3 Ways to Improve your Organic Search Visibility for MORE Business Leads
Published Date: 18 Dec, 2021 | Updated Date: 11 Oct, 2023
Learn more about our tried and true SEO tricks to boost business leads so they stay…and buy!
It doesn’t matter if you’re a mom and pop shop from way back, or an online store just starting out, your main business goal has likely never changed: you want more business leads, and you want them to stick around for the long-term.
But how?
Online business infrastructure changes every day. It’s like waking up in the morning only to find the route you take to work is different than the night before!
Worse yet, you might be feeling left behind when it comes to tech-laden terms like ‘organic search visibility’ or ‘search engine optimization’.
That’s where we come in. We improve organic search visibility and seo results for almost 100 digital clients daily, and have proven ourselves when it comes to helping businesses operate online.
First, we’ll discuss search engine optimization (SEO) and how it affects organic search visibility and website traffic. Then, we’ll give you all the tools you need to expand SEO visibility and target new and diverse audiences!
You’ll also learn…
- …about organic search visibility and why it matters
- …how to increase leads through SEO visibility
- …how to achieve long-term business growth with SEO
- …how to measure the results of your efforts!
In effect, once you have optimized your website and web pages, you will not only increase your SEO visibility but you will also be able to increase leads, which will then increase your sales. Best of all, it’s a lot easier than it looks!
Let’s get started with the basics. What is search visibility, and why does organic SEO matter?
Table Of Content
- Summary Introduction
- What is Search Visibility
- Why does Organic SEO Matter
- Increase Leads from Search Visibility
- What It Takes to Optimize Your Brand’s Organic Search Visibility
- What’s the Reliable Way to Measure Your SEO Efforts
- When should I start optimizing my website for organic SEO?
What is Search Visibility?
Search visibility is a way to estimate or measure how easy it is for people to find your business on a digital search engine like Google or Bing. In simple terms, it refers to how many people see your webpage when they type a search query into a search engine.
It is also a measure of your web traffic, or, how many people visit or click through your website. This measure does however depend on several factors, including your online visibility in a search engine’s index, how highly ranked you are, and how much website traffic is generated by the keyword phrases for which you are listed.
For businesses like yours, search visibility plays an important role in how it draws website traffic to your page, and how it affects the online visibility of your business over your competitors.
It not only lets users find your website on their own (usually while they’re searching for solutions to their own problems!) but also increases leads, which ultimately results in faster business growth!
Here are just a few simple examples on how SEO visibility can enhance the presence of your online business:
- Improves the quality of your website traffic for BETTER lead generation. When you optimize your search visibility, you do it through SEO metrics. Optimized visibility then translates into more people being able to find your business online. It’s like putting a huge neon sign saying ‘come on in’ outside your door! Plus, as soon as your website ranks high with the right search terms, you will have a better chance of converting good leads into true-blue sales.
- Enhance the image of your brand. When you rank high for search engine results, users are more likely to trust your business. Simple as that. Such trust (whether online or off) influences potential customers to visit your website again, or even refer your products to a friend.
- Create an automated ‘machine’ for consistent ROI. Optimizing with SEO metrics is time-consuming, but well worth the investment! WIth good SEO you can increase visibility for increased website traffic and create a self-perpetuating ‘machine’ that consistently funnels real leads into actual sales.
PS: if this reads like alphabet soup, you’re not alone! Many small business owners are unaware how it all works, and just how beneficial and cost-effective SEO can be.
In fact, we always hear the same story from new clients: either they feel SEO is unattainable because they don’t have a big marketing budget, or they are stuck thinking their business is too small to benefit.
Thankfully, neither of those things is true.
Every business (from restaurants to crafters to influencers) can reap the benefits of optimizing their website for SEO. Plus, the benefits of SEO go far beyond online visibility and search visibility.
Here’s are some of the ‘unspoken’ efficiencies that come with great SEO visibility:
- Enhance the user experience. With an SEO-friendly website, users can more easily find what they’re looking for. It’s like having a store assistant right there by every user’s side, providing a positive impression of your website. Just look at how many users Google gets on a daily basis, just with excellent SEO navigation.
