seo search engine optimization link building agencyseo search engine optimization link building agencyseo search engine optimization link building agencyseo search engine optimization link building agency
  • BRANDS
    • Marketer.co
    • PPC.co
    • Link.Build
    • DEV.co
    • Website.Design
  • SERVICES
    • Managed SEO
    • Link Building
    • On-Page SEO
    • White Label SEO
    • Content Writing
    • SEO Audits
    • PPC Management
  • TOOLS
    • Backlink Checker
    • Site Audit
    • Broken Link Tool
    • Robots.txt Tester
    • Sitemap Validator
    • Site Speed Tester
    • Title Tag Checker
    • AI Content Writer
    • SEO Training
  • WHY US
    • Case Studies
    • Our Process
    • Our Team
    • Our History
    • Acquisitions
    • Become a Writer!
  • BLOG
  • CONTACT
LOGINGET STARTED
✕
Why Older Web Pages Outrank Newer Pages on Google
Why Older Web Pages Outrank New Pages on Google
February 10, 2022
What is QDF? How You Can Leverage it for SEO Growth
What is QDF? How You Can Leverage it for SEO Growth
February 10, 2022

How to Improve the Quality of Your Online Leads

Last Updated by Timothy Carter on February 10, 2022
How to Improve the Quality of Your Online Leads

For most online marketers, success boils down to how much revenue your campaign generates.

That revenue is tied to paying customers, and paying customers are just leads who made it through the sales funnel.

Accordingly, many online marketers measure their success in terms of how many leads they were able to generate.

It’s a good number to know, for sure, but there’s one major problem with it: it doesn’t tell you how good those leads are.

Working with five great bottom-of-the-funnel leads is better–and will result in more revenue–than 100 irrelevant or uninterested leads from some tangential whitepaper download on your website.

That 100 number is a flashy vanity metric, but without substantive lead quality, it’s essentially useless.

We write a lot about increasing traffic to your site and improving conversion rates, and this is important for B2B and B2C companies alike.

When most people talk about “conversion optimization,” they’re talking about increasing the quantity of leads you receive.

What follows is a discussion on lead quality, why it matters and how to improve it.

Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

  • Why Lead Quality Matters
  • How to Filter Your Leads for Quality
    • Improve Content Targeting
    • Refine Your Social Media Efforts
    • Segment Your Landing Pages
    • Funnel Conversions Into an Email Campaign
    • Make the Conversion More Demanding (But, Be Careful)
    • Individualize Your Landing Pages
    • Improve Overall Site Design
    • Select Targeted Demographics in Advertising
    • Use Multi-Step User Paths to Pre-Qualify Leads
    • Add More Calls to Action, Including Chatbots
    • Measure Lead Quality in Multiple Channels
  • Conclusion

Why Lead Quality Matters

If you’ve ever been in a sales position, you know why lead quality matters. Low quality leads are people who aren’t interested in your product or brand, or those who are just interested in finding out more details without really buying anything (tire-kickers).

They may even be people who fall outside your demographics if you’re generating leads automatically.

All this is a problem because every “weak” lead you spend time on is wasted time you could have spent on a high quality lead. You might get fewer leads overall, but your sales ratio will be much better.

How to Filter Your Leads for Quality

If you’re just getting started with online marketing or conversion optimization, you might want to focus on quantity first—there’s no use trying to filter two leads down to one lead, but once you start getting dozens or hundreds of leads on a regular basis, you’ll need to focus that stream down to only what’s most important. Here’s how you do it:

Improve Content Targeting

This first option might seem obvious, but it’s easy to neglect.

Your content is responsible for the majority of your inbound traffic and early interested leads—it attracts people from search engines and social media, and forms visitors’ impressions of your site when they start poking around.

The type of topics you pick can have a drastic impact on the people who eventually choose to convert. For example, if you write about basic, general topics in your industry, you’ll tend to attract leads who are nearly unfamiliar with your type of company and industry best practices.

If you need qualified leads with more experience or familiarity, you’ll have to increase the vocabulary and change the focus of your articles.

