Leads already have a desire for your product or service. They want to stay in touch and learn more about how you can solve their problem.

Here is a quick way to increase your targeted leads that your sales team can turn into easy wins without paying the search engines for clicks.

Keyword Research

The first step in generating leads is to get your company in front of the people that have a need and are ready to buy from you. At this point there are two ways we can go about this.

1. Go after the keywords with the most traffic and most competition.
2. Go after the keywords with less traffic and less competition.

It’s the second option that powers companies like Apple, Amazon and your local real estate agent. That’s the one we want to go after. It’s much easier to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.

Here’s an example for the real estate agent to show the difference.

Indianapolis homes for sale

• 1,730,000 search results
• 74,000 Google searches in January  2009
• 5 results on the first page are Indianapolis companies

Zionsville homes for sale

• 64,300 search results
• 5,400 Google searches in January 2009
• Only 1 result on the first page is based in Indianapolis!

As you can see, Zionsville has less competition, but plenty of searches to drive leads to your website. It’s much easier to be at the top.

The Landing Page and Offer

Now that we have picked our keywords we need to design a new landing page to convert that visitor into a lead. It should look great and get to the point.

Let’s start by picking a name for the page that includes only the keywords we are targeting: http://www.myrealtorsite.com/Zionsville-homes-for-sale.html. That page name is very important.

On this page you’ll want to add great content such as a home search, MLS listings, the realtor’s information, contact numbers, etc. and a form to capture the visitors contact information.

On the surface it looks like we have given everything away that they want. The truth is that we have something much more valuable to give them. This is the offer.

When the user fills out the form they will now receive a white paper or e-book on buying homes in the Zionsville area. It contains every demographic you can imagine (schools, income level, low crime rates, mortgage companies, etc) in one easy to find document. Sure, they can find it elsewhere, but it may take 20-30 different places to find it all. You’ve just made their life easy in 1 step.

Driving Traffic and Measuring Results

The next step after creating your new landing pages is to get other websites to link to it. This isn’t about getting visitors from those sites to click through, but rather about building rankings in the search engines. Inbound links are the most important factor in making your web page rank at the top in Google, Yahoo and MSN. It’s a trust factor. If a lot of people link to you, you must have something important to say.

Here at TGFI we maintain a list of over 2500 directories, communities and websites where we can add your link in keyword targeted pages. It’s a slow, manual process, but VERY effective in boosting rankings. Once added to these other high traffic sites, the search engines will automatically pick up your page and move you up the rankings.

Now that we have the landing page created, a great offer to capture leads and people talking about it, we need to measure to see how well it’s working.

There are several great tools for managing leads from the search engines. Google Analytics, Web Trends, Omniture and even Webalizer. These tools will tell us how many visitors are coming to the site, to which pages and from where. If they are from the search engines they will also tell us which keywords were used.

Using this information we can compare the number of visitors to the page to the number of leads. It’s your basic conversion rate. If the numbers are low we can make some content changes or alter the offer, and then test the results to drive them up.

Once the landing pages are up and running smoothly you’ll get a continuous flow of traffic for months, even years to come.

One of the biggest issues we’ve had is properly dealing with the simple trio of search engine optimization: titles, descriptions and keywords. There are some really good tools out there, but all of them have issues or just aren’t kept up anymore.

Lately it’s become more and more evident that we needed something custom. We were willing to pay for it, but none of the authors of those existing tools would get back to us. So, this past week we took it into our own hands. We created the TGFI.net SEO Plugin for Wordpress.

Right out of the gate it does title, description and keyword overrides for greater control over search engine readability. We plan on adding more features, such as navigation control, in the future, so stay tuned!

Learn How People Try to Find You

One of the biggest mistakes we see companies make is to describe their products or services incorrectly. They assume that people looking for their product or service think the same way as they do. Chances are, they don’t.

As an example, here at TGFI we build custom web based applications. While the industry accepts that term, we found the majority of people just want a web designer to help them out. In its simplest form, this is keyword optimization.

Know Your Competition

There is often much to be gained from your competition. Some have been around longer than you. Some have great rankings. Some have a great reputation online. Some have large SEO budgets.

If you’ve been around a while, you can probably name your competitors off the top of your head. If you haven’t, there are several online sources you can leverage.

• Look at the top 10 sites listed in Google, Yahoo and MSN for each of your keywords or phrases.
• Adjust your keyword list and check again.
• Check the Open Directory Project.

Don’t just look at the web either. Traditional media still has some great ideas.

• Hopefully you didn’t throw out those phone books. They are categorized you know.
• For those in Indianapolis, take a look at the Indianapolis Business Journal’s Book of Lists.
• Sign up for industry specific publications.

Optimize Your Page Titles

Every page on your site should be different, and that starts with the title of the page. Be descriptive and use those keywords. Just remember, if a person doesn’t see what they want, they won’t click no matter what your rank. Keep it simple.

Create Unique Descriptions for Each Page

If a search engine doesn’t see a description meta tag, it will use the first 200 viewable characters (letters, spaces, numbers, etc.) it finds on the page. Don’t let them guess. It won’t be what you expect.

Use Headings

Similar to a business document or college paper, headings help to break up the text and tell everyone what you are going to talk about. The search engines know this and look to your header tags to help tell the story. Use your keywords and phrases here. They’ll love it.