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 engine. 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.
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 market share
- Synergize all digital marketing activities
- Stand out from the competition
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.
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 and meta description (i.e. missing, exceed character limit), duplicate content, and more.
3. Check For Speed
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.
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 offering 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…
- 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
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 for 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, backlinks they’ve gained, etc.
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.