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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Will Increase Your Close Rates

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Nu
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Does your marketing strategy include bombarding random people with direct mailers, placing flyers under windshield wipers and making cold calls of numbers you pick from the phone book? 

My guess is you haven’t found this to be very effective since people have grown a tolerance to marketing harassment. Those mailers and flyers are dumped in the trash and their phone numbers are added to the do-not-call registry. It’s time to bring your marketing strategy into the digital age!

The new rockstar of the marketing world is INBOUND MARKETING. Inbound marketing targets the customer who is already searching for your product or service. Put more time into ranking your website on organic search results. Then you make your business easy to find for users who are more likely to become customers. They need you! Now you just have to make it easy for them to find you and convert them to customers.

The best ways to be digitally ‘found’ is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content marketing. If you invest more time into ranking your website on organic search results instead of handing out flyers on a street corner, you will show a much greater return on your investment by converting more customers.

ACCORDING TO SEARCH ENGINE JOURNAL, ORGANIC SEARCH LEADS HAVE A 14.6% CLOSE RATE, AS OPPOSED TO 1.7% FOR OUTBOUND MARKETING LEADS.

As you can see, the rate at which organic search leads close sales is significantly higher than that of outbound marketing leads. Why is that? It’s easier to convince someone who is already looking for your product or service to buy it. As opposed to advertising your service to a random person via a commercial or flyer. Make your job easier and target people who are already interested in your type of product or services.

Let’s look at the differences between Inbound and Outbound Marketing for clarification:

Inbound Marketing

- Drawing customers in by producing new content & increasing site traffic
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) & Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Opt-in Email LIsts
- Word of Mouth & Viral Marketing
- Permission-Based Marketing
- Content Marketing Blogging

Outbound Marketing

- Traditional Marketing, such as: radio, TV, newspapers, direct mail, billboards, etc.
- Interruption-Based Marketing
- Banner and Display Ads Online
- Search Spam
- Outbound Sales Calls
- Pop-ups

Outbound marketing is also known as interruption-based marketing. Outbound marketing disrupts something with a large audience to market their product to that audience. TV and radio commercials, newspaper or magazine ads, and direct mail are all considered outbound techniques. Do you watch the commercials on TV as intently as you watch the show itself? Of course not. As an advertiser, there’s a small chance that someone interested in your product is watching, but there are thousands more who are tuning you out.

Inbound marketing is considered permission-based marketing because it’s any kind of marketing which earns attention organically. The user is searching for your product and service; therefore, they’re essentially giving you permission to market to them. The goal is to have an efficient marketing strategy to generate well qualified leads. The important word here is ‘quality.’ It is better to have less leads but a much higher ability to convert them to paying customers.
The chance of closing a sale is much more likely when the person you’re targeting is in the market for your service or product. When you focus more on your inbound marketing strategy, you’ll increase your ranking on search engines. If your business is highly ranked on a relevant keyword, then the people who need your products or services will find you. And it will be much easier to close a sale with a customer who already needs your service.

Look at the graph below and see how inbound marketing converts more leads into loyal customers, mainly through SEO:

Lead-to-Close % by Channel

By this point you may be thinking Inbound Marketing sounds great but is probably really expensive. Not true. Inbound Marketing may seem more expensive on the front end, but the average cost per lead for outbound marketing is $346, as opposed to inbound which is only $135 per lead.

It’s not only easier to convert a customer through inbound marketing, but it’s cheaper too!! It’s time to hop on board the inbound train! 

Source: http://www.demandmetric.com/content/content-marketing-infographic

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