- Impact customer buying cycle. Everyone wants to make sure their customers are getting the deals, products, and services they need! That’s why good SEO tactics can be a huge game-changer for business growth: it puts those elements of your business front and center without any extra work.
- Beat out the competition. Have you ever visited the second page of your search results? We don’t think so! That’s why great positioning in search engine listings will influence more traffic to your website over the competition.
- Discover new business opportunities. When you get to those high rankings, suddenly, other businesses may come out of the woodwork to latch onto your success! Some will even pay you to run their ads on your website. This kind of business growth adds a ton of potential revenue to your existing sales base.
Okay, okay, so you might think that the next topic – why does organic SEO matter – speaks for itself. But if you could get better search engine results without spending a dime…would you?
That’s the importance of organic SEO!
Why does Organic SEO Matter?
Like we said, it’s possible to achieve a better position on search engine results without paying a single dime to advertise, all thanks to organic SEO.
Organic SEO refers to the methods used to achieve a better position on search engines results without paying for advertising.
These methods may include:
- boosting important keywords
- adding positive backlinks
- writing high-quality content
Organic SEO is a low-cost investment for your businesses because you are not paying for any advertising, but are investing in creating excellent content to drive organic traffic and generate organic search visibility.
In short, organic search visibility can be achieved by optimizing your website with relevant content, blanketing each article or landing page with links that point to high-ranking content, and by incorporating metatags and other types of tag attributes into all the content you create.
This SEO method can provide your business with a long-term advantage. It allows you to perform to your full potential, grow your business and provide organic search visibility, but also helps you increase visibility, enhance brand awareness, and increase content value over time.
Increase visibility
Increasing the visibility of your website on search engines puts your business in the best position to increase leads that are viable and sustainable. It’s like throwing up a huge neon sign that says: we’re here! Welcome!
Enhance brand awareness
Building brand awareness will increase traffic to your website as potential customers become familiar with your products and service. In addition, this can help you identify gaps in the market and enhance your lead generation process too.
Increase value over time
If search engines recognize that the content you produce provides value, it will position your site higher on search engine results. This ranking will increase website traffic over the long term. Best of all, since the content remains forever (at least until you remove it) it will continue to draw in traffic ad infinitum!
As long as the content you produce for organic SEO remains relevant you’ll see perennial benefits along a variety of avenues:
- Sustainability: your search engine results will last longer due to the evergreen nature of posted content
- Competitive edge: by using organic SEO, you will have an advantage over your competitors since they may be focused on paid advertising, which to us is a short-game strategy
- Trust: content of value exudes trust and builds your reputation among the users.
- More clicks: as you grow in organic search visibility, more keywords are produced, which gets you noticed across more search engine results.
- Cost-effective: organic seo visibility is not reliant on fluctuations in ad costs or cost-per-clicks
- Increases leads: more relevant users will visit your website because your site “hits” the relevant keywords your potential customers are searching for.
Think of organic SEO like a steady ship in turbulent waters. It doesn’t rely on fluctuating or recurring monthly costs like paid traffic campaigns, and instead places the most focus on relevant high-value content.
In certain situations, there is merit to having paid ads for traffic, but for most small businesses we’ve found that organic SEO provides more benefit in the long term.
By now you should be feeling a bit more comfortable with organic SEO and how it leads to the ultimate business growth for your enterprise.
Now it’s time to use the SEO ‘net’ you’ve created to (1) lure in new clients and increase leads to your website, (2) to optimize your brands organic visibility, and (3) to measure SEO results reliably.
Increase Leads from Search Visibility
You’ve got them hooked–so how do you take your search visibility to the next level?
Likely, you already understand how important it is to get desirable leads when it comes to marketing. Now it’s all about getting ultra clear about what kinds of leads you want. What does the ‘perfect’ lead look like to you?
