Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important digital marketing strategies that businesses use to promote their products and services. On average, people typically conduct a search on Google three to four times a day, making it an effective and incredibly relevant marketing strategy.
Additionally, many businesses use the power of SEO to maximize their lead generation efforts. As most people use search engines to find information, SEO lead generation is a great method to generate more ready-to-buy inbound leads.
If you’ve landed on this blog, you’re probably interested in learning more about SEO lead generation, and we’re here to provide you with all the insight you need to build an effective strategy! In this blog, we’ll cover what SEO lead generation is, why it’s important, where to start, and how you can improve your strategy for long-term results.
What is SEO Lead Generation?
SEO lead generation is the process of attracting and converting potential customers (leads) through organic search engine optimization strategies. It involves optimizing a website and its content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords, thereby driving targeted traffic to the site.
The general goal of SEO lead generation is to convert this traffic into leads by encouraging visitors to take specific actions, such as filling out a contact form, subscribing to a newsletter, or making an inquiry. However, it’s important to note that goals might change depending on your business objectives. While potential buyers submitting contact information or signing up for a company newsletter may be step one of the goal, you ultimately want to convert those leads into sales.
How Does SEO Impact Lead Generation?
SEO plays a significant role in generating inbound leads by increasing visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs) and attracting targeted traffic.
When you optimize your website with relevant keywords, visitors are more likely to find it and convert users into leads. Optimizing your website structure and load times enhances user experience and engagement. Additionally, high-quality content optimized for specific keywords establishes your site as an industry authority.
Proper SEO practices not only impact the number of digital leads generated but can also make the business easier to find for “proof of concept” or “verification” through Google. SEO helps reinforce the validity of the business. Local SEO attracts nearby customers by optimizing for local search terms and acquiring backlinks from reputable sites, boosting your site’s credibility and authority.
When combined with conversion rate optimization (CRO), SEO enhances pathways for visitors to become leads.
Keep Reading: Guide to Optimizing Content for Search Engines
Where to Start With Your SEO Lead Generation Strategy
Identify Your Market
Like any other lead generation strategy, you must first define your target audience and understand their wants and needs. Businesses can identify their market for SEO lead generation by analyzing their target audience’s demographics, behaviors, and preferences.
You can use tools like Google Analytics and social media insights, conduct competitor analysis, and gather customer feedback to understand what potential leads are searching for and tailor SEO strategies to meet their needs.
Define Your Goals
Before you start your SEO lead generation strategy, you must first identify your objectives by determining what you want to achieve, whether it is increasing website traffic, generating more leads, or improving conversion rates.
If you have a newer website, your first goal should be to increase traffic and session duration. Leads can’t come in without traffic, so you must create and publish content that can drive traffic to your website. To help support this, consider sharing your website on social media and other communication channels to get the ball rolling.
Once your goals are clear, establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your SEO efforts. These KPIs might include metrics such as organic traffic, lead conversion rate, and keyword rankings. This allows you to effectively track progress and make informed adjustments to your strategy.
Complete a Competitor Analysis
Once you define your market and SEO goals, it’s time to start a competitor analysis. First, you must identify who your competitors are. Then, you must determine what the goal of your competitor analysis is. Do you want to see what kind of content they have on their website that you don’t? Are you looking to see how they approach their call to action on each page?
Once you do this, you can take a thorough look at what they’re doing and discover ways that you can achieve better results. This includes analyzing their keyword strategies using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs, examining their content quality and backlink profiles, and evaluating their website structure and user experience to uncover strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improvement in their own SEO efforts.
Determine the Best Keywords for Your Business
Without reaching keywords and applying them to your web content, you aren’t going to get the traffic you need for your business growth efforts. However, it’s important to select the right keywords.
To identify relevant keywords for your SEO strategy, use tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to discover the terms your target audience is searching for. Focus on the following aspects:
- Keyword Intent: Determine the intent behind the keywords. Are users looking for information (informational intent), ready to make a purchase (transactional intent), or comparing options (navigational intent)? Align your content with the user’s intent to better meet their needs.
- Search Volume: Look at the search volume for each keyword to understand how often it is searched. Higher volume keywords can drive more traffic, but they may also be more competitive. Balance high-volume keywords with long-tail keywords, which have lower search volume but higher conversion potential due to their specificity.
