5 SEO Problems That Are Killing Your Lead Generation Efforts

Every business makes efforts for new lead generations, this is the prime focus of every business be it small or big. Companies always aspire to identify prospective customers in order to secure and grow their business. Constant lead generation is the most crucial way through which the businesses can survive and grow.

Lead generation is as important as creating and executing a powerful SEO strategy. An efficient SEO strategy will help your business to secure good search engine rankings in Google. With high SERP, you will be able to grab a lot of web traffic and therefore SEO and lead generation go hand in hand.

With proper SEO you can make sure that your website and your business is visible to your prospective customers and clients. Whether you like it or not but it is a stark reality that your SEO rankings directly reflect the quality and credibility of your business to your prospective customers and clients. Thereby, any loopholes or problems with your SEO strategy can have a negative impact on your lead generation efforts and all your hard work might go in vain.

If you wish to generate more and more leads and if you wish to keep them then you need to pay a close attention to your SEO strategy as well.

Below mentioned are some of the most common SEO problems that can have an impact on your lead generation efforts and solutions to fix them:

Not Taking The User Intend Into consideration While Creating Content

Content relevancy and user expectations are the most important factors that most of the webmasters tend to overlook. You spend a lot of time on long tail and high volume keywords and then you put in more effort and time on creating content for these keywords. Even after all this there are possibilities that your content does not receive the right response. It is also important to have a look at the content that is ranking for those keywords to check how it is framed, what points are covered and how people have responded to it.

This is a common mistake and it hampers your ranking to a great extent. Taking user intention into consideration and thinking from the user’s point of view is absolutely important. If your content is not liked and read by your audience, you cannot achieve anything out of it, it’s just a bare piece of content present on your website.

Your audience is not looking for a 1000 words article that features your keywords; instead they are looking for something that will help them. So when you create new content, be it for your product pages or for your articles and blogs, make sure that you right on topics that will interest your users.

Capturing user interest has benefits that go beyond SEO; this will help you in getting new users as well. For instance when a user likes the content on your website, you can capture this lead by making that user subscribe to your website and then through a targeted email marketing campaign.

Problems With Structured Data

Structured data is a technical problem that can negatively impact your lead generation. Structured data is basically a standard technical way of displaying information on a web page. According to Google, structured data is a standardized format for providing information about a web page and classifying the page content.

Structured data is a code specific format that is coded for a website through in-page markup.

It is important to ensure that Google and other search engines recognize and read your website’s structured data as they use it to get a better understanding about what the web page is all about. If used in the right way, structured data makes the web pages eligible for the special search result features and enhancements like:

News carousels
Knowledge panels
Direct answers
Rich review snippets

Rich snippets are important for ecommerce websites and for almost all the business websites. Have a look at the example below:

When you have rich snippets activated, it is a better way of telling the people what your business is all about. Therefore, not having rich snippets activated or having them activated in an incorrect way will certainly harm your organic click through rate (CTR) and your search results as well.

To put it straight, poorly coded structured data means that your website doesn’t get review snippets.

Not including the review markup inside the product markup of the structured data is a common mistake made by most of the websites. This happens because they assume that the third party app that is managing their reviews will do it for them. It is simple! If you are not getting the review snippets, the third party app is not going to do anything about it; you have to manage this in the correct way.

The solution to this problem is to include a review markup. Google simplifies this process by providing some working examples of the ideal review markup through their structured data testing tool. Including review markup ensures that you get the structured data right and this is good for your lead generation efforts as well.

Unattractive Meta Data

Meta data of your website is important for your on-page optimization, off-page SEO efforts and for lead generation as well. Meta data is the information about a web page that is sent by your website to the search engine. It is displayed in the header section <head> of your website. The most commonly used meta data tags are meta title and meta description.

Meta Title

The meta title tag is the main title/subject of the web page. It is the title that gets displayed in blue bold text in the search engine results. The meta title tag is also one of the most important ranking factors for Google as the title tells the users what the web page is all about. The search engines use this tag for deciding how that page should be ranked for various keywords.

The title of any of your website’s web page is the first thing that the people see. In the example above users can make out that cPanel hosting provided by MilesWeb comprises of free domain registration. So you need to think and make sure that you have an alluring meta title for each of your web pages. The meta title should be able to pursue the people to click on the link. If they end up clicking, then the CTR of your page increases and this has a positive impact on your website’s search engine ranking.

