How to use SEO to leverage lead generation

How to use SEO to leverage lead generation

You want more leads and you’re at your wits end with time wasters.

You’ve heard that SEO could potentially bring in more quality leads, but it may take up to 12 months.

So, in terms of lead generation — you’re left with the decision to either A, ramp up your paid advertising and risk paying for more poor quality leads. Or B, start investing in SEO and play the long game.

But what if there was an option C? What if you could speed up the process of lead generation through SEO? Now, you’re talking.

Before we dive into SEO lead generation techniques that will get you more quality leads faster, let’s briefly go over what is SEO and lead generation in Australia.

What is SEO? 

In its simplest form, Search Engine Optimisation involves making changes to different parts of your website to improve rankings and visibility on search engines like Google and Bing.

Properly optimised websites can help you appear on search engine results pages every time someone searches for something related to your business.

This can include improving website speed and performance, creating relevant content with keywords, or exploring engaging content to keep visitors on the page, among other things.

The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase your website’s ranking, bring in the right (qualified) people via search engines and keep them engaged with your content.

So, how does SEO help with sales lead generation?

What is lead generation?

The lead generation meaning for most business owners is getting a consistent stream of sales qualified leads who are ready to make a purchase. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Lead generation is a marketing campaign that focuses on capturing prospects who are interested in your product or service and converting them into a sale.

It uses a number of different strategies and assets including, paid advertising, landing pages, calls to action, and downloadable pieces of content (lead magnets) to persuade the customer to convert.

Lead generation campaigns are crucial to the growth and success of any B2B and B2C, especially with such fierce competition online.

Now that you’ve got a brief understanding of the two, it’s time to discuss SEO vs Lead Generation, and how they work together.

Doing SEO without considering lead generation is like ignoring customers that walk through the door.

Imagine investing your time, effort and money in SEO to optimise your website. You start ranking for business-related keywords and the traffic starts rolling in. All of a sudden you’ve gone from 200 to 1000 visitors a month.

Are you just going to ignore the fact that there are 1000 new users coming to your website every month?

SEO works hand-in-hand with lead generation because the more times your website appears on search engine results pages, the more potential customers can interact with your brand.

And with 93% of online experiences beginning with a search engine, we can see why SEO has fast become one of the best ways to get more clients, increase sales and revenue, and drive business growth.

In fact, 57% of B2B marketers say that SEO generates more leads than any of their other marketing initiatives.

With the right SEO strategy, you can turn your website into one of the most effective lead generation tools that work 24/7 to bring in a steady stream of leads.

See how SEO and lead generation helped grow revenue by 200%

How to generate more leads with SEO

If you’re wondering how to increase your sales from your digital marketing efforts, it’s time to pay attention.

When it comes to inbound marketing strategies, there’s often confusion between B2B online lead generation and B2C lead generation. Although the two are quite different, the fundamentals of creating an SEO strategy are quite similar.

To kickstart your SEO strategy, our marketing team has outlined some simple steps you can take to help increase your website’s organic traffic.

From keyword research and creating a content strategy to content and format, here are 9 SEO best practices for generating more SEO leads.

1. Define your ideal lead

Always begin with defining who your target customer is. It doesn’t matter if you’re launching a PPC lead generation campaign on Google Ads or conducting an outbound lead generation exercise with cold calls, you always need to know who your target audience is.

Defining and creating a customer persona will allow you to create more precise and relevant content that hones in on the targets questions, problems, desires, frustrations, motivations, and even their favourite food.

This ensures your business appears as many times as possible to your ideal lead with the right content at the right time. Start mapping out your ideal lead with our free Customer Persona Template.

2. Spy on your competitors

If it’s already been done, why reinvent the wheel? You can learn a lot from your competitors. With the right SEO competitor analysis tools, you can spy on the competition to find out what’s working, what’s ranking and what you need to outrank them.

Similar Web is a free competitive analysis tool used by top brands and businesses for its ability to provide accurate insights about any given site, app or platform.

You can compare traffic statistics from multiple competitors, including how many unique visitors they generate a month.

Similarweb Market Intelligence

Traffic Overview by Similarweb Market Intelligence

You can also see where their traffic is coming from and the top pages they are ranking for. Pay extra attention to where the traffic is coming from. If you notice a lot of it is from social media, this may be a good opportunity for you to focus more on SEO.

3. Perform a content audit

Before we get into your content strategy, it is important to first conduct an audit of all the content on your website to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses.

A content audit will help you prioritise what service page or product you need to focus your SEO efforts on and where there may be content gaps to fill.

The aim of this exercise is to find out what content pieces are performing the best on your site, what topics is your audience connecting the most with, and which posts are collecting dust.

By the end, you’ll be able to:

  • Pinpoint what pieces of content performed the best on your site
  • Determine what type of content your ideal lead prefers
  • Locate and plug content gaps where visitors may be falling off within your sales funnel
  • Gather ideas for future content pieces
  • Discover pages with high impressions, but low conversions
  • Get rid of content that no longer aligns with your business or audience

Here’s a step-by-step guide to conduct a content audit 

4. Create a content strategy

Now it’s time to figure out what content you’re going to show your target audience. Knowing what content to write or produce can make or break your content strategy, so it pays to know what people are searching for.

