7 SEO Techniques to Get More Leads Through Google (And Other Search Engines)

Search engines can be a goldmine of leads for local businesses, but only if your website gets enough visibility at the right places in the search.

And how do you go about making sure your website does show up in the right searches and gets you leads? Well, that’s exactly what you will be learning in this post.

So without further ado, here are 7 SEO techniques that have proven to help local businesses rake in hundreds or even thousands of leads, month after month.

#1 Doing Keyword Research

SEO starts with keyword research. It doesn’t matter if it’s a small local business or a fortune 500 company, keyword research would always form the foundation of any SEO campaign.

But many local business owners aren’t aware of this, and often completely neglect keyword research.

When we say keyword research, we mean finding the “words” your potential customers use to search for your products or services on Google or other search engines.

For example, if you’re a roofer based in Dallas, Texas, you would want to find out what terms people in your area use to find your services.

This can be done using the Google Keywords Tool, but an easier and quicker way to do it would be by installing the add-on Keywords Everywhere.

Once you have installed it, you can just perform a quick search for your most obvious keyword. In this case, it would be “Roofer Dallas Texas”.

Keywords Everywhere would now tell us how many people search for this keyword every month, as well as other useful, relevant keyword ideas as you can see in the above image.

Optimizing the Content on Your Website

Once you have found the right keywords related to your products or services, the next step is to optimize your website’s content for those keywords. Simply put, this means that you would want to naturally include these keywords in the content on your website at important places, so that Google can know that your website is relevant for these keywords, and rank it accordingly for them.

Some of the important places on your website’s pages from an SEO perspective include the title and H1 tags. Other than that, you can also optimize your images by putting a relevant keyword into them as the alt text.

#2 Build Presence Through Online Directories and Citations

There are many online directories out there, and getting your local business listed in the good, relevant ones is definitely one of the easier ways to build some web presence and gain some SEO authority for your website at the same time.

However, remember that more is not always better here. The relevancy is the key, with the most niche-relevant directories typically giving the best results.

While these links aren’t considered very high quality in general, they tend to work wonders when it comes to local SEO.

#3 Build a Blog Section

Something most local businesses almost completely ignore is a blog section on their website. They think that they just need to talk about the products or services they are offering on their site, and there’s no need to write lengthy posts about specific topics that might answer some common questions or solve universal problems in their niche.

However, when it comes to ranking in Google and getting leads through it, a blog section on your website is a very important factor. It helps you establish yourself as an authority in your niche, which naturally means much better rankings than your competitors that don’t make blog posts, and thus, more leads for your business.

You can use the keyword research technique we explained above to find out what exactly people in your niche are searching for on Google, and then write detailed, informative blog posts around those topics and post them on your website.

This is a fairly long-term SEO technique though, and you need to do it consistently in order to see some significant results over a period of time.

#4 Making Guest Posts

Guest posting is another SEO technique that involves writing detailed and informative content around relevant topics in your niche, but the difference is that you make these posts on other people’s websites in your niche with a link back to your website.

For example, if you’re a local plumbing business, you can find “home” blogs through Google, reach out to them, and offer to make a guest post. When they accept your offer, you need to write a detailed post on a topic of their choice (or you can suggest your own topics to them too, given they are open to it), and include a backlink to your website.

These backlinks are one of the most important factors when it comes to ranking your website in Google and other search engines and getting potential customers to your website through them.

As for how to find these blogs, you can get started by performing a few searches in Google mentioned below.

“write for us” your niche (for example, home)

“become a contributor” your niche

If you don’t find many results, choose a broader niche. For example, instead of using the word “kitchen”, use “home” instead.

The below image further explains the kind of search you need to perform for this.

You can also just buy quality, niche-relevant guest posts if you don’t have the time or skill to do it yourself. One important factor you should look for when buying guest posts is that the sites you’re buying the posts on should have a decent amount of traffic.

If they don’t have any traffic, there’s a very high chance they are very poor quality and spammy. You can use the tool SEMrush to get an estimate of the traffic a particular site is getting.

#5 Building Donation Links

These are another type of backlinks that will push your rankings higher in the search engines and get you more leads in the form of qualified potential customers.

The name might sound a bit weird, but that’s pretty much how it works. You pay some money as a “donation” to another website to have your website’s link placed on it.

These links can cost anywhere between a few dollars to a few thousand dollars, but as a local business, you would probably be just fine with links that cost you less than $200.

A few of these links can do your site a lot of good, and after a few months of performing a donation link-building campaign, you may see more targeted traffic coming in from the search engines and converting into leads for your business.

Finally, finding these sites is straightforward but time-consuming. There are many sites that accept donations, but not all of them allow a backlink in return.

So you will have to weed through a long list of sites to find a few that do give you a backlink in return for your donation.

The search term you need to use to find these sites through Google is “donation list” + “contributors”. Again, just putting up an image below to make it easier to understand for you.

#6 Get More Positive GMB Reviews

For local businesses, the Google My Business (GMB) reviews probably matter just as much as the backlinks to their website. And unless you work on getting a good few of them, you may always end up leaving a lot of business on the table.

A good way to get positive reviews on your business listing in Google is to simply request satisfied customers to leave a review. Once you have delivered the product or service your customer ordered, and they complimented you and gave you a positive feedback, you can request them to leave a positive review on your Google My Business listing.

You should make it easier for them by sending them the link to your listing on Google, and can even consider offering them a discount on future purchases. You would likely get it back manifold as your positive reviews build up and your business starts ranking in the Maps pack of Google’s search results.

#7 Optimize Your Website for Mobile Devices

With as many as 90% of mobile users searching for local information using their mobile, you certainly can’t ignore the “mobile” leads.

Of course, there’s also the fact that Google seems to favor mobile-friendly websites with its mobile-first indexing practice.

Simply put, a mobile-friendly website is a must for local businesses.

Image source

But don’t let that make you feel worried as you might think you would need to perform complicated technical tasks to achieve this. If you’re using WordPress for your website, then all you need to do is make sure the theme you’re using is mobile-friendly.

Most modern WordPress themes are mobile-friendly. However, you would ideally want them to be responsive as well, meaning that they would adjust the website’s size according to the screen size of the user’s device, something like you see in the below image.

Image source

If your theme isn’t mobile-friendly, you can simply search for one that is and use that instead. However, don’t forget to create a backup of your site before changing the theme, so that you’re covered in case something messes up during the process.

But What About Capturing All Those Leads?

The 7 SEO techniques we walked you through above would help you increase organic, targeted traffic to your local business website, but what about capturing all those leads?

Without an effective lead-capturing or email opt-in tool, you would still be losing a lot of business.

This is where MailOptin comes in and ensures that you reap all the rewards after putting in the effort into performing the above SEO techniques. It comes optimized to capture the most leads you possibly can, but is still surprisingly easy to set up and use.

Furthermore, after capturing the leads, it also helps you set up email campaigns and send emails to all those leads and convert them into customers.

So all you need to do to get more leads through SEO is get MailOptin and start working on these SEO techniques.