Here are some helpful questions to get you thinking–just remember, you’re working to create an ‘avatar’ of a customer you want to sell to. It’s all about determining the who’s what’s and why’s of your target customer base.
- Who is that person that is interested in the product or service you sell?
- What are they hoping to get out of your product or service?
- Why do they want to purchase from you as opposed to your competitor?
- How do they feel when it comes to doing business with you again?
- What types of questions will my customers ask?
Once you have a general idea of your target customer, you can begin thinking about generating these leads from all different sources, such as websites, social media, and word of mouth.
For instance, at The Digital Navigator, we sell digital marketing and web development services, and find our leads through an SEO optimized website that focuses on specific keywords based on our SEO metrics and the customer avatars we’ve created.
When we generate organic traffic through organic search visibility, our audience is targeted, which makes it easier for us to convert potential leads into sales. This is why it is important to use organic SEO to increase SEO visibility and increase leads for your business.
Here are the 5 main ways we at The Digital Navigator use avatars to generate organic traffic through organic search visibility
- Improve existing pages. Revamp existing web pages to make sure they are SEO friendly, plus update them relevant keywords and content.
- Create a framework for existing pages. Make sure to include a target word count, and to deploy user experience tactics for improved calls to action.
- Optimize the intent behind new pages.Justify all content plans with your user intent as a guide. Build creative briefs and avatars to impact and improve user understanding of products and services. Here are 4 types of user intent to consider:
- Informational: my customer wants to learn something
- Transactional: my customer wants to buy something
- Commercial: my customers are in search of vendors in my industry
- Navigational: they are in search of something, whether a product or service
- Nurture leads. Engage with leads across various channels over a select period of time. Not all leads are converted immediately which means incorporating newsletters or email subscription options can be beneficial toward consumer awareness about your products.
- Promote content updates. There is actually a ‘right’ way to capture important organic traffic leads through content updates. This is all about constantly improving your UI and content, and making sure potential customers or clients know about it. This can be accomplished by making blog introductions more enticing, or by moving lead forms higher up the page for more interactive experiences on your website. PS…Google prefers ‘fresh’ content, so make sure to update your content at least once a year!
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2. Optimize Your Brand’s Organic Search Visibility
Before we jump into optimizing your brand’s organic search visibility, let’s take a look at how SEO visibility affects your online visibility.
There are three types of SEO strategies that help increase website traffic: on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO:
On-page SEO
On-page SEO helps search engines to understand and rank your content–this is directly related to your SEO visibility. This can be achieved by creating content on your website, optimizing title tags, metatags, and image optimization.
Technical SEO
This is a subtype of on-page SEO where web development strategies improve your website’s SEO “score” and improve user experience. This is achieved by speed optimization and structuring the data on your website.
Off-page SEO
This relates to activities away from your own website. For example, this would be content marketing, social media, and reviews.
Now, here are 7 actionable steps you can use now to optimize your brand’s organic search visibility and increase leads for your business:
1. Make sure your website is optimized for lead generation.
Make sure that your website has a modern design, great user experience, flexible CMS, and the capability to collect leads using forms.
Modern design
A great website is more than just one that looks good and provides information about the business. It also needs to be up-to-date and look professional.
Great user experience
A website that is user-friendly and concise allows users to browse the website easily and with purpose.
Flexible CMS
A flexible content management system like WordPress allows you to edit and add web pages easily as you update content for SEO purposes. At The Digital Navigator we use WordPress because of its versatility and because of its added plugins, themes, and tools which allow us to monitor performance and enhance user experience.
Capacity to use forms
Ensure your website has the ability to use submittable forms so users can easily and efficiently request more information. Forms also provide a perfect method to collect lead information while giving them the opportunity to contact you whenever they need.
2. Get a technical SEO site audit
Performing an on-page technical SEO check-up on your website not only allows you to fix any issues you find but also helps you increase leads as it makes your website more secure, faster, structured, and fully integrated.