Meta Description

There was a time when the meta description used to be the sole factor that tells Google what the web page is all about. But now the search engine reads the complete page and therefore, meta description is more important for the people who perform the search.

Your web page’s meta description is displayed in black below the title by Google in the search engine results. If a searcher is attracted by your website title, he/she will read the description as well. Therefore, it is important to have informative and brief meta descriptions for all your website pages as they will help in improving the click through rate and your leads will get converted into regular website visitors.

Simple Tweaks That Will Improve Your Meta Data:

Make sure that your meta title includes the main keyword of the page, preferably the keyword should be placed at the beginning of the title.
Length of your meta title is also important. The complete title should be displayed to the searchers, therefore make sure that your title is not too big.
Your meta description should not be just about the keywords, it should be informative, brief and interesting to read for your leads.
Your meta description should be framed in such a way that it should convince the visitors that they should click on the website link.
Considering that you have Google Analytics tracking activated, you can test if your meta title and description is properly optimized or not on the Search Engine Console.
When you check Google Analytics statistics and when you see that a particular URL has a good search engine ranking but it is low in terms of the CTR (click through rate), then you must optimize the meta title and meta description of that web page.

Issues With Competing Content Pieces

You would obviously want all your website pages to rank well for all the important keywords you are working on. Therefore you would go by the rule that more pages you have that target these keywords, the better it is, right?

Well! It’s actually not the case! If you have multiple web pages and multiple pieces of content that are targeting the same keyword, it is not going to do any good to the ranking of your keywords, and in fact it is going to complicate things for you. This strategy will not just have a negative impact on your SEO but it will adversely affect your lead generation efforts as well. This happens because your content pieces that are targeting the same keywords will compete with one another.

If there are multiple posts targeting the same keyword, Google gets confused about which is the right piece of content that you want to rank for a particular keyword and each of your pages starts eating into each other’s traffic and in turn the search engine traffic of all the pages is hampered.

Too many pages targeting the same keyword also affect your link building efforts. When too many content pieces and pages are targeting the same keyword, for the search engine it means that you are competing with yourself. As a result of this, each of your page has a lower and reduced page authority and your pages have less possibilities of getting ranked. If your website pages are not ranked well in Google, they will be considered as less in authority by the searchers and this will hamper your lead generation.

Fortunately, it is not very difficult to solve this problem. You can create topic clusters and remove duplicate content and inspire the marketers to strategically create authentic content. Choose an authoritative page for every keyword and concentrate on ranking that page. Repurpose all your pages in terms of on-page optimization as well. You can also consolidate your content by using 301 redirects. It is important to use 301 redirects if you have multiple pages on your website targeting an important keyword. With the use of 301 redirects, you will be able to easily consolidate the content without losing out on the link juice.

Last But Not The Least – Slow Page Load Times

If your website pages take forever to load, your website visitors will leave even without taking a look at your website. Google does not show slow websites to the searchers as they are likely to abandon it. Slow loading pages also affect your bottom line, if your website navigates slowly, people won’t be able to complete the buying transaction and they will lose interest in your website irrespective of the discounts and offers you feature. Website loading speed is an even more important factor for the mobile users. This is why Google has taken Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) into consideration.

You can easily check your website page speed through Google Page Insights Tool. If you have a low web page loading speed, Google will highlight many technical factors that are responsible for this. However, you can easily fix some issues like image size and web hosting server. The web hosting platform that your website is based on makes a huge difference when it comes to the loading speed of your website. It is important to ensure that your website is supported with an appropriate web hosting platform that is equipped with fast servers. If your website pages are loading slowly, then it is time to upgrade your web hosting package. As long as the images on your website are concerned, it is important to restrict the size of your images so that they fit the web pages. You can create multiple version of an image with different dimensions that can be used for different devices. You can also compress the images before you post them so that the entire web page loads quickly.

Conclusion:

Lead generation is an integral part of your business and you will see improvements in it when you take care of the factors mentioned above. The future of your business depends on the lead generation efforts you put in today so you must make sure that there is no hurdle in your way of generating new leads!