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Lead generation through SEO is the lifeblood for most online businesses.
Unfortunately, many digital marketers struggle to boost traffic AND convert it to warm leads.
You may consider paid advertising and traditional marketing, but that investment usually doesn’t produce long-term results.
If you want to learn how to generate more organic leads without a colossal budget, below are some ideas to share with your site development team and other stakeholders.
Optimize Your SEO Landing Pages for Lead Generation
You can drive thousands of visitors to your supposed “converting” landing page, but if that page is a lead generation failure, you’ve simply wasted valuable resources.
Your page should first be optimized for lead conversion:
- Beautiful design
- Calls to action above the fold
- Answer the users’ query as quickly as possible
- Make sure your colors are on-point
- Enticement for capturing lead contact details
It’s not until your page is optimized for conversions that you should work to start driving traffic for lead generation.
We discuss lead generation strategies, including SEO landing page optimization in complete detail in a separate post.
Keyword Research to Match Search Intent
Getting organic traffic hinges on understanding the terms that your prospects and customers use to search. So, performing keyword research is vital so your audience can find your site.
When it comes to generating leads through SEO, you need to consider the following:
Commercial Search Intent
Is the keyword I am targeting in my lead generation relevant to commercial search intent?
In other words, when someone searches where are they in the sales process funnel?
You can capture leads at the top of the funnel by offering downloads, but those leads have less value than hard-hitting leads and you’ll have to push them through a drip campaign to get any results.
And lead generation from an email sequence can take some time.
Your ideal lead is at the bottom of the funnel.
Organic Traffic for Lead Generation
To understand organic traffic in lead generation, you should understand the most important keywords for your business and the competition for those keywords on the Web.
When you use keywords in your site and your content, your site is easier to find.
A vital factor to SEO lead generation success and boosting traffic is doing your homework to find the most keyword searches with the lowest difficulty.
SEMRush, Ahrefs, Moz and Google’s Keyword Planning Tool can help you do this.
Broad Match, Short Tail Keywords
Commercial search intent keywords at the bottom of the funnel are usually broad match and VERY competitive.
That also means it can take time to generate organic traffic from these pages.
You’ll need to update your content regularly, engage a link building company and perform SEO outreach.
Broad match, short tail keywords are the envy of every SEO in any industry.
They’re also key to lead generation.
So, start with the easiest part: where your site is ranking with the highest matches and the most number of searches each month.
Also, look for high-volume keywords that your site doesn’t rank for.
It also pays to look at your site analytics to find where the visitors are coming to your site.
Is it to one of your main site pages or on the blog?
Getting this data will tell you what search engines value on your site.
It will also tell you what potential leads might be searching.
Content for Lead Generation
Having one or even a handful of nicely-designed pages isn’t good enough for lead generation.
You will need to put together a system for creating regular content that is produced and optimized for ranking and conversion.
Regular Content Production
Now that you know the keywords you want to write about, it’s vital to have a regular content marketing strategy. Search engines and readers want to see consistency, so make sure you deliver it.
There is no rule about how often you should post; it depends on how many organic leads you want to get and what you want to do with them.
The more content you write that people like, the more leads you’ll get.
If your site doesn’t get a lot of traffic on its blog, you should focus on critical keywords in the strategy above in this article.
Then, publish at least one strategic blog post per week.
Over time, you should start to rank organically for some keywords that matter to their company.
Regular content can be time consuming.
If you need help, you can engage our content writing services to help with scale.
Optimize Your Content
What good is a beautifully designed website if no one visits and it doesn’t rank?
Lead generation demands you have traffic to your pages because those pages rank for the keywords that matter to your users.
On-page optimization services can help your newly-created pages outrank competing pages for very competitive terms.
Your site’s pages shouldn’t just convert users by generating leads, they should also be optimized for search engines.
We suggest our guide that outlines all the 200 most statistically significant ranking factors in Google.
If you optimize for search engines, you are more likely to be optimizing for lead generation as well.
Off-Site Content Through Link Building
Once you have created pages and posts that are optimized on-site, it’s time to start earning links to your content.
There are literally dozens of strategies for building links to your content.
Spend the time required to optimize your site with quality backlinks.
This strategy will help your pages rank.
Pages that rank get more traffic and generate more leads for your business.
Know Your Lead Personas
Before you write any content, create buyer personas, so you know whom your content is for. So, you should define who is your ideal customer.
When you create high-quality content that speaks to your ideal customers, you will see better organic traffic rankings. Remember that keywords and search only help so much; you need to write helpful information in that content or read it.
When you have figured out who you want to reach the most, you can write content that speaks to them.
Make Enticing Lead Conversion Points
So, you understand how to get new traffic to your site. But you must have places on the site to make that traffic into leads. And it’s more than a contact form.
Think about when you go to a store to look for a pair of shoes. If a salesman comes up to you, usually, you say you are only looking.
It’s the same thing on your site when people see the contact form; many don’t want to reach out.
But what you write a great post that tells them how to buy a rental property, and at the bottom of the post, there’s a link or button that lets you download a free property report. This is a better experience for the user, so they are more likely to reach out.
Also, use the User Flow Tool in Google Analytics. Look at the pages that your readers will and the pages that make them leave the site. It can help make a flow-through model for your site to ensure you know where your readers are coming from, where they’re going, and where they leave the site.
Ask yourself if the process makes sense.
- Is there a way you can make it easier for your site visitors?
- Is there critical information they want to find or a question they want to answer?
Keep in mind that your visitors will have different needs and will be in a different place in their research.
Your site must have many places where people can opt in to what your company sells.
Using Video for Lead Generation
Video has been a vital element in search and SEO for more than 10 years when Google came out with its Universal Search.
But video is still quite underrated in search marketing even now.
One study finds that sites that use video are 53 times more likely to rank on the top pages of Google.
There are a few reasons for this:
- Google is more interested in quality content than keywords; Google knows that readers care about quality. Most videos offer informative content that answers questions.
- Search results that have video have a 41% more CTR than searches without video.
- Video makes the visitor stay on the page longer, so your content is more relevant and authoritative in Google’s eyes.
- Video attracts more backlinks for SEO. Having video and not just text will triple your linking domains.
Curious about your site’s backlinks compared to the competition, use our free backlink checker right now!
Combine Social Media with SEO Lead Generation
The better the content you create, the more sites you can share it to, which means more visits to your website.
Never underestimate the power of social media. When you take time to make the most engaging content, you shouldn’t just stop there.
Share it on your social media channels.
This will increase the chances that the links are used and will bring people to your site.
Think about every social media channel as another search engine, Keywords matter for blog posts, but they are just as key for social media channels.
Remember, the idea of social media today is to provide meaningful search results that answer questions of customers and prospects.
Iterate & Update Your Lead Generation Strategy
A/B test content effectiveness, update content accordingly and iterate regularly.
When it comes to lead generation in SEO, traffic volume can cover the sins of poor calls to action.
But, lead generation means you’ll need content that REALLY stands out.
Keep updating and tweaking on and off-site until you are able to rank for the short tail keywords you desire.
Don’t waste time on making content marketing that serves your interests; focus on your readers’ interests, and the traffic and leads will come!
He is a recurring speaker at the Search Marketing Expo conference series and a TEDx Talker. Today he works directly with high-end clients across all verticals to maximize on and off-site SEO ROI through content marketing and link building. Connect with Sam on Linkedin.
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