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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Lead Generation for High End B2C Products

Hera today we learned that we do not need lead generation for basic B2C products that are low priced and simple.

For example, if you are selling candy or a pen, it is a simple low priced product and doesn't need lead generation.

The sales cycle is short and the decision-making process is easy. Many of these products and services are bought on impulse.

Even if the end consumer makes a wrong purchase, it is not something to worry about. If I spend 10 rupees on a pen and if it doesn't write properly, I will not lose sleep over it.

My time is more valuable than going back to the shop and asking for a refund. However, when it comes to high-end B2C products, we need to do lead generation.

Let's take two examples of high-end B2C products.

What are the biggest purchases that a consumer will make in his lifetime? It is easy to guess.

The biggest purchase would be a house.

People end up spending their entire life savings to buy a home. The next biggest purchase that they will make will be a car.

Let's first think about buying a home.

The Process of Buying a Home:

If someone is interested in buying a home, he/she will look at an ad and will call the number on that ad. Or they will look at an ad online, click on it, visit the landing page and fill out a form with their contact information.

This contact information becomes a lead for the seller. As we discussed in lesson 1, this is a lead because it leads to a sale.

This contact information is the connecting link between the buyer and the seller. Once the seller gets the contact information he will call the prospective buyer and schedule a site visit.

Without seeing the house in person, the buyer cannot make a buying decision. This is a complex product and once the purchase is done, it is difficult to reverse the transaction.

So the buyer will visit the house (or a model house if it is still under construction) and then will ask a lot of questions to the salesperson.

Does it have a good water supply?
Is this a good neighborhood?
What about the facilities in this apartment building?
What about the security and so on.
These are the questions and objections that the buyer has before he can go ahead with the purchase. The decision-making process can take anywhere from 3 to 6 months. The sales cycle is long in this case.

The seller needs to generate the leads, profile the leads, score the leads, and then close the sale with constant follow up. (All these strategies will be discussed in the future lessons).

Now let's take another example of a high-end purchase.

The purchase of a Car: After a house purchase, the next biggest purchase for an end consumer would be the purchase of a car. It is not a one time purchase but it can happen once in 3-5 years. Since it is a complex product, lead generation is required for this.

This is how the process would flow:

The buyer sees an ad online for a car.
He visits the landing page and downloads a brochure.
He gives his contact details to download the brochure.
Then he watches a welcome video.
Below the welcome video, there is a link to request for a test ride.

The form asks a lot of questions such as:

What car do you currently own?
When are you planning to purchase the new car?
Will you be buying it as an individual or as a company?
When do you want to request for a test ride?
Do you need financing for the car or will you pay the full amount upfront?
The questions that are being asked in the form is very important to score and profile the leads. The salesperson may not have time to call every lead and give the test ride of the car to them.

He has to filter out the highly qualified buyers from the unqualified ones. Many car enthusiasts who don't have the money to buy cars would still request for a test ride.

The information filled in the form will help the salesperson to prioritize the leads. That's why lead profiling and scoring becomes important. In future lessons, I will show you how lead-profiling and scoring works in real life with practical tools.

You can see that in both the cases mentioned above the sale cannot happen without lead generation.

No one will see an ad and swipe their credit card to buy a home or a car. Lead generation and sales are required in this case because the buyer has a lot of questions that need to be cleared before the sale can happen. And that can be cleared only by a salesperson. And for that, the salesperson needs the contact information of the buyer.

That's why lead generation becomes very important. The same method can be applied for any B2C product that is high-end.

If you are selling an interior-design service or an appliance that is high priced, you need lead generation.

In the first few weeks, we will be focusing on the theory and fundamentals of lead generation which is very important. Without understanding the principles and fundamentals, the strategy and tactics will not make any sense.

If you are looking for tactics and strategies that you can apply immediately, please have patience, they are coming to you in the future lessons. If you understand the principles properly, you will be able to come up with your own strategies and tactics.

That's it for today's lesson on lead generation for high-end B2C products and services. In tomorrow's lesson, we will talk about lead generation for low-end B2B products and services.

Lead Generation for B2B and Enterprise

In previous post, we talked about why it is not required to generate leads for B2C when the products are simple and low priced.

