Time to welcome Google Search Central and say by Google Search Console

Merriam-Webster claims the first known use of the word "webmaster" was in 1993, years before Google even existed. However, the term is becoming archaic, and according to the data found in books, its use is in sharp decline. A user experience study we ran revealed that very few web professionals identify themselves as webmasters anymore. They're more likely to call themselves Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), online marketer, blogger, web developer, or site owner, but very few "webmasters".

We're changing our name In brainstorming our new name, we realized that there's not one term that perfectly summarizes the work people do on websites. To focus more on the topic that we talk about (Google Search), we're changing our name from "Google Webmasters Central" to "Google Search Central", both on our websites and on social media. Our goal is still the same; we aim to help people improve the visibility of their website on Google Search.The change will happen on most platforms in the next couple days.

Centralizing help information to one site To help people learn how to improve their website's visibility on Google Search, we're also consolidating our help documentation and blogs to one site.
Moving forward, the Search Console Help Center will contain only documentation related to using Search Console. It's also still the home of our help forum, newly renamed from "Webmasters Help Community" to "Google Search Central Community". The information related to how Google Search works, crawling and indexing, Search guidelines, and other Search-related topics are moving to our new site, which previously focused only on web developer documentation. The content move will happen over the next few days.

We will continue to create content for anyone who wants their websites to show up on Google Search, whether you're just getting started with SEO or you're an experienced web professional. 

Consolidating the blogs The blog that you're reading right now is also moving to our main site. However, we will wait one week to allow subscribers to read this last post on the old platform. Moving this blog, including our other 13 localized blogs, to one place brings the following benefits:
More discovery of related content (help documentation, localized blogs, event information, on one site)
Easier to switch between languages (no longer have to find the localized blog URL)
Better platform allows us to maintain content, localize blog post more easily, and format posts consistently
Going forward, all archived and new blog posts will appear on https://developers.google.com/search/blog. You don't need to take any action in order to keep getting updates from us; we will redirect the current set of RSS and email subscribers to the new blog URL.

Googlebot mascot gets a refresh
Our Googlebot mascot is also getting an upgrade. Googlebot's days of wandering the web solo come to a close as a new sidekick joins Googlebot in crawling the internet.

Googlebot mascot gets a refresh
When we first met this curious critter, we wondered, "Is it really a spider?" After some observation, we noticed this spider bot hybrid can jump great distances and sees best when surrounded by green light. We think Googlebot's new best friend is a spider from the genus Phidippus, though it seems to also have bot-like characteristics. Googlebot's been trying out new nicknames for the little spider bot, but they haven't settled on anything yet. Maybe you can help?

As parting words, update your bookmarks and if you have any questions or comments, you can find us on Twitter and in our Google Search Central Help Community.

When do we need Lead Funnels?

In the previous lessons, we talked about Lead Generation funnels and I showed you an example of how I have built my lead generation funnel. 

We have also discussed that high-end B2B and enterprise products do not need a lead generation funnel and low-end simple B2C products do not need leads at all.

Lead generation is required when you are selling a product that is high-priced, is complex, and the buyer might have a lot of questions before buying your product or service.

 Please note that the requirement for lead generation and the requirement for lead generation funnels are not the same things.

 Lead generation is required when the product price is higher. But when the product price is very high and the target market is very small, a lead generation funnel is not required.

 A lead generation funnel is required when you have a balance between the two. Your products and services are not too cheap and simple, nor too costly and complex.

 A funnel is required when you have B2C products at a higher cost and B2B products at a lower cost.

Examples of products and services where a funnel is required:
High-end B2C Products like house, car, appliances.
Low-end B2B products like software
So how can we visualize this?

I have made this chart which explains it clearly. 

In the chart, you can see that there are two Y-axes.
The marketing effort goes down as the price of the product goes up.

The lead generation effort goes up when the price and complexity of the product increases.

When the price is too low, you don't need leads, so you don't need lead generation funnels.

When the price of the product is very high, every lead that you reach out to will be a very high quality targeted lead, and you do not need a funnel in that case.

For example, Infosys, a large enterprise IT company, would reach out to people who are the right fit for their services. They would already have a fair idea about their target customers. Pinpointing the lead is not a problem at all. They would do cold-emailing, meet, and connect with the right people in conferences and also reach out to them via referrals. The sale is more dependent on the sales effort than the marketing effort.

