SEO for Sales People

SEO for Sales People:from B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify by Jeff Gibb
Hopefully someone at your company is responsible for SEO. Whether it’s the web administrator, the marketing athlete or an SEO black-belt like Scott Fasser or Marko Wollschlaeger, someone should be managing your organic web presence.
As a sales person, your time is better spent selling than worrying about every detail of your company’s SEO strategy. But there are a few key SEO indicators that sales people should be aware of in general. The following are worth investigating, and will help you understand how much lift you are getting from SEO. It might also help you create some urgency on allocating resources (people or software) to focus on the highest quality lead source!

Non-branded Keyword Traffic

What is it? – This is all the organic search (SEO) traffic that does not include your brand name. Non-branded keyword traffic is essentially visitors/leads that were drawn into your website without the intent of finding you.
Why it matters for sales people? – While the sneaky marketing department may show you a nice graph with great SEO keyword traffic numbers, you should dig into the details. A report with a keyword filter to remove your brand and product names (including acronyms and misspellings) will tell you what you really care about: how many new visitors and leads did we get from SEO without the help of other branding efforts?

Local Keyword Ranking

What is it? – Google shows unique results based on the searcher’s location. Local keyword rankings reflect the positions of keywords in specific geographic areas.
Why it matters for sales people? – It’s critical for sales people with a regional or international territory to know how they are represented in those markets. If you rank high in Google US for a important non-branded keyword (see above), the traffic will roll in. Is the same true in Google UK? What about within the US? Is the west territory gaining the same benefit as the east? For more information on why a high ranking matters, check out Optify’s Click-Through-Rate study.

Meta Description Tags

What is it? – A meta description is the section of text that shows under the link to a site in a search engine result page (SERP). They are ~150 characters, and help the searcher decide if the website is right for them to visit.


Why it matters for sales people? – There are literally hundreds of elements that determine the ranking of a website for a specific keyword. Once the site is ranked, the work is not done. The description that shows in the meta description is major factor in the decision to click through to a website from a SERP. Sales people need to make sure those descriptions match the needs they hear from customers the solution they sell. Alignment in that process will ensure high qualified leads convert on the website.

Where Can You Find This Stuff?

As you might guess, Optify’s inbound marketing software can help you find all of these items fairly easily. You can create a filtered organic search report in a few seconds, select your global or regional search engine and click through ranked pages for keywords to check the meta descriptions feel free to start a free trial.
There are a few other places you can go to check these. Google analytics will tell you about your non-branded traffic, but local rankings will be a little more difficult. There are also several focused tools that can tell part of the story.
Regardless, knowledge is power. Knowing the current SEO status can help you focus or jumpstart the inbound marketing engine for sales.