- Keyword Difficulty: Assess the competition for each keyword. High difficulty means more competition, making it harder to rank. Target a mix of high and low-difficulty keywords to create a balanced SEO strategy.
- Relevance: Ensure the keywords are relevant to your business and the content you can create. Irrelevant keywords, even with high search volume, won’t attract the right audience.
- Trend Analysis: Use tools to identify trending keywords in your industry. This helps you stay ahead of the curve and create content that capitalizes on emerging interests.
Focusing on keyword intent, search volume, difficulty, relevance, and trends can help you develop a more effective SEO strategy that drives targeted traffic and improves your search engine rankings.
Remember the competitor analysis that we just talked about? Another way you can analyze the keywords is by seeing who your competitors are targeting. This allows you to uncover opportunities and gaps in your own strategy.
Optimize Your Website
Search engine optimization isn’t going to happen if you don’t optimize your website for SEO value… shocker, right? Therefore, you must follow web optimization best practices to rank on search engines. To do this, you need to practice the following SEO methods:
- On-Page SEO: First, make sure your site is set to be crawlable (this is an easy step but often overlooked). Optimize meta titles, descriptions, headers, and content with your targeted keywords. Ensure your content is relevant, informative, and engaging.
- Technical SEO: Make sure that you have the proper tracking tags installed, such as analytic scripts, to ensure optimization. Improve your site’s technical aspects, such as page load speed, mobile-friendliness, and site architecture. Ensure that your site is crawlable and indexable by search engines.
- User Experience (UX): Enhance your website’s design and navigation to provide a seamless user experience. This includes improving page load times, creating a mobile-friendly design, and ensuring easy navigation.
Create Valuable, Quality Content
To create high-quality content, develop a content marketing strategy that includes blog posts, articles, videos, and infographics addressing the pain points and interests of your target audience. Optimize all content with relevant keywords, ensuring it is well-structured and easy to read.
Additionally, remember to keep your content fresh by regularly updating old posts and adding new content to maintain relevance and engagement with your audience. This includes adding more relevant, trending topics within the copy and including examples that readers could relate to or help them better understand the subject at hand. Another way you can ensure you’re crafting quality content is by gathering and sharing your own statistics, positioning your company as a data-driven business with the proof to back your expertise up.
Best Practices for Using SEO for Lead Generation
Follow On-Page SEO Practices
To optimize on-page elements, write compelling and keyword-rich title tags and meta descriptions that encourage clicks (without being too clickbaity). Use H1, H2, and H3 tags to structure your content and include keywords naturally for a better conversational flow.
Here’s an example of a good blog heading vs. a clickbaity one:
Good Blog Heading
Heading: “10 Proven Strategies to Improve Your Marketing ROI”
- Why It’s Good: This heading is specific and promises actionable strategies. It clearly states what the reader can expect to learn, appealing to their interest in improving marketing ROI.
Clickbaity Blog Heading
Heading: “The Secret Marketing Trick That Will Skyrocket Your ROI Instantly!”
- Why It’s Clickbaity: This heading uses sensational language and makes unrealistic promises, which can lead to disappointment if the content doesn’t deliver on such bold claims.
It’s important to note that while there can be multiple H2s and H3s throughout a web page or blog, there can only be one H1, and it should serve as the page’s title. The H1 should include the page or blog’s head keyword, and this head keyword should be unique to this specific page or blog on the website. If you have too many places on your targeting the same word, you risk keyword cannibalization, which negatively impacts the ability to rank highly on SERP.
Additionally, use internal links to guide visitors to relevant pages and keep them engaged on your site longer. Internal links help guide the user through the site to answer questions they may have or to related articles that help them learn more about the subject they are interested in. This can also impact content ranking higher for that specific subject matter.
Implement Local SEO
Local SEO is a method businesses follow to help their website rank better locally. There are a few ways that your business can effectively approach local SEO:
- Optimize Your Google Business Profile: Claim and optimize your Google Business Profile (GBP) listing with accurate and up-to-date information.
- Include Local Keywords: Incorporate local keywords into your content and metadata to attract local leads. However, it’s important to note that “near me” is NOT a keyword that we should write for.
- Get More Customer Reviews: Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews, which can boost your local search rankings and credibility.
Additionally, you must ensure that your business passes the NAPU audit, which stands for Name, Address, Phone, and URL. These four components are crucial to getting a business to rank locally. These details help inform search engines and users of the business and ensure consistency in data for a business online.