Ubersuggest is a great tool that can be used to create content that will actually be read and consumed by your audience. See what top pages and keywords and phrases your competitors are ranking for, and write content that people want to read.

There is also a free keyword tool that shows hundreds of keywords and long-tail keyphrases, as well as the number of searches, making it easier for you to generate a list of keywords that are ranking.

Get content ideas from top-performing content pieces for any keywords discovered in your research and write about topics that will appeal more towards your target lead.

5. Use keywords that turn visitors into leads

At a basic level, there are three stages in a sales funnel to consider: awareness, consideration and decision.

To turn a visitor into a lead, you will need to map out content that satisfies their needs at each stage of their journey and pushes them towards a conversion.

Let’s say you were looking for a new TV. Here’s what you might be searching for at each stage:

SEO for Lead Generation Funnel

Now that you’ve gathered enough information on TVs, and probably created a shortlist, it’s time to start comparing prices, hence looking for discounts and sales. During the awareness stage, you’re simply after information on various types of TVs but are nowhere near making a purchase.

It’s time to make a decision! You know what TV you want, how much it costs, it’s time to find out where to buy that TV model.

Your ideal leads are going through the same stages when they are searching for information around your business offering. This is especially true in B2B lead generation strategies, where the decision to purchase can take anywhere from 1 to 6 months with multiple touchpoints.

By creating content with the right keywords relevant to each stage of the journey, you can increase your chances of turning a visitor into a lead, and eventually, a sale.

Explore different types of content formats

Continuing our conversation above, sometimes it’s not enough to simply write a blog.

Using different types of content formats can help satisfy user search intent at each stage of the journey.

For example, instead of just writing a blog that reviews the top 10 TVs of 2021, you could also create a video version that summarised everything on the blog and place it at the top of the page.

On this page, you might include a downloadable guide or checklist that helps the visitor choose a TV that’s best for them.

Not only will this help increase time spent on the page, but you also increase your chances of turning visitors into leads through engaging and relevant content. 

Optimise SEO channels for conversions

If you have done everything mentioned above, you would have succeeded in generating more qualified traffic to your website. Now it’s time to ramp up the lead generation tactics and turn all those visitors into leads.

These tactics can include things such as:

  • Placement of compelling calls to action on service pages
  • Adding downloadable pieces of content that satisfy search intent on high performing blogs
  • Creating internal links to other relevant pieces of content
  • Include keywords and long-tail phrases that satisfy different stages of the funnel
  • Use landing pages to increase conversions (what is a landing page?)

These conversion optimisation techniques will help improve user experience, boost engagement and increase conversions. This is where your website becomes the ultimate SEO lead generation tool.

What is conversion rate optimisation?

Here’s 12 CRO mistakes you should absolutely avoid

Promote Google Reviews

Reviews are an essential part of the awareness stage and how your ideal prospect searches online. They allow your business to become more visible and help establish an online presence and reputation.

The average consumer will read 10 reviews before they feel they can trust a business, and only 53% of people will consider using a business with less than a 4-star rating. Promoting your reviews increases visitors’ confidence and trust in the brand therefore, it’s in your best interest to get more Google reviews!

But what about negative reviews? Here’s how to handle reviews on Google My Business

Develop outreach partnerships (link building!)

Link building or backlinking is a crucial part of SEO marketing. It involves getting other reputable websites with high domain authority to link back to you. In turn, this will help drive more traffic to your website, boost your rankings and authority.

It’s important to note, however, that not all links are equal.

For example, getting a link from Deloitte will have a huge impact on your ranking when compared to a newly built website with low authority. That said, we know getting a link from Deloitte is a near-impossible task.

Back linking best practices is to try and get links from websites with higher domain authority.

What not to do — Common SEO mistakes to avoid

Like anything in this world, moderation is key! Overstuffing your content with keywords or publishing content that isn’t related to your business can actually cause more harm than good.

Here are some common SEO pitfalls to avoid:

  • Buying bad quality links from directories (link farms!)
  • Keyword stuffing
  • Article spinning (why article spinning is bad for SEO)
  • Creating and publishing content that isn’t related to your business
  • Publishing content that isn’t yours
  • Duplicate content
  • Black hat SEO
  • Not linking to other content on your own website
  • Not linking to other credible sources of content
  • Not defining SEO KPIs linked to lead generation

Is a lead generation agency right for your business?

The online world is changing at a rapid pace.

New competitors are sprouting up by the day and old foes are rising up the ranks the deep, dark depths of page 10 on Google search results page. If you’re not using SEO to leverage your lead generation, you’re going to fall behind.

If you think about it, are you really okay with letting your competitors steal your sales? Because that’s what is essentially happening.

Investing your time, money and effort into driving hoards of traffic to your website without a lead generation strategy is basically giving your competitors free sales.

Don’t end up on page 10 of Google. Let’s talk about how we can help your business use SEO to get more qualified traffic and leads. Get in touch.

See how we generated over 300 online enquiries each month

Updated: November 10, 2022
Leon Dougall

Leon is Invicta’s content specialist and has a bachelors in Journalism. He fell into the world of digital marketing and copywriting and has never looked back. Intrigued by customer journeys and consumer psychology, Leon specialises in creating a seamless, omni-channel experience through his engaging content.

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