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This expert piece was written by Abbas Sahrawi, head of marketing at Nektoublek.

Many startups go out of business for one reason: a lack of consistent leads.

Want to learn how to create a strategy that pulls in qualified leads, month after month?

A cost-effective and a scalable way to get qualified leads is to use SEO to get in front of a hungry audience willing to spend money with you. And the advantage is that you don't need a ton of traffic to generate revenue; you need highly targeted traffic, whether you have 100K monthly visitors or only 1,000.

In today's article, I'll show you how to incorporate 3 straightforward methods into your SEO strategy to start getting more leads that convert.

Let's dive in.

1. Select 3 Major Pain Points

Let's be brutally honest here: you didn't start your blog for fun. Your blog is a marketing channel focused on driving sales. To attract the right visitors, you have to find their pain points: what keeps them awake at night? What is their 6-month goal? What do they fear?

An easy way to effectively research your audience's needs is by talking to them, either in person or through social media. The second option is often quickest: head over to your Facebook and/or Twitter account, sort out your most active followers, and send them a private message. Ask them to jump on a quick call with you in return for a free month's trial of your SaaS, a free consultation, or a freebie of whatever your business offers.

Note down the most common pain points. Next, align these pain points with the keywords your audience is most likely using to find your competitors. Pump up your SEO and outrank them.

Pro tip: try to talk to at least 10 people to get some good data.

2. Find Relevant Long-tail Keywords around these Pain Points

Keywords driven by pain points are the bread and butter of a good SEO strategy. Neglect this and you'll fail.

Pain-point keywords tend to get fewer monthly searches, but the searchers have acknowledged their problem and they're actively looking for solutions.

To find these keywords, use the Google search hack method: head over to Google, type your audience's main pain point, then open a spreadsheet and write down all the long-tail keywords you see.

Let me give you an example. Let's say I'm targeting marketing agencies, and my offer is a social media analytics tool. I interview some agency reps and discover that their main pain point is that they can't find the right tool to figure out their best-performing posts on social media. I put "social media tool" into Google, then I scroll down to where it says "people also used", where I find "social media analytics tools comparison”. Using a tool like SEMrush (free, by the way), I can see that this term gets 290 monthly searches.

Clearly, the searcher who uses that term is more likely to buy my product if I'm on the first page of results, so I need an article about that term, optimized for Google.

Pro tip: always look for long-tail keywords that contain one of the following words: best, comparison, cheap, and review - they’re more likely to convert.

3. Write Optimized Content

You found your audience's main pain points and selected some long-tail keywords. Now all you need to do is write SEO content around those keywords.

I won't go into detail on how to write an article - a Google search will cover that - but I will offer this advice:

• Include your keyword at the beginning of the title, in the URL, and in both the first image ALT tag and the first 100 words
• Write better content than what's on the current first page of search results
• Make your content visually appealing
• Make your content easy to skim through
• Finish your article with a tailored call to action to get the most leads. For my example above, on the keyword "social media analytics tools comparison", I'd use "Want to discover your best-performing posts with one click? Try our tool now, for free!"

Takeaway

Clients are the lifeblood of your business. Helping your customers solve their problems should be your utmost priority. Find out your audience's key pain points, align them with long-tail keywords that match their intent, and write optimized, valuable SEO content around those keywords to generate more leads that convert.