My SEO Guy Isn’t Generating Any Leads

One of the top complaints we get from potential clients that call our Dallas Fort Worth digital marketing agency is that their current “SEO guy” isn’t generating any leads. In fact, they usually also say, “I can’t tell what my SEO guy is even doing on our website.”

Sad to say, but this isn’t uncommon. If you’re one of the small business owners that has been struggling to get real customers to call your business, show up at your brick and mortar office, or even generate traffic that turns into sales, then you’re in the right place.

Getting Real Results with SEO

The first thing you should know is that there are multiple methods of providing Local SEO or search engine optimization that can all produce results on their own or in combination working together. It’s important to understand who you have working for you, their specialties, and the type of results you can estimate to see over time.

What Types of SEO Companies Are There?

Some SEO companies provide Google Maps optimizations, while others specialize in technical SEO, which can include optimizing for site speed, Google Lighthouse, and other crawling metrics that Google and other search engines really care about. There are also plenty of SEO agencies in the United States and abroad that provide backlink focused digital marketing campaigns and have built strong networks with other companies and brands in specific niches or have a great outreach team that generates quality links. Then of course, you have your content writing SEO teams that simply pump out content and the social SEO teams that are experienced at converting through delivering your message and service effectively across social media.

Most of these days, small businesses are forced to choose between solo-preneurs that try to do everything ineffectively and large agencies with massive teams and extreme overhead costs that prevent them from ever actually accomplishing anything. If you’re a small business with a revenue between $500,000 and $20,000,000, where do you go? You find the perfect agency designed to provide the full package where everyone performs at their peak, because that is their specialty. That’s where we come in at Nickel SEO.

The Changes in SEO Up to 2023

SEO and digital marketing have come to mean a lot of the same things over the years. What was once a niche service in digital marketing back in 2015 when we started has developed into a wide encompassing methodology to generating leads in 2023. For example, many people tend to still think that SEO, content marketing, Google Ads, or social media marketing function separately. But, that’s no longer true, and your SEO team shouldn’t approach it as such. Search engine optimization includes efficient use of all of the above along with the expected technicals and backlinks to truly build a well-rounded campaign. Let’s take a look at how each of those impacts SEO:

The Impact of Technical SEO on SEO

Technical SEO refers to the optimization of the technical aspects of a website to ensure it is easily accessible, crawlable, and indexable by search engines. It forms a crucial foundation for an effective SEO campaign, as it directly impacts how well search engines can understand and rank your website.

Technical SEO affects an SEO campaign in several ways:

1. Site visibility and indexation: By optimizing your website’s technical elements, you make it easier for search engine bots to crawl and index your content. This increases the likelihood that your site will appear in search results for relevant queries.
2. User experience: Technical SEO improvements, such as faster site speeds and mobile-friendliness, enhance the overall user experience. A positive user experience can lead to higher engagement, lower bounce rates, and better organic rankings.
3. Organic rankings: Addressing technical SEO issues helps search engines better understand your content and its context. This can lead to improved organic rankings, as search engines are more likely to rank websites that provide a seamless experience and valuable content to users.
4. Avoiding penalties: Ensuring your website follows best practices and avoids issues like duplicate content, broken links, and poor site navigation can help you prevent penalties from search engines, which can negatively impact your rankings and visibility.
5. Enhanced search features: Implementing structured data and schema markup can improve your website’s appearance in search results by enabling rich snippets and other enhanced search features. This can increase click-through rates (CTR) and drive more traffic to your site.

The Impact of Content Marketing on SEO

Content marketing is a strategic approach to creating, distributing, and promoting valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a specific target audience. The ultimate goal of content marketing is to build brand awareness, establish trust and credibility, and drive conversions or sales. It involves producing various types of content, such as blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, infographics, social media posts, and more, tailored to the needs and interests of your audience.

Content marketing affects an SEO campaign in several ways:

1. Quality content: High-quality, informative, and engaging content is favored by search engines, as it provides value to users. By consistently producing top-notch content, you can improve your website’s organic rankings and visibility.
2. Keyword targeting: Content marketing allows you to target specific keywords and phrases related to your business and industry. This helps improve your website’s relevancy for these keywords, leading to better search engine rankings and increased traffic.
3. User engagement: Engaging content encourages users to spend more time on your website, reducing bounce rates and increasing the likelihood of conversions. Search engines consider user engagement signals, such as time spent on a page and click-through rates, when ranking websites.
4. Backlinks: High-quality, shareable content can attract backlinks from other websites, which are an essential component of SEO. Backlinks serve as “votes of confidence” from other sites, signaling to search engines that your content is valuable and worth ranking higher.
5. Social signals: Content marketing helps you generate social media engagement, which can indirectly impact your SEO performance. While social signals are not a direct ranking factor, they can contribute to increased brand awareness and drive more traffic to your site.
6. Long-tail keywords: Content marketing allows you to target long-tail keywords, which are less competitive and can drive more targeted traffic to your website. By creating content around these specific topics, you can capture the attention of users with specific search queries, improving your site’s visibility for a broader range of keywords.

The Impact of Google Ads on SEO

Google Ads, formerly known as Google AdWords, is an online advertising platform developed by Google. It allows businesses to create and run pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns across Google’s vast network, including search results, display networks, YouTube, and other partner websites. Advertisers bid on specific keywords relevant to their products or services, and their ads appear in search results or on partner websites when users search for those keywords.