Your content marketing strategy, if executed with care, can be your greatest source of incoming leads.

Writing regular high-quality content and using the power of social media channels to syndicate that content will naturally attract dozens, and in time, hundreds of leads to your website. In order to maximize the conversion potential for those leads, and ensure that those leads are as qualified as possible, you need to adjust your content strategy accordingly.

For example, if you own a law firm, but you only do work with business clients, writing content about consumer-focused law and litigation work might attract a large number of people to your blog—but those people wouldn’t belong to your key demographic, and your lead quality would correspondingly decline. It’s better to write and publish content that caters to a highly specific type of person—the kind of person you’d love to come in as a lead.

Refine Your Social Media Efforts

Just like content, the things you publish on social media can have an effect on who comes to your site. However, on social media, you have more control over who comes into and remains in your pool of followers.

For example, you can target specific demographics to reach out to and build an audience person by person to increase the percentage of connections who fall into your targeted demographics.

You can also use segmented lists to filter out those who might not be relevant—such as people outside your geographic area.

Additionally, you (or a member of your team) can spend more time on social media, reaching out to individuals you know would make good leads and following them.

This will get their attention and gradually shift your following to be mostly comprised of prequalified leads.

Segment Your Landing Pages

If your content and social adjustments don’t help, you can consider funneling people to different landing pages based on their intentions (and possibly behavior).

For example, let’s say you offer three different levels of service:

  • one for beginners
  • one for experts
  • one as a white-label service for other businesses

Here, you can create three different landing pages with specific copy that only appeals to one of these demographics (each).

If you funnel lots of traffic to each of these pages, they’ll naturally filter out any leads who aren’t qualified for each specific service.

Funnel Conversions Into an Email Campaign

Instead of attempting to get leads right away, turn your main site of conversion into a “prospective lead” generator.

When you get someone to fill out your form, subscribe them to an ongoing email campaign (or similar marketing strategy that keeps your brand top-of-mind).

A portion of these subscribers—only the most interested—will open your emails regularly, and might even reach out directly to you.

With every email, your pool of prospective leads will grow warmer toward your brand, and uninterested parties will naturally unsubscribe, allowing your lead pool to filter itself.

Make the Conversion More Demanding (But, Be Careful)

What I’m about to suggest violates a basic principle of conversion optimization: make the conversion as easy as possible.

When you do this, you greatly increase the quantity of leads you receive, but unfortunately, you also decrease the quality.

By making your conversion process more difficult, such as asking more questions or requiring a specific commitment to proceed, you’ll filter out the marginally interested parties and focus solely on those who are already willing to buy.

The downside to this strategy is that you can end up alienating those who may not yet be at the bottom of the funnel.

Why is this bad?

Well, if you can still capture them long before they may convert, you can still hold their attention with the occasional marketing message via email. That way when they are ready to purchase, your product or service is top of mind for their needs.

What looks like a low(er) quality lead today, may be a very hot lead 6, 12 and 24 months from now, once you’ve had a chance to warm them up.

If your conversion funnel was too demanding, you may have missed them altogether.

So, when looking to increase the quality of your leads, A/B test to make sure there is a balance between volume and quantity.

That balance will be different for each company and across industries.

Individualize Your Landing Pages

Another option is to set up one or more highly specific landing pages for your users.

For example, instead of vaguely leading people to your website and a generic contact form, you can create a specific landing page for each of your products or services (depending on how many you have).

These specific landing pages will explain exactly what the product is, and speak directly to whichever demographic you’re targeting.

The downside to this strategy is you will likely see fewer conversions.

Not everybody visiting a car dealership is going to be interested in buying a new, red sports car, and not everybody visiting your landing page is going to be interested in what you’re selling.

But by sacrificing the sheer volume of leads, you’ll be effectively narrowing your lead pool to only the most interested and qualified candidates. You’ll have sacrificed a flashy number in exchange for a faster, more valuable lead pool.

You can direct users to these specific landing pages using whatever marketing channels you want; for example, you could tie different landing pages into different blog categories or link them to specific groups of PPC ads.

