Why you should avoid lead generating websites
More and more lead generating websites are popping up. You probably know of the few bigger name ones. And you might of actually got some phone calls or emails from some of the smaller ones.
Now the problem with these sites are that they want you to pay a lead fee for the traffic they generate. And it is always the same pitch, they have tens of thousands of website hits a month. And they give you a big speech how you can benefit from joining their site. But in the end, why pay another site to link to yours and fuel their rankings for your keywords? You are much better off taking those monthly or individual fees and hiring someone to do organic local SEO to your own site. In the long run you will start ranking your own site for the terms you are looking for and the best part is once you stop SEO you rankings stay the same! At least for a while. Unlike the link generating site, once payment stops your leads stop, no matter if you dumped 5k into their system or not.
The other pitfall I have noticed is if you are a smaller website, and you decide to add your website link, a description for you company/business with all the keywords you use for your own site. Next thing you know is the lead generating site starts out ranking you for those keywords. So not only are they now your competition, the leads you would normally get from your own site are getting pass through a lead generating site and you have to pay for what should already be rightfully yours.
The overall point is, just because a website says they have a lot of traffic doesn’t mean you should pay them money for you to have your link on their site. There are many factors to evaluate outside of site traffic. And if you do a little math and they want you to pay $5-$50 per lead that is like paying that much for each click. In which case you might as well set your daily budget to $50 on Google and get on the first advertising spot on Google for specific keywords and get more traffic per click. And in the end, anything over a few hundred dollars a month should be put toward your own online marketing/search Engine Optimization campaign. Lead generation is an expensive short term solution, whether you are paying Google per click or a third party lead generation website, once the payment stops so does the traffic.