How to use SEO for lead generation? 8 Strategies to capture more leads

SEO reinforces lead generation as it involves tactics that bring you on top in google search results and cultivate your audience’s interest in your brand with optimized content. 

As per a survey, approx. 96% of website visitors are not ready to pay at once, yet you can consistently attract and engage them with SEO support to generate more qualified leads.

In a nutshell, marketers need to work according to google search results to optimize their company’s website. In this article, you’ll find complete information on how to use SEO for lead generation and various implementation techniques.

What is SEO lead generation?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an approach that can help you capture leads and improve brand awareness. And when a business generates leads from the website content or through any unpaid practices, this process is known as SEO lead generation.

Why is SEO important to grow a business? 

SEO is an effective practice of optimizing website content with the support of specific business-targeted keywords, images, and web copy.

The graph below shows how rapidly the searches are increasing, making it even more important for companies to stay on top of the mind of their customers.

Now, let’s understand how the search engine works to find results –

1. Crawlers or special search bots explore the web for the most relevant website links. 
2. These website links are indexed in a database, and analyzed by their keywords, images, web text, video files, and stored data.

Whenever a user searches anything of the search engine (Google, Bing, etc.), then –

3. The search engine hunts for the best results for the searched term by analyzing and comparing with the information present in the database. 
4. Based on its comparison, the search engine presents the closest match as it results for the searched term.

According to Marketing Charts 2012, 59% of B2B and 49% of B2C marketers trust SEO lead generation method. Hence, B2B or B2C businesses have to work hand in hand with SEO to showcase their online presence and rank higher.

SEO lead generation is important to skyrocket your business because; 

• It offers more visibility to your business: Successful SEO practices drive organic traffic to your website; hence, you can expect more leads and potential customers.
• Enables you to stand out among your competitors: Winning SEO tactics will help beat your online competitors by ranking you higher so that your target audience finds you and doesn’t miss any crucial leads.
• Helps to get consistently qualified traffic: If your content is optimized and considered relevant according to the search engines, then you will get a higher rank effortlessly in many closely matched search engine results pages. 

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Ways to do lead generation through SEO

There are mainly two ways through which you can generate leads by implementing an SEO digital marketing strategy –

Direct way: It helps drive more prospective customers to the website where you can directly pitch for sales.

Indirect way: It helps generate SEO leads through various platforms by synergizing with the different marketing channels.

Let’s understand the two aspects in detail.

1. Direct way of SEO lead generation

SEO tactics were used globally to drive more target audiences into your business website so that the relevant offerings such as content, videos, product knowledge, etc., can be used to generate leads.

To grow your customer list using SEO, marketers need to optimize well: 

• Reaching potential audiences by targeting transactional Keywords: 

Audience and target audience are two different things. Businesses look for leads that are interested in their brand, product, or services.

SEO lead generation tactics of targeting specific demographic with transactional keywords will help you achieve your business targeted audience.

Before heading forward, let’s understand what transactional keywords are.

Transactional keywords are the terms that indicate the intent of searchers with respect to their search.

For example, if a user searches for the “Salesmate CRM price,” then the word “price” shows their likeliness to purchase the Salesmate software.

Examples of a few transactional keywords – benefits, cost, solution, problems, buy, purchase, etc.

Lead generation will be easier if you’ve learned the art of implementing the most relevant transactional keywords according to your target audience’s interest.

• Satisfying the search intent by posting relevant content regularly: 

As you know, search engines give results by comparing the content with the searches, so it is important for businesses to publish the content on their website that their target audience is looking for.

Your content should be able to satisfy your audience’s quest, and remember that only high-quality content can hold your website visitors.

Ensure your content is relevant and powerful enough to convert your target website visitors into your customers authoritatively.

First, it is important that Google verify and trust your site, or we can say get a high website domain authority.

Now, understand what domain authority is? 

Domain authority of a website predicts the chances of the website ranking in the SERPs. It is a ranking score given by search engines by measuring the total number of high-quality links that route towards your website.

Another factor that impacts search intent is visitor engagement. The amount of time a visitor spends on your website after landing on it tells Google about your website quality.  

If visitors don’t stay much longer on your website, then search engines don’t consider the website good enough to showcase as a result. 

The most reliable trick to satisfy your target audience’s search intent is by providing high-quality content that solves their query, enhances their knowledge, etc. 