Improve Overall Site Design

It goes without saying that poorly designed web pages convert poorly.

Creating a quality landing page may mean improving your existing landing page design or overall website design with a website rebrand.

Here’s an internal example from SEO.co directly. We went from this:

improve web design to improve leads

To this:

improving landing pages and design for improved lead quality

When we redesigned our website, we also simultaneously rebranded our company.

In doing so, the redirects from the old to the new traffic took a hit.

However, even with <1/2 of the former traffic, the new brand and site continued to outperform the old brand in lead quality, thanks to the trustworthiness imbued by the updated design.

If you update your design properly, using the right color psychology, you should expect to see an improvement in the quality of your leads.

Select Targeted Demographics in Advertising

Speaking of advertising, selective demographic targeting is possible with many types of paid online advertising.

For example, Facebook ads allow you to get incredibly specific with the types of users you advertise to.

You can select an ideal gender, age range, selection of interests, and geographic location, and the social network will only display your ads to people meeting those requirements.

The keys to harnessing this to its maximum potential are knowing which demographics make for the best leads, and engaging those demographics with compelling design and copy.

Start by categorizing your incoming leads in terms of their identifiable demographic qualities, and measuring how successful each follow-up is.

When you aggregate your data, you should be able to identify which qualities result in the most successful opportunities, and you’ll be able to favor those qualities in your advertising from there on out.

Incorporate multiple designs and different lines of copy to run A/B tests once you roll out your ads.

That way, you can determine the best type of messaging to use for your future campaigns.

Use Multi-Step User Paths to Pre-Qualify Leads

This strategy is especially useful for filtering leads that must meet a series of different requirements.

Essentially, you’ll be creating a workflow for your users to follow, from initial entry to point of contact.

You can structure this however you’d like; as an example, you could have a social media post that introduces an article by saying “Are you a small business owner? You’ll want to read up on these energy tips” and filter your audience to only small business owners interested in saving energy.

Then, your article could focus exclusively on electricity, filtering out any small business owners who want to save on gas or other forms of energy.

Finally, you can end your article with an anchor-text targeted, quality backlink to a landing page by asking “Do you use more than X kW of electricity a year?” and filter out low-energy businesses.

The landing page could filter out even more unqualified leads.

Including multiple steps like this will lower your conversion rates and through-traffic, but it will increase the quality of your leads. Your goal should be filtering out as many bad fits as possible in the least amount of steps.

Add More Calls to Action, Including Chatbots

Along with our website redesign, we implemented many more calls to action across our site, including an automated chatbot:

live chat engagement on site

Upon implementation of the chatbot, our leads increased some fourfold.

More importantly, the quality of the leads that come in from the chatbot, far surpass any leads we have had from any other source, with the exception of direct inbound calls.

We have found that the chatbot leads include many more individuals who are closer to the bottom of the funnel in their buyer journey.

In addition, we have made sure that the chatbot call to action differs from page to page, ensuring the chatbot prompt matches the intent of the user visiting the page.

This ensures the interaction with the bot is extremely targeted.

Measure Lead Quality in Multiple Channels

This is by far the best long-term strategy you can incorporate in order to maximize the quality of your online leads.

Start by defining all available marketing channels that eventually lead to a contact.

This could mean setting up a different landing page for each medium, tracking user behavior based on points of initial entry, or simply asking “how did you hear about us?” on a contact form.

Run your marketing campaigns as you normally would, and sort those leads into different categories based on how they initially found you.

Once you’ve done that, measure the quality of each lead in terms of two characteristics: the lead’s level of interest, and the quality of the fit.

You can measure the interest level by gauging how enthusiastic the lead is about your company, and you can determine the quality of the fit based on how neatly the lead fits into your model of the “perfect” customer.

Find a way to aggregate those measurements, and compare the averages of each category.

By the end of your analysis, you should have a very clear idea of which advertising or marketing channel generates the highest quality leads.

Knowing this, you can cut some of the lower-quality channels, and focus more on your efforts toward the more successful medium.

