One of the biggest challenges for an industrial SEO company is to accurately measure the results of a lead generation campaign. For e-commerce businesses, results are relatively easy to measure — an order is either placed or it isn’t. For lead generation, tracking and measuring is more complex.
How an Industrial SEO Agency Should Track Results
- Form tracking. Website inquiry forms are a common form of industrial lead generation. The industrial SEO firm must be able to identify forms submitted as a result of the SEO campaign.
- Phone tracking. Because industrial product applications can be complicated, customized and hard to explain, B2B prospects are apt to use the phone to initiate an inquiry. It’s crucial for the industrial SEO company to identify phone inquiries resulting from the campaign. Phone lead tracking is often overlooked because of the complexity of setting it up. But without phone tracking, you will underestimate the ROI of your campaign, possibly by a wide margin.
- Lead validation. The final step is to separate form and phone sales leads from other types of conversions. Extensive Straight North research reveals that, on average, about half of all conversions are something other than sales leads — spam, sales solicitations, customer service calls, misdials, etc. Whereas failing to track phone leads causes you to underestimate results, evaluating campaigns based on conversion data rather than lead data causes you to overestimate them.
Once SEO leads have been identified, it is important for you to continue tracking leads through your CRM system, so that you can accurately calculate revenue driven from SEO. Because industrial sales cycles typically run from a few months to over one year, this final connecting step is extremely important — but not something an industrial SEO company is normally in a position to execute on behalf of a client.
Industrial SEO Services — Critical Elements
In addition to precise tracking, successful SEO depends on several other areas of execution. The most critical for industrial firms include:
- Keyword research. Keywords must be carefully evaluated to consider search volume, competitiveness of the keyword, buying intent and relevance.
- Content production. Creating content on your website and off-site are major elements of an SEO campaign — on-site content builds domain and page authority, and off-site content builds links back to your website. Your industrial SEO agency needs skilled copywriters proficient in B2B style. Strong copy makes your content credible, useful and engaging — all essential for strong organic search rankings and influencing prospects.
- Website issues. Without an SEO-friendly, easy-to-use website, all the organic traffic in the world will not generate a critical mass of sales leads. Website shortcomings that hurt SEO and are common in the industrial sector include:
- Poor mobile-friendly design
- Slow-loading images and/or web pages
- Overly detailed but poorly optimized product page content
- Failing to have product/service pages dedicated to each product/service keyword set
- Technical issues such as broken external links, poor internal linking structure and duplicate content