Companies are continually looking for ways to grow. These days, most local companies have found the importance of focusing on the internet to find growth. This is because most people are using the internet today more than ever. Still, many companies have the challenge of finding leads and growing when using the internet. In this article, we will explain a few tips you can use to grow your leads.

What is a Lead?

A lead is a person who sees your website, visits it, and expresses interest in buying or subscribing to your product. For example, if you are conducting an online advertisement where the target are expected to enter their phone number or email address, the people who fill these details are the leads. There are several types of leads that you ca generate when marketing online.

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) are people who have reacted to your online advertisement or those who have visited your website but have not received a sales call. A good example is someone who sees your landing page and submits his email address. A sales qualified lead (SQL) on the other hand refers to contacts who have taken action to express their interest in becoming your customer. For example, this is someone who sees your landing page, fills their details, and then asks a question about your product. SQLs are usually better than MQLs.

The third type of lead is a product qualified lead. This is a person who has used your product or service before and have indicated that they would like to buy more. A good example of this is in SAAS companies, which use a freemium model. If a free user expresses interest in being a paying customer, they are referred to as a PQL. Finally, there is a service qualified lead.  These are people who have talked to your marketing team and expressed their interest in becoming paying customers.

The Process of Generating Leads

Broadly, there are four steps involved in generating a lead. In this part, we will look at these four steps.

Attract

The first step of getting a lead is attracting. This is a step where a stranger gets to know about you. This happens in several ways. First, a user can find your website organically when browsing the internet. For this to happen, you need to have a website that is optimized well for the search engines. These engines include platforms like Google and Bing. To rank high in the search engines, you need to have worked with a good SEO San Jose agency which has decades of experience in the industry. Alternatively, the user can find your website as an ad in the search engine. Third, the person can see your website in social media.

Convert

Internet users find tens of advertisements and websites every day. However, they only interact with a few of them. To convert a stranger, you need to do a few things. First, you need to ensure that your website ranks high on Google. Second, you need to ensure that you incorporate other types of marketing like email and social media. After finding your website, you need to have ways of collecting user data. To do this, you need to have forms, call to action, and quality landing pages.

Close

The next step in attracting a lead is closing. This is a process where you use the information given by the user to make them become customers. In this process, it is recommended that you have a team member get in touch with the lead and explain how the product works. If you use a free trial, we recommend that you offer it to them.

Delight

The biggest mistake you can do is not to make your lead happy. An unhappy lead will be lost forever. Therefore, you need to ensure that you are able to provide a high-quality product because you want the lead to last forever. You also don’t want to have a negative review in the internet.

The process of generating a lead can be summarized as shown below.

Why SEO Is the Best Method to Generate Leads

The process of generating a lead is often expensive especially for new companies. Since these companies don’t have any reputation or internet presence, it becomes very expensive for people to find them. One of the best ways to generate leads is search engine optimization. This is because when you are ranked higher on the search engines, you will be getting customers on autopilot. You won’t need to spend a lot of money marketing your company or landing pages. SEO is not only good for saving costs. It is an excellent method if you want to build a good brand. Websites that are ranked higher usually have a better reputation than those that use paid advertisement. Therefore, if your website is not ranked well on search engines, we recommend that you find a good SEO agency San Jose who will help to optimize your site.

Summary

In this article, you have learnt what a lead is, the various types of leads a company can generate, the process of generating a lead, and why you should focus on optimizing your website for search engines. As you plan on how to grow your company, these concepts will be very important to you. Therefore, you should contact a good website developer, web strategist, and Silicon Valley SEO company.