Last Updated:
According to HubSpot, 60% of marketers say that inbound (SEO, blog content, etc.) is their highest quality source of leads, and leads by SEO have a 14.6% close rate. These stats tell us that SEO plays a major role in helping businesses generate leads that eventually convert into paying customers. That’s because people are using search engines to answer pressing questions, solve specific problems, or look for easy ways to perform a certain task. In fact, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. That’s why brands should make it a top priority to optimize their websites for SEO to generate leads.
What Is Lead Generation?
SEO and lead generation aren’t one and the same, but they both go together like peanut butter and jelly. SEO stands for search engine optimization and involves improving your site’s visibility and traffic. You need SEO to rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Without a good SEO strategy, it’ll be difficult for your website to rank higher than that of your competitors. And without ranking, you minimize your ability to bring in leads to your site via search engines. Lead generation involves grabbing the interest of consumers and inspiring them to make a purchase.
By connecting SEO and lead generation together, you come up with a powerful combination that drives traffic to your site, which can eventually lead to conversions. Conversions can be anything from completing a form to buying a product or service on your site.
So, to sum up in just a few words, SEO helps generate leads.
How Do You Generate Leads Through SEO?
Let’s look at an example of lead generation through SEO in action. A business owner is looking for construction companies in their area. They might search “construction companies near me.” Another business owner might need more specific construction repair services, which will turn up more specific results in the SERPs. For example, they might use the search term “emergency construction repair services” or “emergency construction repair services.” He or she might click on the top results that seem to best match their query and user intent.
The business owner has now become a lead as they view some of the construction company’s most recent projects, which show images of their work and a list of services that pertain to emergency repair. Impressed, the lead clicks on the contact page and fills out a form that allows them to specify the nature of their inquiry, their name, company name, address, and more. This is the first official point of contact the lead makes with the company, which could eventually result in a purchase if the lead is satisfied with the company’s service offerings and pricing.
Obviously, every lead generated through SEO will be different, and every touchpoint will vary based on the specific situation. But the overall gist of SEO for lead generation boils down to one key trend: attracting a user to your website from a search engine.
Why Should You Choose SEO For Lead Generation?
SEO for lead generation is a cost-effective marketing strategy because it doesn’t involve paying for TV commercials, radio ads, print ads, and online ads. Inbound lead generation costs 61% less than outbound. There are no ongoing operational costs that come with SEO for lead generation.
When you begin to rank in the SERPs, there’s no cost to keeping your position. While you’ll still have to perform certain marketing tasks like gaining backlinks, sharing on social media, blogging, and getting referrals to boost your rankings, your SEO efforts will have little to no cost at all compared with outbound lead generation activities.
Analyzing SEO Benefits
Cost-savings aren’t the only benefit you can gain from lead generation through SEO. With SEO, you can also:
- Create a better user experience
- Bring higher close rates
- Increase conversion rates
- Build brand credibility
- Establish brand awareness
- Improve mobile-friendliness of your site
- Gain or increase market share
- Synergize all digital marketing activities
- Stand out from the competition
Basically, there’s little you can’t achieve with search engine optimization. You can create content, introduce link-building, optimize the site for local search, and introduce various other improvements that will eventually boost your web traffic.
Even if you’re not that dependent on SEO lead generation, you can still use this tactic to boost other marketing processes. For example, having an optimized site is vital for paid advertising and social media marketing conversions. Eventually, all these people will land on your web pages, and depending on what they see, they may or may not purchase from you.
5 Tips On Generating Leads Using SEO
Now that you’ve gained a better understanding of how SEO and lead generation are connected let’s look at how to use SEO to generate qualified leads.
1. Perform Keyword Research
Keyword research is an important element of your content marketing strategy. Remember the example we talked about above? A potential lead might search for a specific term to turn up the most relevant results. It’s up to you to find out the most searched-for keywords in your particular industry.