 Key tips for mastering the search intent with content: 

• Engage by responding timely to the queries of your target audience. 
• Rejuvenate the reader’s mind with powerful content that includes valuable insights, proven ideas, relevant images, and videos.
• Convince the readers with practical examples that trigger them to believe in your brand.

SEO content will boost the chances of lead generation as you can serve the right content in front of the right audience.

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2. Indirect way of SEO lead generation 

Using SEO lead generation is an advanced practice that leverages businesses to grow their customer lists with highly qualified leads.  

Below are the 4 effective marketing efforts that can boost your customer list when synergized with SEO.

Social media: You can optimize your social media to promote high-value content and drive more traffic to your website. 

Local business listing: You can provide necessary information about your company, such as the name, address, and contact details. Local business listings can target a specific audience and sell better.

Leveraging Reddit/Quora: You can find out what your prospects want and interact by answering their questions on platforms like Reddit & Quora.

Guest posting: You can contribute content for other websites with your potential customer as their audience; in return, you can get a link to your website.

The next topic is key strategies that will tell you how you can get a higher position in search engine result pages of your target audience.

Let’s get started.

8 SEO lead generation techniques to thrive your business

In addition to SEO, you need to implement certain techniques to get desired results. Below we have mentioned the 8 most effective lead generation techniques that every business can implement.

1. Audit your website

Auditing the website is a consistent practice that enables marketers to understand where their website stands in terms of overall performance. Conducting a local SEO audit can be particularly beneficial for those focusing on local businesses.

Identifying which web pages are doing well and which ones require optimization is necessary. So, it is advisable to audit your website first to find opportunities for improvement. 

SE Ranking, Google Search Console, Ahrefs SEO Site Audit Tool, SEMrush Site Audit Tool, and SiteChecker Pro are other widely used SEO tools for all types of businesses to audit websites. 

2. Optimize your website loading time

Website loading time impacts your search engine ranking. Hence, a slow loading time of your website will negatively impact your website ranking and result in higher bounce rates. 

With minimum website loading time, you can provide a great user experience to your target visitors, boosting your ranking on SERPs. 

Now, the question is how to check your website speed. 

Well, some effective free tools are available that will help analyze your website loading time and specific web page performance.

You can go for free tools such as the PageSpeed test by Google or Pingdom to check the speed of your site.

Key SEO tips to boost your website speed –

• Always choose a reliable web hosting service provider like Hostinger, Bluehost, Dreamhost, etc. 
• Your website should be mobile responsive as most of the target audience search through mobile phones.
• The images should be optimized & for this, you can use TinyPNG(an image optimizer plug-in). 
• Optimize scripts with the use of WP Fastest Cache.
• Always clean your database. You can use Wp-optimize for this. 
• Fix broken links.
• Delete spam comments (if any).
• Remove all the unnecessary plug-ins and scripts.

We can say, the faster response of your website to searches will give your site a higher ranking on SERPs. So, identify your website performance and improve it with the help of SEO tools. 

3. Utilize the power of keyword research

Keyword research is one of the most peculiar practices in SEO lead generation strategy. Businesses find specific words that are used while searching for a product or service related to their brand.

An online business can get a maximum number of relevant leads with the right keywords, enabling the search engine to identify your brand for your target audience. 

You can use free keyword tools such as Answer the Public and Keyword Planner to discover keywords for your business. 

With the help of other smart keyword research tools such as Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, Semrush, Google Search Console, Jaaxy, etc., brands can find the most relevant keywords. 

Valuable free resource –

You can check out Neil Patel’s video showing how to conduct keyword research. It is a 60-second insightful resource to learn for free.

4. Update on-page content

All your marketing efforts are ineffective if you don’t have enough relevant content to engage your target audience or hold your website visitors. 

Your website content should be able to give a great user experience by providing information that adds value in a certain way.

While checking your website on-page content, notice; 

• Do you have a good web copy? – The website’s headings, subheadings, etc., should be clear and concise. Moreover, look after the Meta Title, Meta description, and keyword density. 
• Is your web copy worth reading? – The descriptions should be relevant, informative, and useful to your readers. 

You can analyze your landing page performance with Google analytics. It enables marketers to find the specific areas that are responsible for increased bounce rates.

Google Analytics lets you successfully identify all the problems with the on-page content to improve for the best results. 