Improve Technical SEO
SEO lead generation goes beyond the content you have on your website. While on-page and local SEO are impactful, it goes beyond that. That means you have to practice technical SEO, which is everything behind web copy and updating your GBP.
To improve technical SEO, you need to:
- Boost Site Speed: Optimize your site’s loading speed to improve user experience and reduce bounce rates.
- Optimize for Mobile-First: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, as a significant portion of traffic comes from mobile devices.
- Have an XML Sitemap: Create and submit an XML sitemap to search engines to help them crawl and index your site more efficiently.
- Fix Broken Links: Regularly check for and fix broken links to improve user experience and SEO.
Luckily, there are tools offered by Google that allow you to improve site speed and user experience. For example, Google PageSpeed Insights measures your site’s performance and provides suggestions to improve speed and user experience. Additionally, GTmetrix (which was built off of Google’s Lighthouse—the precursor to PageSpeed) offers detailed insights into site speed and performance, including specific recommendations to optimize loading times and enhance overall performance.
Write and Share Content Potential Buyers Want
With all the new AI content generators out there, the web is getting more saturated with the same, generic content. Therefore you must be strategic in your content marketing approach.
When crafting and promoting content, you must write about subjects relevant to the buyer and align with their wants, needs, and interests. Additionally, it needs to have unique insights that AI content generators can’t provide.
For example, let’s say you’re a commercial cleaning company, and you want to write a blog about “the best office cleaning products in 2024”. In this blog, you can provide a brief overview of the best products while also adding your own insight. This includes explaining how your cleaning technicians use them for ultimate cleanliness.
Build a Backlinking Strategy
Backlinking is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own, improving your site’s authority, search engine ranking, and organic traffic.
To ensure quality, focus on reputable and relevant backlinks within your industry. High-quality backlinks from authoritative sites signal trust and relevance to search engines, improving your rankings and attracting targeted traffic. These strategies include guest posting on industry sites, engaging on industry-related forums, promoting content via social media and email, creating shareable content, and reaching out to resource pages.
For example, sharing how your company has implemented AI to help reduce task time in certain areas of the business with other businesses in your industry online can be a great way to engage in discussion, and gain links back to your own site.
Don’t worry if you have backlinks that come from poor websites; you can use tools like Ahrefs or Moz to monitor your backlink profile and disavow harmful links.
Optimize for the User Experience
Have you ever clicked on a website and struggled to find what you’re looking for? This is due to not building your website for the user experience.
The better a user’s experience on your website, the more likely they are to stay and navigate your offerings. To optimize your website for user experience, you must have:
- Easy Navigation: Ensure your website is easy to navigate, with a clear and intuitive menu structure.
- Engaging Design: Use a clean, professional design that makes it easy for visitors to find information and take action.
- Clear CTAs: Include clear and compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) on your pages to guide visitors toward conversion.
There are heatmapping tools out there, like CrazyEgg, that allow you to gain more insights into how users move through the site, helping to further improve the user experience.
Consistently Monitor and Analyze Performance
Without monitoring and analyzing your SEO efforts, you won’t know if they’re impactful lead generators. Therefore, you must consistently check in to see if your strategy is working.
To monitor and analyze performance, consider using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your website’s metrics. Additionally, conduct regular SEO audits to identify and fix issues affecting site performance.
And maybe most importantly, continuously refine and adjust your SEO strategies based on the data and insights gathered to improve results.
SEO lead generation isn’t a one-and-done deal; it requires extensive preparation, strategy, execution, and refinement to ensure you’re using your website as a lead generator. Luckily, there are SEO lead generation companies out there that empower your business to spend more time selling and retaining customers rather than focusing on bringing in new leads.
Key Takeaways
SEO lead generation plays a crucial role in digital marketing, allowing growing businesses to be found quickly by potential customers online. It’s an incredibly impactful approach to inbound lead generation because it attracts more decision-makers who are eager to learn more about what your business has to offer.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, we know a thing or two about SEO lead generation. As a leading outsourced sales and marketing company based in St. Louis, we have a team of SEO specialists who understand the impact it has on sustainable business growth, and we work to provide companies with exceptional results. And we know how effective our approach to SEO lead generation is—we use the same methodology to promote our business!
When you’re ready to maximize the impact of your SEO lead generation efforts, contact the experts at Abstrakt!