While Google Ads and SEO campaigns are thought to be separate strategies, they can complement and influence each other in various ways:

1. Keyword research: Both SEO and Google Ads campaigns rely on targeting relevant keywords. By running Google Ads, you can gain valuable insights into which keywords drive the most traffic, conversions, and engagement, helping you refine your SEO keyword research, targeting, and content creation efforts.
2. Improved visibility: Google Ads can provide immediate visibility for your business in search results by placing your ads at the top or bottom of the first page. This can complement your SEO efforts by driving additional traffic to your website while you work on improving organic rankings.
3. Testing and optimization: Google Ads allows you to quickly test different ad copy, keywords, and landing pages to see what resonates best with your audience. This data can help inform your SEO strategy, enabling you to optimize your website content, meta tags, and other on-page elements to better meet the needs of your target audience.
4. Boosting local SEO: Running local search ads through Google Ads can help increase your visibility in local search results, driving more foot traffic and local customers to your business. This can complement your local SEO efforts and improve your overall online presence.
5. Sharing audiences: Google Ads can help you reach new audiences that you may not have been able to capture through SEO alone. This increased exposure can drive more traffic to your website, potentially boosting user engagement signals that may positively impact your organic search rankings.
6. Link building: Google Ads that run are a live link on Google search that can provide backlink “juice” to your website which can be an added support to any SEO campaign.

The Impact of Social Media Marketing on SEO

Social media marketing is the process of using social media platforms to promote a brand, product, or service, connect with a target audience, and achieve marketing goals. This includes creating and sharing content, engaging with users, running social media advertising campaigns, and monitoring performance. Popular social media platforms for small business marketing purposes include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Although social media marketing and SEO are distinct strategies, they can complement and indirectly influence each other in several ways:

1. Increased brand awareness: Social media marketing can help increase brand awareness and online visibility. As more people become familiar with your brand, they may search for it on search engines, driving more organic traffic to your website.
2. Content distribution: Social media platforms are ideal for distributing your content to a wider audience. Sharing your SEO-optimized content on social media can result in more traffic, user engagement, and potential backlinks, all of which can positively impact your SEO efforts.
3. User engagement: Social media marketing encourages user engagement, which can lead to increased time spent on your website and reduced bounce rates. These user engagement signals are considered by search engines when ranking websites.
4. Social signals: While the relationship between social signals (likes, shares, and comments) and search engine rankings is not entirely clear, there is some evidence to suggest that a strong social media presence can indirectly influence your organic search performance. A higher number of social signals may indicate to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant to users.
5. Building backlinks: Social media platforms can be a source of valuable backlinks to your website. When users share your content, it can attract the attention of influencers, bloggers, or journalists who may link back to your website, contributing to your backlink profile and potentially improving your search engine rankings.
6. Customer insights: Social media marketing provides valuable insights into your audience’s preferences, interests, and pain points. This information can help you create better-targeted content, refine your SEO strategy, and optimize your website to better meet the needs of your target audience.

The Impact of Backlinks on SEO

Backlinks, also known as inbound links or incoming links, are links from one website to another. They are created when one website links to another website’s content, typically as a reference, citation, or resource. In the context of SEO, backlinks are important because they serve as an indicator of the linked website’s credibility, authority, and relevance.

Backlinks have a significant impact on an SEO campaign for several reasons:

1. Search engine ranking factor: Search engines like Google view backlinks as “votes of confidence” for a website. A higher number of quality backlinks indicates that a website is a valuable and authoritative source of information. As a result, search engines are more likely to rank websites with a strong backlink profile higher in search results.
2. Referral traffic: Backlinks can drive referral traffic to your website when users click on them. This can increase overall website traffic and potentially lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
3. Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA): Backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites can increase your website’s domain authority and the linked page’s page authority. Higher DA and PA scores can improve your website’s organic search rankings.
4. Indexing: Backlinks help search engine crawlers discover and index new pages on your website. This ensures that your content is included in search engine databases and can appear in search results.
5. Building relationships: Earning backlinks from other websites often involves outreach and relationship-building. This can help you establish connections with influencers, industry leaders, and other key players in your niche, which can lead to further collaboration and opportunities.

However, not all backlinks are created equal. High-quality backlinks from relevant, authoritative, and trustworthy websites have a more significant positive impact on your SEO campaign than low-quality backlinks from spammy or unrelated websites. In fact, having too many low-quality backlinks can lead to penalties from search engines, negatively affecting your search engine rankings.

To maximize the impact of backlinks on your SEO campaign, focus on earning high-quality backlinks through tactics like guest posting, content marketing, influencer outreach, and creating valuable, shareable content that naturally attracts links from other websites.

Our Approach to SEO

At Nickel SEO, we have a dedicated team all located here in the United States, with the capabilities of providing a complete multi-step approach to SEO campaigns for small businesses. Located in Dallas Fort Worth, Texas, we work with small businesses with a yearly revenue of $20,000,000 or less. If you’re a small business looking to grow and expand in the years to come, we’ll help guide you there and create the proper SEO campaign that will drive the sales and results that you want to see.