Consumers need not go through a long decision-making process to buy such products and most of the products are purchased on impulse.

There are cases where you will need to generate leads for B2C products, but we will look into it in future lessons.

Today let's discuss Lead Generation for B2B and Enterprise products.

Is lead generation required for it?

Absolutely yes.

Without generating leads for a B2B product or service it is very difficult to sell it.

The products are high priced and also complex in nature.

For example, if I have to sell my digital marketing services to a company, I have to generate leads.

The number of people who can be my potential customers is very low and I cannot do mass marketing or advertising for my services.

Do you think I would end up getting customers for my digital marketing agency if I put a billboard in a busy junction? It might help in brand awareness, but people are not just going to see an ad and buy a complex service with a 6-months contract.

When you are selling high-end services and products for B2B and Enterprise, lead generation is also easy.

You might be thinking that isn't lead generation difficult in such cases?

No.

Lead generation is easy - but the sales and conversion process is difficult.

To sell well, you need a brand, a personal brand, and a good offer combined with a strong sales pitch.

Let's look at an example from my own experience.

I sold a digital marketing funnel building service to a big publication. The publication was Your Story. I had a feeling that if they did digital marketing well, they would be able to scale up their revenues fast.

I wanted to get in touch with their CEO and I was able to do it. It took a lot of patience and persistence, but when I got in touch with her, I requested a meeting and I got it.

In the meeting, we pitched our services and we closed the deal along with some advanced sales and negotiation tactics.

Here, the lead generation was not difficult. We knew their contact details. But I was able to get a response from them because I had a personal brand for myself as a Digital Marketer and they have heard about me. I also did a very strong sales pitch and used my negotiation skills to close the sale.

Let's take another example of a company with products and services for high-end clients. Wipro serving HDFC Bank. If Wipro has to sell their software development services to HDFC, they will not be generating leads online nor will they advertise their services. They will get in contact with the right decision-makers.

Getting a response from the decision-makers and closing the deal is not easy, but the lead generation is not difficult. You just know who your target customers are and you get in touch with them. Your target customers will be very low in number.

So what I am trying to tell you here is that lead generation is NOT required via digital marketing if you are selling very simple B2C products , or very high-end B2B and Enterprise products.

Lead Generation is required when you are selling high priced complex B2C products or low priced B2B products. We will discuss this in the next lesson

If you have any questions about this lesson, let me know.

Do we need lead generation for B2C

If your business doesn't need lead generation, then there is no point in trying to learn how to generate leads, right?

So when does a business not need lead generation?

A business doesn't need lead generation when it is selling low priced consumer goods that are simple in nature.

When consumers need not go through a tough decision-making process to buy something, and when they do not need a lot of time to decide, generating leads is pointless.

Here are some examples of low priced consumer goods:

• Candy
• Soap
• Pen
• Cookies
• Body spray

These FMCG (Fast-moving consumer goods) products are simple, low priced, and attract a lot of repeat buyers.

Companies that sell FMCG products do not need lead generation.

Imagine how difficult it would be if you had to generate leads for someone who is interested in a bar of soap, have a salesperson call them and convince them to buy the soap and close the deal.
It is not practical because the amount of profit that you make from the sale of the soap is not enough to pay for the sales person's time and you would end up making losses with the sales process.

It is also not required because the decision-making process for buying soap is simple. Only when a product or service is complex and has a lot of questions to be answered about it, a salesperson needs to be involved.

Many FMCG products are simple products and decision making is usually impulsive. In such cases, brands will engage in marketing activities to raise brand awareness about the brand and get a strong market positioning within the market that they are operating in.

For example, Gillette is a good brand for men's razor blades and they have a strong market position as the leader when it comes to razor blades. They do not generate any leads for the sales of their products. They just advertise and build brand awareness.

What would you do if you had salespeople that do not take a salary or a commission from you? Would you employ them to sell your low priced, simple B2C products? Probably yes. But in the real world, you cannot hire people at no cost. But you can close yourself digitally and use marketing automation to sell without any human effort.

Can you think of all the products and services that do not require lead generation?