Prioritize website security
Having an up-to-date SSL certificate ensures that your website is safe from hackers and tells potential customers that it’s safe to do business with you. At The Digital Navigator, we frequently make sure that our site is up-to-date with all applicable security measures so that users feel assured they can freely submit any personal information without risk to their personal data and privacy.
Optimize website speed
Slow websites are not only annoying for users but also negatively affect your search engine rank. In addition, it can also persuade users to leave your website sooner, resulting in a loss of traffic. The average user will stick around for three seconds before they jump off your site if it doesn’t load.
Add structured data
This refers to certain categories of information that help search engines understand what the website is about, such as your working hours, address, and contact information.Structured data not only helps you rank better in search engine results but also provides an easy way for your users to contact you.
Add complete, relevant title tags and meta descriptions
It’s important to have title tags and meta descriptions for every page of your website. This not only provides ease of navigation to users on your website, but also gives your web pages a professional look.
3. Search Engine Optimize the Copy on Your Web Pages
This step is important because websites themselves don’t rank in search engine results, but individual pages do.
That’s why each of your web pages needs to lead users straight to the valuable information they’re looking for.
How? use the right keywords and strong calls to action.
4. Provide the right information
Your website’s individual pages should be structured so that information is consistent, clearly communicated, and organized with headers.
When potential leads visit your website, they are trying to solve a specific problem. Therefore, it is important that every page encourage web visitors to take action by acknowledging the problem and defining how you as a business can solve it.
How? Format your content by using headers and lists. These allows your information to be easily read and interpreted.
5. Incorporate the right keywords
Having a smart keyword strategy can help attract leads to your pages.
Keywords are used to indicate how people will find you. Essentially, keywords are what people use to search for your business or industry.
People search for specific services, products, or vendors by using keywords to find the website that fits what they are looking for.
By using targeted long-tail keywords, question-based or comparative keywords, you can not only broaden your brand’s reach but also solidify your brand as an authority on a given topic to position your content over your competitors.
Examples:
Question based keyword: “How to optimize my website for organic search visibility?”
Comparative keywords: “WordPress vs. Wix”.
6. Implement an inbound marketing strategy
A strong inbound content marketing strategy allows you to create helpful and original content about the subjects that interest potential leads and answers their questions.
This can be achieved by incorporating videos, blogs, articles, and images on your website.
For example, The Digital Navigator uses images, videos, graphics, and informational articles like this one, since it allows us to not only share more about who we are, but also provides significant value to the reader – no matter where they are on the customer journey.
How: Create high-quality content for lead generation that is tailored to your potential customers’ needs. Use the customer avatar that you put together to understand who your target lead is. You can also conduct your own market and keyword research, or reach out to us for help.
7. Effective Call-To-Actions (CTAs)
Once potential customers land on one of your website pages and you’ve provided them with helpful information on that page, the goal is for them to take the next step.
Calls-to-action should tell your page visitor what to do next, whether that’s filling out a contact form, giving you a call, or downloading a resource.
For example, if you go to The Digital Navigator’s website, you will see a “Schedule a Free Consultation” button which is a CTA as it tells users to book a consultation so they can talk more about digital marketing and web development services that we offer. Mostly, it’s a way to provide direct access for inbound leads to talk with our dedicated service staff behind the scenes!
3. Reliably Measure your SEO efforts every step of the way
So how do you measure your organic search visibility efforts?
SEO metrics are important for any business, especially e-commerce. You’ll want a quantifiable measure to make sure that your efforts to increase SEO visibility have been successful.
There are many SEO metrics that can be used to measure and track your SEO performance and results. However, depending on your type of business, you should establish which metrics are the most critical for your business and track those metrics regularly.