When do we need lead generation funnels?
We need lead generation funnels when we are somewhere in the middle of the chart that I have shown above.

In the previous lesson, I talked about how I generate leads, nurture them, and filter them to engage with the sales process. My business (the training one and not the agency) is a B2C business. But the products (my training programs) are not low priced. They are starting from 10,000 rupees ($150 approx). 

I cannot just market my products and brand and expect people to buy. That's why I create a funnel.
Let's take a look at one of the B2B products I have - OptinChat.com. It is a lead generation tool for website owners that collects names and email IDs of visitors. The cost of the tool is $49 a month. The price of the product is not too high that I would have a sales team that reaches out to people directly and sells them. The profit from each sale wouldn't be enough to pay the sales team.

So even though OptinChat.com is a B2B tool, I market it in such a way that I would sell a high-end B2C product. There are too many prospects out there for a manual sales outreach to effective.
I generate leads for OptinChat by giving the free version of OptinChat for free and I do webinars to sell the premium version.

In the next email, I will explain how the lead generation funnel for OptinChat (a low-end B2B tool) works. 

The funnel generates the leads, nurtures them to build trust with them, and converts the cold leads into warm leads even before the sales process begins.

How I Generate Leads for my Business

In the previous lesson, we talked about lead generation funnels and why they are important to filter out the high quality leads from the low-quality ones.

Filtering high-quality leads is important because when you are doing high-end B2C sales or low-end B2B sales you will have more leads and a good mix of low quality leads in it.

When you are generating leads via digital marketing a good mix of untargeted and uninterested leads will come into your system.

When you are prospecting for B2B leads and reaching out to businesses, you are generating very high-quality leads.

For example, Clever.com is software for schools for delivering education online. Their minimum pricing starts at $5000 per year. Most of their customers are enterprise customers.

In such cases, they will just reach out to their target customers via a sales force and start converting the leads.

If you are towards the middle of the pricing spectrum you might not have that luxury. That's why we need lead generation funnels.

Before we dive deep into lead generation funnels and how they work, in today's lesson I want to give you an example of my lead generation funnel.

To create a lead generation funnel, you need a lead magnet. The lead magnet is the first part of the entire funnel. Without a lead magnet, you will not be able to generate a lot of leads through inbound marketing.

My lead magnet is my free digital marketing course with 25 videos. For people who want to learn digital marketing, I give away this course for free. But to sign up, people need to give me their name and email ID.

Once they give me their name and email ID, they become my lead. I created this lead magnet a few years back. Once my lead magnet was ready, I went ahead and started driving traffic to it.

First, I used search traffic to get the leads. I used to get more than 5000 visitors a month via the search engines to my blog.

I converted the visitors into leads using this lead magnet. Then I started driving traffic to the lead magnet using Facebook Ads. And then I started using Google Ads to drive the traffic. (Hire Digital Marketing Company to Generate Leads for you)

Once they enter their name and email ID, their course will start. I deliver one lesson every day for 25 days. Until 25 days I do not sell anything. The videos are designed to provide value and build trust with the audience.

Trust building is an important part of sales. Without trust, sales cannot happen. In an offline sales model, trust is usually built via personal relationships.

If a salesman is good at his craft, he would build trust with his prospects and he would close the deals. But when you are generating 100s or 1000s of leads, you cannot have individual conversations with each person who is in your funnel. That's why marketing automation helps in lead generation funnels.

An automated sequence of emails builds trust with your audience on automation. You don't need to lift a finger. Setup the email sequence, get the leads and the trust-building happens automatically. But as we all know, without sales the funnel is not going to sustain itself.

"Sales" is the power source of the funnel. Sales give us transactions and transactions will give us profits.

When we make profits, we can reinvest the money back into the creation of lead magnets, back into traffic driving mechanisms like SEO, SEM, and Display Ads, and back into CRM and Marketing Automation tools that help us build trust with the audience.

So how do we sell in B2C when there is a funnel?

As we have discussed in the previous lesson, we need to pick out the high quality leads from the low-quality ones to engage them in a sales process.

That's where the concept of lead scoring comes in.

I score the leads based on their behavior. For example, let's take 2 leads. 1 lead is highly interested and there is a high chance she will buy. One lead is not so interested and has a very low chance of buying.