Using these keywords in your content will tell Google what your content is about, which will help you rank for the terms your potential customers are searching for. Consider using transactional keywords, which are keywords that indicate a searcher’s intent is to buy something or take action on a website soon. The more relevant the keywords you use, the more likely your content is to rank.
Understanding Keywords and Metrics
Before you can conduct keyword research, you need to understand what kind of keywords are out there:
- Informational keywords
- Branded keywords
- Commercial keywords
- Transactional keywords
For the most part, each one of these phrases is utilized during a specific stage of the funnel. In a normal situation, people will first browse informational keywords, thus getting acquainted with specific topics. Once they realize they have an issue, they will slowly start researching potential solutions by browsing commercial and branded keywords.
Ultimately, they will utilize transactional keywords to find products and services that can meet their needs. To get the most out of the process, you shouldn’t only focus on transactional keywords. In fact, despite not having a high commercial intent, informational keywords are the best way to reach target audience, especially if you’re a relatively small site.
2. Audit Your Website
Auditing your website will help you determine which pages are performing well and which ones aren’t. There are various tools that you can leverage to crawl your website and check for certain things like broken links, problematic titles, meta descriptions (i.e., exceeding character limit), duplicate content, and more.
Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can give you additional insights about the performance of relevant keywords. They can also tell you if your blog posts are suitable for specific search intent and how the target audience responds upon landing on your web pages.
During an audit, you can check all sorts of stuff on your website. The term is generally utilized when we perform a comprehensive analysis, but you can also use it to address certain areas of the marketing process:
- Full website audit
- Competitive audit
- Link audit
- Content audit
- Conversion audit
- Data privacy audit
Full Website Audit
Full audits are usually done when a marketing agency first starts a project. During this process, they need to make sure that the website is indexable and works as intended. An SEO expert in charge will take a look at all sorts of things, from site-wide errors to website speed and mobile responsiveness (something we’ll cover in the next entry).
Competitive Audit
We’ll mention competitor analysis in the following section, so we’ll skip it for the time being.
Link Audit
Given the importance of links for your site, this is something you’ll have to do every once in a while. During a link audit, you’ll need to check the quantity and quality of your links, most notably if some of the incoming links can harm your optimization. This type of audit is vital for scouring potential black-hat attacks and addressing them.
Content Audit
As the name implies, content audit analyzes all the articles and other pages on your site. The main intent is to determine if the pages can be seen properly by all users and whether they’re optimized for Google and other search engines. During the process, a marketer also needs to create a list of future articles that need to be created.
Conversion Audit
One of the most neglected aspects of SEO is conversion. Marketers often neglect the fact their clients need to sell for optimization to be profitable. If you can’t generate money for their enterprise, they’ll pull the plug on the project sooner than later. During this phase, you need to ensure that the client gets the maximum value from every page and that they’re properly streamlined toward service and product pages.
Data Privacy Audit
Data privacy audits are a relatively new process. Marketers use it to review the clients’ websites and company policies, cookies, banners, and other elements and processes that might lead to legal issues.
3. Check Speed and Mobile Responsive
Users are more likely to leave a page if it loads too slowly. So Google is constantly looking for and prioritizing sites that contribute to a positive user experience, which means faster-loading sites are more likely to rank higher. Generally speaking, your goal is to make your pages load within three seconds or less.
With the rise of mobile devices, mobile responsiveness has become a major consideration for marketing experts. Website owners need to make sure their sites can be properly accessed through cell phones and tablets without interfering with user experience. In fact, you need to ensure that similar information is always available, regardless of the device.
If your solution is too complex, you might have to consider hiring software developers to create an app for your brand.
4. Create a Backlink Strategy
Backlinks are crucial when it comes to generating leads with SEO. Google wants to make sure your site is high-authority and offers valuable content. Google does this by checking for sites that link back to yours. So make sure you’re generating backlinks from trustworthy sites with high domain authority.