Here are some common SEO metrics to get you started:
- Organic Traffic
This refers to the number of visitors your website generates from people clicking on your web page, either because they visited your site directly, or because they appeared in that user’s search engine results. If you are providing a solution to the user’s query, each click is an opportunity to gain a new customer or lead. This is an effective indicator that shows the progress of your SEO strategy. - Keywords ranking
To see results with this metric, your website and content need to be optimized to rank on top of search engines’ results for specific keywords and long-tail keywords. A simple way to track your Google ranking for keywords related to your business or products is to do a Google search. The results will show you where your website ranks for those specific keywords. - Search Engine Results Page (SERP)
Google produces SERP which consist of organic results, ads, and SERP features. Examples of SERP features include featured snippets (instant answer), knowledge panels, and image packs. Search engine visibility measures how many people see your website in the search results, which could be affected by the authority of the SERP features. Overall, this metric gives you a bird’s eye view of your SEO progress. - Click-Through Rate
This represents the percentage of users who clicked on your website from the SERP. You can use this metric to analyze how effective your title tags and meta descriptions are in attracting users’ attention. - Bounce rate: this represents the percentage of users who visit your site but leave without further interaction. This metric counts a visit as an interaction if the user clicks on more than one page. In a nutshell, a lower bounce rate means a higher quality visit.
Now that you have a better idea of what SEO metrics you can use to measure traffic, it’s time to choose which analytics dashboard will best suit your needs.
There are a ton of analytics software options to choose from, so let’s talk a little bit about Google Analytics and the main alternative, private analytics.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It also provides statistics like total site visits, bounce rate, average time on site, and even demographic information of your users.
The primary focus of Google Analytics is to interpret and process website usage data, identifying trends and opportunities you can leverage to increase traffic and boost your web presence.
On the other hand, Google Search Console is a web service by Google which allows webmasters to check indexing status and optimize website and seo visibility. This metric is more related to the ways in which your site appears to anyone who is keying in the high-level search keywords and phrases you’ve associated with your brand or business.
We’ve found this to be a truly valuable option for SEO marketers and web developers across the board, given its focus on impressions. Here, you are able to study things like click-through rates, search queries, crawl errors, links from outside websites, and HTML errors–all in one safe place.
Private Analytics
Many businesses opt to use Private Analytics over Google Analytics, as it is a preferred and more reliable way to measure your website traffic. Indeed, we believe (without bias!) that private analytics provide the most accurate data possible.
This is why we use our own customized private analytics tool at The Digital Navigator. Basically, it helps us gather precise information about your website without having to share all that personal data with Google!.
Private analytics also allow us to offer additional insights to unlock user behavior and examine website user trends that are specific to your website.
We categorize trends across a visual ‘heat map’ (just like on the weather channel!), and candifferentiate your data by looking into specific subsets of information. For example, you can look at your clients in Canada vs the US and break down data points from there to make better decisions to support each client based on the particulars of their location.
To be clear, most businesses have the capacity to implement their own private analytics, but because The Digital Navigator interprets the private analytic data for clients, we are well-used to saving our clients from the tedious, time-consuming process that most business owners find overwhelming.
Ideally, the person or team managing private analytics should gather and decipher the data for you, so that you can get back to focusing on business growth and doing what you really love!
When should I start optimizing my website for organic SEO?
Right now!
There is no doubt anymore about the importance of organic search visibility, and how such visibility serves as a bell-weather lead for every sale opportunity you have in-store.
Now, as you start the process of increasing brand awareness and sales, take a moment to really evaluate the extent to which your site is optimized for SEO.
- Do you have an idea about your target audience, or ‘perfect’ customer?
- Is your website optimized for organic search visibility?
- Do you have a way to reliably measure the changes you make to SEO?
Once you have the cat in the bag, your business will be more accessible to new users and future, long-term clients. Ultimately SEO visibility is a crucial component to increasing sales and being successful in a constantly evolving online landscape.
These tips should get you out the door with your business growth online, but if you’re still stuck on page one and aren’t sure where to move next, we definitely have your back!
We can provide start-to-finish management for all your SEO needs, and get you the search result rankings you need to surpass your competitors! Ask us how – we’re always eager to chat with new and experienced business owners who want to break into online sales, without forking over a ton of cash.
If not, we have full confidence in your ability to execute–but know we’re just around the corner if you need any extra support.
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