Every small business in the world needs new customers to continue to survive. Without customers a business only serves itself and will never make any money. This has been a constant since the advent of capitalism. The entire purpose of creating a business is to make money, at least that is the core reason but there are always other reasons for establishing a business such as family legacy so on and so forth. It still boils down to one key factor that remains a constant, a business requires customers to either purchase their goods or hire their services.
Most businesses start out as a small business and small businesses typically cannot avail themselves of the same opportunities that larger, well-established businesses can afford. So, what are they to do when it comes to competing with the larger established businesses? They need to generate leads. What are leads? Leads are basically prospective customers, no matter how you label it it still comes down to it being a lead on a prospective sale. That could be a walk in customer for a restaurant or a walk in customer for a hardware store.
Now that we have established that we need leads for small businesses, how do we go about getting leads? There are many different methods to get new leads for your small business and the one we will be talking about today deals with using your website and alternative methods such as lead generation websites.
Using your website to generate leads can be expensive depending upon the level of competition for the authoritative content and business displayed on your website. In other words, you need to understand that it is not so much as your URL or your website ranking, it is more along the lines of the content with the targeted keywords that rank and allow your business to show up in search results. So basically what we’re talking about with using your website to generate leads is to establish a strategic SEO solution with command content with an authoritative ring to it that has well researched targeted keywords in the content along with all of the nitty gritty technical details that go hand in hand with SEO like meta tags and headers and and lots of other technical stuff. If you hire the right SEO strategist and they set your website up properly to show up in the search results and then the second stage of once the visitor actually gets, to capture the viewers interest and convert them into a paying customer or a qualified lead. These are good SEO solutions.
A different method that is utilized for small businesses is using a well established lead generation website. What is a lead generation website? It is a website that was created to fill a particular niche within and industry and it is set up the same way that your personal website would be set up but the difference is, a lead Gen. website is set up with far less pages and is targeting keep keywords that have very low competition and is generally location specific it ranking which makes it ideal for small businesses that have not gotten their own website to show up in search results and are in need of leads.
There are several different types of lead generation websites. There are websites that will generate leads on a grand scale and sell those leads in batches to multiple amounts of customers by way of having visitors to that lead generation website sign up for newsletters or discounts or whatever the case may be and then there are the lead generation websites that I am referring to that where deal with a specific niche within an industry and they build the website around that. For example, a lead generation website could be a site for epoxy flooring but it would need to serve a specific location. A good example would be epoxy flooring in Las Vegas. Now to be more specific, the ideal lead generation site would do what we call niching down, so that would take a regular main niche and taking it down to another more specific niche that is being searched but there is not a tremendous amount of competition for it. So for example, if we were to combine the keywords and location and niche down to a lesser targeted keyword it would be something like be epoxy garage floor Las Vegas. This looks odd but this could be a perfect lead generation website and how this would work is this as this lead generation website ranks up and starts showing up in the search results for the targeted keywords, potential customers would be visiting the site and filling out the request form and calling the phone number displayed. These lead generation website businesses will then rent out the website leads to be exclusive to one specific small business thereby fulfilling their need for new leads and taking away the hard work that they would need to do in order to turn their own website into a lead generation machine.
In small business it’s all about what we can do now and then we need to be constantly looking to the future and business growth. If we are only consumed by what is directly in front of us, we will never grow. Lead generation websites are the way for small businesses to find new leads now. The absolute best way for small businesses to get the same results and better is to do a strategic SEO plan on their website and put in the work but reap the long term benefits. Ranking up your website with SEO is not a race, it’s a marathon. This is what you would do when envisioning the future of your business, it’s an investment in your business but it takes time and the rewards you will wreath are so worth the trouble.