To gain backlinks, you can do the following:
- Create quality content
- Write guests posts
- Share your blogs on social media
- Comment on high-quality blogs
- Respond to questions on Quora
- Give testimonials
- Get interviewed
- Use influencer marketing
- Leverage authority resource page
Keep in mind that not all links are made the same; some of them can, in fact, be disastrous for your search engine optimisation. We suggest that you focus on sites with a large following and a clean slate. Ideally, you would want to get as many high-quality links from businesses related to yours, as this can increase your authority and relevancy.
One of the biggest no-nos is spamming links from low-quality sites with bad reputations. For example, we suggest you avoid PBNs, overspamming links via social media, and participating in link schemes. While some of these might assist you in the short run, they’ll cause major troubles sooner than later.
5. Look At Your Competitors
To get a leg up on your SEO strategy for organic lead generation, take a look at how your competitors are faring. Keep a record of their positions in search of the same or similar queries. Then, analyze how well their pages perform. If their pages are performing better than yours, figure out why and make adjustments based on your findings. Consider the structure of their posts, how they’re written, the backlinks they’ve gained, etc.
By tapping into their search traffic, you can learn more about their own SEO lead generation strategy and how you might implement this approach to your website visitors. Checking on other sites is one of the prerequisites for generating high-quality leads. Then again, don’t be afraid to experiment with your own tactics if you think they’re more suitable for your brand.
Choosing Lead Generation Company
Using SEO for lead generation can be fantastic for you or a major waste of money – it all depends on the circumstances. Most notably, if you have a new site with limited content and links, you shouldn’t expect miracles overnight. The process takes quite some time, which is why you need to be patient to generate proper results.
The project’s success also hinges on the marketing agency you’ve hired. Given that you’re going against potent global competition, you’ll need the best people for the job.
Unfortunately, finding quality providers is easier said than done. To help you out, we’ve listed a few of the most important things you need to consider during the hiring process:
Check Their Reviews
The best way to learn more about an agency is by checking what kind of work they do for other websites. While testimonials might not be the best representation of their service quality, they can still tell you a lot about their previous clients. On top of that, you should also check reviews on Google, Yelp, and other aggregates.
It’s also worth noting that SEO companies don’t get as many reviews as other service businesses. So, unless we’re talking about large SEO providers, don’t expect you’ll find too much data online.
Check Their Site
Another great method for vetting marketing companies is by analyzing their own performance. Website metrics like Domain Authority are a good starting point, but we suggest you dig a bit deeper. For example, you can use free tools like Ubersuggest to quickly analyze their traffic and search engine rankings.
This type of analysis can also be valuable if you’re looking for a specific service. For example, if you need a good content writing team, your focus should be on articles posted on their site. Even if they suck at other SEO tasks, they might be a great choice for this particular service.
Contact Previous Clients
Of course, even with all the analyses you might perform, you might still not fully understand how an SEO agency does its job. So, to get better insights, we suggest you contact their previous clients.
By talking with their past clients, you might learn more about their ability to cooperate and communicate at the highest level. You might also learn more about their ability to meet goals and deadlines and what kind of conversions you can expect.
Ideally, you should focus on clients who criticized the company’s work, as they can tell you about potential issues you might encounter.
Review Their Marketing Process
You can learn a lot about a lead generation company based on their process. Agencies that have a meticulous methodology that relies on sophisticated software are usually the best choice for you. Most importantly, you should choose providers who are proactively seeking better, more advanced solutions for their clients.
Communication and availability are also major considerations. In the end, you don’t want to partner up with agencies that can’t explain what they’re doing at the moment. Ideally, your provider should send periodic reports or contact you every once in a while to explain where they’re at with the timelines.
Conclusion
SEO is a perfect solution for your lead generation. Not only does this marketing tactic drive a large number of prospective customers to your site, but it can also convert them at a much higher clip than some other marketing tactics.
However, to get the most out of search engine optimization, you should have some basic understanding of the process. That way, you can always stay on top of things, no matter what’s happening around you. Of course, you should also partner up with an agency that can perform this service at a high level.
For more on how to generate leads through SEO, team up with a fabulous SEO agency like Miromind. We’ll help get you the search engine rankings you need for the most qualified leads.