these actions into place and it will start driving traffic but give it a little time for it to take some effect.

…….final tip is just to measure, analyse and convert. Without measuring what’s going well, what’s going badly it’s going to be very difficult for you to ascertain which of your efforts and which of your pages are doing the right thing. So use tools, put tools in place that can help you convert more and work out what’s working and what isn’t.

I really hope you’ve enjoyed the webinar. Apologies for the technical issues and sorry you didn’t get to see Lilah. Best of luck implementing these actions and driving traffic in 2022. We hope to see you at one of our next webinars. Take care.