B2B Lead generation and appointment setting has a lot of methods and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of them. These marketing strategies have been used time and time again by many businesses, companies, enterprises, and even large scale corporations. Financial success can be gained upon the usage of these marketing strategies. One just needs to know the right method in implementing these marketing plans.
In terms of SEO, many people (businesspeople and consumers alike) use methods in order to optimize their chosen keywords so that Google and other search engines will deem their website as deserving to rank at the top spots in search results.
Now SEO is somewhat like earning money; there are legal and illegal methods to doing it. In real life, we work and even manage businesses in order to earn our weight in gold. There is, however, an easy way to do it which is stealing. Sure we can get away with it at one time but there will be dire consequences in the long run.
Similar to this concept, SEO has what we call white hat and black hat methods. In other words, white hat SEO are the methods that are legal whereas the latter are the illegal ones. Simply put, white hat methods lets businesspeople and marketers alike to make their chosen keywords rank by doing what is friendly to SERP bots and spiders. Ranking can take a long time to achieve but it will all be good in the end. Black hat SEO on the other hand lets business websites shoot to the top spot of search engine results. However, search engines, especially Google, will sanction such websites upon detection of such methods. Penalties can range from lowering page rank, lowering the rank of chosen keywords to immense degrees, or even blocking the website from ever being crawled by their spiders and bots ever again.
Not good for any aspiring business website who wants to rank in search engines for a very long time.
If businesses did black hat methods for lead generation and appointment setting, they can expect a good flow of business leads. However, this flow of targeted sales leads will only be for a few days to a few weeks at the longest. Website owners should fear the sanction of Google being able to take down their rankings if they did such methods.
In short, no search engine rankings mean no leads; no business leads mean no appointment setting that will be done. No sales appointments that are set, no profit; no profit equals no business.
Business people should only pay attention to doing only and solely white hat SEO methods. Proper link building and content marketing methods should only be done. No instant traffic generators or keyword spamming should be done else repercussions will be reaped.
The good thing about doing marketing for b2b purposes is that methods can be mixed. Ergo, white hat SEO tactics can be mixed with other b2b marketing methods like cold calling or direct mail.