IT consulting companies often work their local market. Most markets have plenty of competition, which makes standing out and increasing lead volume challenging.
So what can IT consulting companies do to generate a steady stream of qualified leads?
Below are 5 ways to establish your brand, increase traffic and grow lead volume.
SEO
If your IT consulting company works a local market, showing up for relevant keywords in search results is important. How can you do better at increasing the SEO value of your website?
Some of the best ways to increase your websites authority in the search engines are:
- Onsite optimization - Following technical SEO best practices and ensuring you're optimizing your pages for the right keywords.
- Citations - Make sure your name, address and phone number is accurate, consistent and listed on the major directories such as Google, Yahoo!, Yelp, Superpages and more.
- Inbound links - Building quality citations can help with inbound links, but you'll likely need more to beat your competitors. Look to partners you work with, associations you belong to and leverage any good PR your company recieves.
- Content - Publishing fresh, quality, relevant content on a regular basis can do wonders for your SEO. It adds more pages to your website, helps you rank for long tail keywords, gives search engine spiders reasons to come back often and index your website as well as help with earning more inbound links and social mentions.
Blogging
As mentioned above, content is king and a powerful tool to generate more visitors to your website. You should blog at a minimum of once a week, but twice a week or more is recommended. Be sure to write about what your target audience is interested in and researching during their buying process of your services. Optimize for long tail keywords your prospects are using to maximize your SEO.
CTA's
Blogging and search engine optimiztion are great ways to attract targeted traffic to your website. But traffic won't do you much good if you don't have calls-to-actions in place to convert traffic to leads.
Create content offers such as eBooks, whitepapers and guides to help educate prospects and generate leads for your business. Include CTA's to promote your content offers on your blog and throughout your website. When promoting content offers, direct visitors to landing pages that highlight your offer and include a lead capture form.
Don't forget to make purchasing easy as well by prominantly including your phone number and contact form on every page of your website.
Paid Social Promotion
Did you know that you can target Facebook Ads specifically to your local market? Facebook Ads are often less expensive to run than Google AdWords or other local advertising options. The targeting options they offer are robust and enable you to drill down to your specific target audience, ensuring only the right people will view your ad.
Retargeting
By doing everything mentioned above, you're generating more targeted traffic. But let's face it, even with calls-to-action, great offers and compelling content on your website, not every visitor will convert to a lead. But, they expressed some interest in your company by visiting your website in the first place. Retargeting is a great way to bring visitors who didn't initially convert back to your website, giving you another opportunity to convert them into a lead.
You can run retargeting ads on both Google and Facebook, maximizing your brands exposure and increasing conversion opportunities.
Leveraging SEO, blogging, social ads and retargeting will no doubt drive more qualified visitors to your website. It takes a lot of effort and time, but if you stick with it, you can enjoy month-over-month lead increases, squash your competitors and grow your business.
