Which is more important for local businesses? Lead quantity or quality?
Local business is changing in 2022, so should your marketing strategy. As consumer behavior, SEO ranking factors, and other surprising new changes take place this year, it's not too late for you to get ahead of the curve. Instead of looking backward, in this report, we learn from the future to give you the best tips and tricks to prepare for 2022. Dig into our report to find the most exciting findings and surprising new advancements we’ll be seeing in the local service business space.
Service Direct, a pay-per-lead local business service, recently conducted a survey with 250 local service businesses (LSBs). From the survey, Service Direct was able to identify LSB’s main marketing goals, challenges, and effective lead generation tactics. Though quality lead generation was ranked as the top priority for LSBs, it was also reported to be the biggest challenge. The report goes further to identify hidden opportunities to succeed, the most effective strategies to increase the quality of leads, and actionable steps to achieve success in 2022.
Quality Over Quantity
Though lead volume remains a top priority at 48% for most businesses, the importance of quality can often be overlooked and ranks lower at 42%. The difference between a lousy lead and a good lead lies in intention. Someone browsing the web for a pair of shoes for their cousin’s wedding will automatically tune out irrelevant ads like a food delivery service in less than a millisecond. An SEO or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign that focuses solely on increasing web traffic will typically also result in high bounce rates. For PPC campaigns especially, the costs of the poor-quality leads will rack up with little to show in terms of sales and conversions.
Add PPC Power to Your Lead Engine
The report also shows that LSBs view PPC advertising as the least effective in generating leads. While not for every business and a more complicated form of lead gen, when used correctly, PPC can be an incredibly powerful tool. Google can leverage search engine data to effectively target potential customers with PPC. By creating a strategy that aims to attract leads with relevant needs and interests to what the business provides, it can cut operational costs on low-return marketing campaigns and increase conversion rates.
Power Up Your Pages
To tackle these challenges, Service Direct suggests a “quality over quantity” approach for lead generation. Here are some of the tips for a high conversion website from the report. Direct’s report.
Check page’s load speed - Check out our page on Google Core Web Vitals (CWV) to learn how Google is going beyond just page load speed when assessing your site. Our tool analyzes Page Experience metrics such as First Input Delay (link), Largest Contentful Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift to give you insight into your customer’s on-site experience.
Make sure it’s mobile-friendly – Optimizing your website for a seamless mobile experience is important to generate high-quality leads. Mobile searches are outranking any other device. Seventy-six percent of those who search on mobile for a local service visit the location within 24 hours. Try our WooRank review for free to check whether your site is mobile-friendly.
Ensure H1, Meta Description, and title tags are updated – These are all elements important for on-site SEO and user experience. Updating H1, meta descriptions, and title tags will help Google understand what your page is about so the search engine can show it to the right people.
Keep SEO in mind by using relevant keywords – WooRank's keyword tracking tool allows you to research, track, and localize your keywords to fuel your marketing efforts.
Other things to keep in mind:
- Utilize forms for users to quickly fill
- Building a dynamic CTA
- Create dedicated landing pages
An all-in-one SEO tool like WooRank can simplify and optimize your website by finding technical issues such as page load times, security issues, HTTPS (instead of HTTP), and more. WooRank also crawls your website to give you actionable items for on-site and off-site SEO.
Pay-Per-Click
For any PPC campaign, keyword research is the first arguably one of the most important steps for success. When looking for a keyword, it’s important to consider two things:
- Is it relevant to the audience you’re trying tor each?
- Is it a highly competitive keyword?
For local businesses especially, finding a low competition keyword is both important and easier than it is for national brands. Since those looking for services locally tend to search for a phrase along with “near me” or use Google’s location finder feature, it can be easier for local businesses to show up higher in search results. Being more specific and targeting longtail keywords also helps to narrow down your offerings so your business is found by the right people.
Local SEO is a gold mine opportunity for local service businesses. Hubspot reported that 46% of all Google searches are for local information and of those searches, e, 18% resulted in a sale within 24 hours. WooRank’s keyword research and tracking tool comes in handy for not only optimizing your site’s content but finding the best keywords to target for organic SEO and PPC campaigns.
2021 gave marketers valuable insight into how the world of digital marketing is changing. To keep up with the rapidly changing landscape,LSBs should be taking a more targeted and strategic approach to lead generation.This may seem like an intimidating task, but you don’t have to tackle it alone. By investing in an all-in-one SEO tool like WooRank, you can easily optimize your content and target PPC ads to bring in more quality leads.
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To learn more about the findings of the LSB survey and additional tips to improve lead quality read Service Direct’s benchmark report here.
