Are you using search engine optimization (SEO) as part of your lead generation efforts?
When done right, SEO can attract highly qualified leads to your WordPress site in the form of organic traffic.
In fact, SEO increases your search engine rankings for the keywords you want to target, gives people a chance to click on your site, and offers you a chance to show them why your website is worth their while.
And, if you’ve optimized your site for SEO properly, the traffic that comes to your website from search results will be a part of your target audience and convert, just the way you want them to.
The problem is, despite knowing all of this about SEO, many people find the thought of optimizing their websites for higher rankings overwhelming.
If you know that you need to improve your SEO efforts, but don’t know where to start, keep reading to learn about some simple SEO strategies to increase leads on your WordPress site.
1. Create a Sitemap
Sitemaps are the files that list your site’s web pages for Google and other popular search engines.
This way they know what kind of content you have on your website and how it’s organized. This ensures your site is crawled and indexed for the right audience.
Google itself has said that creating a sitemap is good for higher search rankings and says you should always create a sitemap if:
- Your site is large so nothing fails to get indexed and served up in search results
- There’s not a lot of internal linking on your site, which makes it harder for bots to crawl and index your content
- If your website is new and doesn’t have inbound links from other websites, which helps lead crawlers to your website for indexing
You can easily create a sitemap for your WordPress site using the following plugins:
If you don’t want to add another plugin to your site, and are using one of the most popular SEO plugins on the market today, Yoast SEO, you can create a sitemap with that instead.
To start, navigate to SEO > General > Features, scroll down to XML sitemaps, and turn the feature On. Yoast SEO will then create a sitemap of your entire website for you.
You can also click on the question mark to reveal a link for seeing your website’s sitemap:
When you click on See the XML sitemap, you’ll see all the sitemaps that have been created for your site. For instance, there might be one for posts, pages, categories, and more.
Click on each to see more details.
When you create a sitemap for your WordPress site, most search engines are able to detect it, crawl it, and index it.
But for good measure, you should also “tell” Google you’ve created a sitemap so crawlers can index your site faster.
For step by step instructions on how to do this, check out this helpful tutorial by Yoast.
2. Conduct Keyword Research
It doesn’t matter how great your content is, if you don’t include the right keywords, you’ll never be found in search results by your target audience.
After all, the keywords in your content are used by search engines like Google to deliver the right content to the right people depending on their search queries.
For example, let’s say you wrote an extensive review about the movie Titanic, but didn’t include keywords like “Titanic movie,” “Titanic with Leonardo DiCaprio,”, or “Titanic soundtrack.”
When someone comes to Google looking for historical facts about the sinking of the Titanic, and your content mysteriously pops up, one of two things might happen:
- You’ll fail to generate any leads on your website because people will see your content snippet and realize you don’t have the kind of content they are looking for.
- People will click on your website thinking you’ll have facts about the Titanic, only to find out you reviewed the movie, which is not what they’re looking for. As a result, they’ll immediately abandon your site, increase your bounce rate, and harm your site’s SEO (since Google favors low bounce rates and web pages that have lots of user engagement).
To find good keywords to use in your content so your content ends up in search results for people that will want to visit your site and convert try using SEMRush.
All you have to do is enter the keyword you’re wanting to rank for in the search box and see what keywords are ranking high right now in Google.
For example, when we enter the term “WordPress website,” this is what shows:
Not only will you see what the most popular keywords related to “WordPress website” are, you’ll see related keywords as well.
You’ll also notice the search volume, the cost per click (CPC) of each term (which is helpful if you run PPC ads), and a link to the actual search engine results that have that keyword.
These are the terms you want to use in your content, along with their variations, to boost your site’s SEO and generate qualified leads.
3. Use Keywords in the Right Places
Once you’ve found the keywords you want to use on your website, you’ll need to optimize the actual content that surrounds them.
The key here is to use one main keyword per piece of content.
You don’t want to use the same keyword for multiple pieces of content because they’ll compete against each other in SERPs, which is not helpful.
To find out which content that has already been published that needs SEO optimization, again use SEMRush. Navigate to Organic Research > Positions and enter your domain name.
You’ll immediately see the keywords your content is ranking for, their position in Google search results, and the URL each keyword corresponds to on your website.
Focus on content that is ranking between 4 and 10. These are the pieces that are already on the first page of Google, but could use a little help.
If you don’t have any content that is ranking that high, take a look at what content you feel is the most important to your brand and concentrate on optimizing it for higher rankings.
To help improve your content rank higher in search results, and get people that are actually interested in what you have to offer, aim to put keywords in the following places:
- Page title
- Meta descriptions
- Subheadings
- Content
- Images
- URLs
- Links
The goal is to place keywords throughout your content so crawlers can index your site properly for search results and people reading your content can determine whether your content is relevant to them or not.
To help you out, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to show you when your content is optimized using your designated content, and where you need to make improvements.
Optimizing your content after you’ve chosen your target keywords is ultimately what will bring traffic to your site.
And, if you’ve optimized your content the right way, and are using keywords that are right for your target audience, you’ll see that the traffic coming to your site is full of leads that want to (and will) convert.
4. Optimize Your Images
Making your images SEO friendly is another helpful way to drive lots of leads to your WordPress site from search results.
Not to mention, using images on your website breaks up written text, grabs people’s attention and engages them, and ultimately helps your search rankings thanks to the increase in session duration.
But what many people don’t realize is that not optimizing their images can actually hurt their SEO efforts in two major ways:
- Images that aren’t optimized tend to load slower and negatively affect your search rankings
- Images without keywords in the Alt Title won’t appear in the right search results
You can easily compress your WordPress images using an online like TinyPNG or a WordPress plugin like Smush It so images take up less server space and load faster.
This will ensure a better viewing experience and encourage people to stick around, become interested in what you have to offer (thus becoming a lead) and convert by subscribing or making a purchase.
If you really want to improve the speed and performance of your website for site visitors, you should use a CDN to deliver content and images in the quickest way possible for all site visitors.
When it comes to your image descriptions, the part you never want to leave out is the Alt Title.
Crawlers index this part so they can place your images, and your content, in relevant search results.
Think about it. Sometimes people only search for images.
You want to make sure your images show up for your target audience, since they’re most likely to become leads and convert in the ways you want them to.
In the end, people are visual by nature and expect to see images mixed in with your site’s content.
Don’t let images harm your chances of driving qualified leads from search results to your website.
Conclusion
And there you have it! Some of the simplest SEO strategies you can use on your WordPress website starting right now to bring more traffic and leads to your website.
When it comes to building a larger following or generating more online sales, you depend on the type of leads that come to your website.
Don’t let lead opportunities pass you by because you don’t know how to optimize your site for SEO.
Instead, make sure the right people see the right content at the right time in search results so that everyone that visits your site can be turned into a loyal follower or customer.
Step two in my article keyword research was to check these keywords for traffic and competition in the 