The highly interesting lead will open all my emails and read through all the lessons. The less interested lead will hardly open any emails. If I give 1 point for every email open and 3 points for every click inside the email then I can find out who are the highly interested leads and who is not so warmed up to my offer. (Learn Digital Marketing to Generate Leads for your Business)

I would end up calling the highly interested leads and engage them in a sales process.

"Sales" is a separate topic in itself and deserves a series of lessons on its own but you get the idea.

What are Lead Generation Funnels?

In the last three lessons, we talked about lead generation for high-end B2C products and high-end B2B products.

We also understood that low-end B2C products that are simple don't require lead generation.

The effort that is invested in lead generation is not worth it because the profits that we make from each sale is not going to be enough to justify the efforts in lead generation and sales. Also many times, the end customers do not want to share their contact information and talk to a salesperson when they are buying something simple. They just want to make the payment, purchase it, and use it.

If they have to give the contact information and wait for a salesperson to get back, they might not like it. Imagine the last time you ordered something from Amazon. You just ordered it. We don't want to talk to someone in such cases even if someone is available to talk to. It takes time and time is limited. Time is money.

So lead generation is only required when the price of the product is high and the product is complex. Like a house or a car.

However, as a business, if you are generating a lot of leads then you will not be able to call all the leads and serve them.

If you generate 1,000 leads a day and you have 10 salespeople who can call only 10 leads a day then what will you do with the rest of the 900 leads?

If your sales team tries to pick leads randomly and call them, there is a high chance that a lot of these leads will not be interested. It would be an inefficient use of the time of the sales team. And you as a business cannot hire 100 salespeople because that would be too costly.

As a thought experiment, consider that you can hire 100 salespeople and each person calls 10 leads a day. And you are generating 1000 leads a day. What do you think would be the conversion?

Let's say out of every 100 calls to the leads, 1 person converts into a customer. At this conversion ratio, you are going to generate 1 sale per salesperson for every 10 days on average. That means each salesman can convert 3 leads into customers a month.

Recap of the numbers:

Leads generated per day: 1,000
Total salesmen: 100
Calls per day per salesman: 10
Calls per month per salesman: 300
Conversion ratio: 1/100 (1%)
Conversions per month: 30
Conversions per month per salesman: 3

Now the biggest problem you will face is that 3 sales are not good enough for you to make enough profits and pay the salary of the salesperson.

The salary or the commission you pay the sales guy is going to be more than what you make as profits.

So what we need to do here is increase the conversion ratio of each salesperson.

Instead of each salesman converting 1 lead into a customer out of 100 leads, we need to get each salesperson to convert 10 leads into customers out of 100 leads. And this can happen only if you create a lead generation funnel.

There is no lead source in the world which will give you high quality leads out of the box.

Every traffic source online will send you all kinds of leads and we need to filter through them. It's like mining for diamonds. You need to process a lot of coal before you can find the diamonds. That's what a funnel does for you.

A funnel will filter out the high quality leads from a heap of leads and gives you the best quality ones.

Getting back to our example, remember we are generating 1000 leads a day and we do not have 100 salespeople. We have only 10. Each salesperson can call only 10 leads a day.

So what we need to do is find out what are the top 100 leads out of the 1000 leads so that we can assign 10 leads to every salesperson.

We find out the high quality leads in such a way that the buyer is in one of these 10 leads.

It's like predicting which area of the coal deposit will have a higher concentration of diamonds and processing just that instead of processing the entire coal deposit in that area.

That's why we need Lead Generation Funnels. The funnel is a filtration mechanism to find out the best leads that can be engaged with. With a funnel, we can get the same conversions with 1/10th of the sales team. The funnel does the rest of the work for us. That's why marketing automation is important. It cannot automate all the tasks, but it can make us more efficient.

Recap of the numbers with a funnel:

Leads generated per day: 1,000
High-quality leads identified: 10% (100 per day)
Total salesmen: 10
Calls per day per salesman: 10
Calls per month per salesman: 300
Conversion ratio: 10/100 (10%)
Conversions per month: 300
Conversions per month per salesman: 30

In the process, the funnel also builds trust with the leads and converts the cold leads into warm leads.

I hope in today's lesson you understood the importance of lead generation funnels.

In the next lesson, we will look at an example of how a lead generation funnel can be applied to B2C leads, and in the lesson after that, we will look at how the same technique can be applied to low-end B2B products as well.
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