Conclusion

Truly successful lead generation strategies are ones that give you the best opportunities, not the most opportunities. Setting up a system that feeds you only the most qualified leads will eventually save you time, money, and stress.

If you don’t want to build new landing pages or new user workflows, you can at least get started with understanding and catering to your ideal customer demographics.

Every action you take counts toward refining your lead pool and perfecting your lead generation strategy.

These aren’t the only options for increasing lead quality, but they are some of the most practical and most effective.

As you can see, most can be set up in a matter of hours, and provide a steady filter to weed out some of the least relevant leads in your sales pool.

Every bad lead filtered out is less time wasted by the sales team and higher percentages of sales to traffic, so continue refining your system until you’re left with a well-oiled lead-generating machine.

  • Author
  • Recent Posts
Timothy Carter
Timothy Carter
Chief Revenue Officer at SEO.co
Industry veteran Timothy Carter is SEO.co’s Chief Revenue Officer. Tim leads all revenue for the company and oversees all customer-facing teams - including sales, marketing & customer success. He has spent more than 20 years in the world of SEO & Digital Marketing leading, building and scaling sales operations, helping companies increase revenue efficiency and drive growth from websites and sales teams. When he's not working, Tim enjoys playing a few rounds of disc golf, running, and spending time with his wife and family on the beach...preferably in Hawaii.

Over the years he's written for publications like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications. Connect with Tim on Linkedin & Twitter.
Timothy Carter
Latest posts by Timothy Carter (see all)
  • Drip Marketing Campaigns: How to Structure & Send Emails for Maximum Impact - February 6, 2023
  • Why Aren’t My Landing Pages Working? [50 Reasons] - January 31, 2023
  • 18 Search Engine Alternatives to Google - January 20, 2023
Share
5
Timothy Carter
Timothy Carter
Industry veteran Timothy Carter is SEO.co’s Chief Revenue Officer. Tim leads all revenue for the company and oversees all customer-facing teams - including sales, marketing & customer success. He has spent more than 20 years in the world of SEO & Digital Marketing leading, building and scaling sales operations, helping companies increase revenue efficiency and drive growth from websites and sales teams. When he's not working, Tim enjoys playing a few rounds of disc golf, running, and spending time with his wife and family on the beach...preferably in Hawaii. Over the years he's written for publications like Entrepreneur, Marketing Land, Search Engine Journal, ReadWrite and other highly respected online publications.

Related posts

Is It Possible to Succeed in SEO Without Link Building?
February 8, 2023

How to Rank Without Building Backlinks


Read more
Ultimate Guide to Drip Marketing Campaigns
February 6, 2023

Drip Marketing Campaigns: How to Structure & Send Emails for Maximum Impact


Read more
Local SEO Strategies & Tips
February 1, 2023

14 Local SEO Strategies & Tips


Read more

Inc 5000 Logo

Our Services

  • SEO Services
  • Link Building Services
  • On-Page SEO
  • White Label SEO
  • Content Writing Services
  • Amazon SEO
  • PPC Management
  • Public Relations
  • Brand Mentions
  • SEO Site Audits

SEO Resources

  • SEO for Beginners
  • Link Building Guide
  • Local SEO
  • Online Marketing
  • Digital Marketing
  • Content Marketing
  • SEO Reseller
  • Backlink Checker
  • Keyword Research
  • Google Ranking Factors

About SEO.co

  • About Us
  • SEO Team
  • SEO Blog
  • SEO Clients
  • SEO Tools
  • Markets Served
  • Locations Served
  • Client Login
  • Contact

Contact Us

Email: info@seo.co
Call: +1 (877) 545-4769
Address: 1425 Broadway Suite 22689
Seattle, WA 98112
White Label SEO Agency
  
Outwrite. Outrank.
© 2023 SEO.co. All Rights Reserved
Privacy Policy | Sitemap
    GET STARTED
      Manage Cookie Consent
      To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
      Functional Always active
      The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
      Preferences
      The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
      Statistics
      The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
      Marketing
      The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
      Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
      View preferences
      {title} {title} {title}