IT LEAD GENERATION
managed IT services company lands signed agreement
Overview
A local managed IT services and support company is in dire need of leads. Their best customers are local small businesses who need to outsource their IT. Whether a customer needs network security management or a simple cloud computing setup, this managed IT company can assist.
The business has always thrived. But, the last year has sent the owner and CEO on a witch hunt to find a marketing tactic that will fill the sales pipeline again. They’ve invested in a new website. They’ve built a new brand for a new comprehensive IT management service. Google ads are racking up bills. The sales team is connecting with any business owner on LinkedIn within the city. Plain text email campaigns are being sent from the owner, and then display emails, and so on…
The company has resources, domain authority, and momentum to gain traction via organic search.
How do you generate leads for an IT solutions company with keywords that cost $50 / click?
Challenge
The IT solutions company had just purchased a website from an “industry provider.” While the initial sales pitch sounded good, when we came along we discovered at least 10+ other IT solutions companies across the US with an identical website.
Same text, same images. The only thing different was the company name and logo throughout the site.
How was a website with duplicate content going to be considered unique in the eyes of search engines? Why would a search engine rank our client site when they could receive the same information from 10+ other websites?
The easy answer would be to turn to more paid advertising to develop immediate leads. But with IT services commanding an average of $50 per click in the market, a healthy lead generation budget would go fairly fast.
Expensive ad market. Duplicate content on the website. A stressed out CEO in need of some immediate wins to help rally the company (and, owner).
What to do?
Solution
We had to work with what we had.
That meant taking the cloned website and rewriting the content to make it unique to search engines and potential customers.
It also meant that we had to get smart with the keywords we would target. Since we needed some immediate wins, we didn’t have the luxury of targeting an IT service that would take 12 months to rank. Nope. We had to focus on keywords that were resting comfortably on page 2 or 3 of search engines, and do what we could to help boost these services to page 1.
Not only would this help free up some advertising dollars by saving on $50 / clicks, but it could also generate some trusted organic leads.
We furiously went to work rewriting content, promoting content, and fixing all the various Technical SEO errors that existed on the site.
Result
Most smart agencies know that SEO takes time, but most clients never want to hear or accept that. Regardless of wants and desires, it would be a boldfaced lie if we said we had some immediate short-term wins. The honest truth is that SEO got a slow start in the beginning as we sought to make our case to search engines why our client site was unique.
The area where we could make an immediate impact was around promoting the client site. We deployed our local Digital PR initiatives to generate placements for our client. These placements helped raised brand awareness locally, drive referral traffic, and build domain authority to help our content rank.
As referring domains grew, so did our search positions. We began to see first page, and top 3 rankings for terms like:
- #1 organic search ranking for the term “it services CITY”
- #2 organic search ranking for “it support CITY”
These keywords were spot on with our client’s target customer. We began to see and track several contact form submissions, IT assessment requests, and Whitepaper downloads each week.
Finally, our IT management company received their first signed agreement through an organic inbound lead. The successes kept coming, in correlation with their favorable search positions.