5. Check your competitor’s activity to optimize

Smart business owners always check their competitors’ activities so that they are one step ahead of them.

A good SEO competitor analysis software like Similar Web can help you find what’s working for your competitor and can help you outrank them. 

You can analyze more than one competitor and compare their performance to get the best idea to win among them. 

An SEO competitor analysis tool lets you check where most of the traffic is coming from, the top-performing pages, blogs, etc. If you have a new business, then a competitor’s analysis will be a guiding light to designing your marketing and sales strategy.  

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6. Create a blog with SEO content

Businesses considerably use blogs as a source to target more audiences and attract potential leads.  

The blogging companies obtain 97% more links, and 77% of online users read blogs. Hence, blogging is a great SEO practice that enhances website performance. 

Businesses create blogs to drive potential traffic and convert them into your leads for further process of the sales funnel. A successful blog can generate massive leads for your brand. 

Key SEO tactics to optimize your blogs –

Use keywords smartly: You must cover all keywords related to your industry, brand, product, service or target audience, etc.  Using keywords is good but avoid irrelevant keyword stuffing as this may harm your website credibility.

Consistency is the key: Creating a blog could be easy. But, you should post useful content on your blogs regularly and maintain a specific frequency to get needful results. 

Leverage subheadings: Use H1, H2, H3, or H4 subheadings and provide a structure to your content for a better user experience. 

Content formatting: Content value is truly consumed only if its formatting pleases your readers. So, make sure your blogs have proper formatting.

Below are the formatting guidelines for creating blogs

• Use heading and subheadings 
• Use bullets to point over the long form of content 
• Write short and clear sentences 
• Linked with the relevant content for better understanding  
• Highlights text by turning bold to emphasize 
• Underline or Bold the text when to drive attention  

A consistent, targeted, valuable blog generates more leads, enhances website traffic, drives more sales, and thrives your brand awareness. 

7. Leverage link building to generate leads

Link building is an SEO practice to acquire links to your website from other relevant sites. These links are formally known backlinks.

Implementing a successful link building strategy requires a careful balance of time, effort, and link building costs, as various approaches, such as content creation, influencer outreach, or utilizing link-building tools, may entail different costs. 

Search engines consider those websites well for high ranking if they have backlinks from trusted websites.

Links enable your target audience to navigate to the desired web pages. It also guides search engines while crawling to bring out the most relevant results from your website. 

You can remove the tag rel= “nofollow” so that the crawlers can identify it. 

You can also manually approach relevant bloggers for a guest post for credible link sources of prospecting leads.

8. Implement local SEO practices

Although you can present your online business to a worldwide audience, many companies must implement local SEO practices. This can help you leverage local SEO for lead generation.

For example, if you have a bakery in California in the US and the most suitable audience for your shop is the people of the Western United States. Then, local SEO practice can help you rank higher for that specific search.

Local SEO best practices that you need to consider

• Submit your business information on online local directories such as Google  
• Identify and focus on geo-specific keywords 
• Register on the Google My Business list
• Optimize your on-page content for local search
• Generate complimenting reviews 

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What is the most reliable SEO lead generation tool in 2024?

The most effective SEO lead generation tools help discover your target audience to grow your ideal customer lists. Below are the top SEO lead generation tools that help in website audits, content performance, competitor analysis, keyword research, and many more. 

• Ahrefs 
• Semrush 
• Surferseo 
• Moz 

Here’s the list of additional tools that can help you improve SEO lead generation –

• Ubersuggest for keyword research 
• Hike for SEO analytics (best for startups & small businesses) 
• Yoast for On-page SEO
• Keyword for SERP tracking
• Google Analytics for web analytics 
• Deadline Checker for spotting the broken links 

Once you’ve generated leads, you need to capture them and bring them into your database. So, keep reading to discover how to capture more leads and engage with them.

How to capture leads generated by SEO and boost the business with automation?

SEO lead generation practices are giant in driving website traffic, but what next? 

Having thousands of people as your daily website visitors is great only if you successfully capture contact information such as mobile phone numbers or email addresses. 

To achieve this, you require lead generation & management software that provides contact web forms, chatbots, or live chat features to capture the prospecting leads.

Salesmate CRM can help you in both lead generation and automation that supports business growth.

Salesmate is a robust lead generation & automation tool that supports your marketing and sales team’s exponentially growing business graph.

Salesmate’s lead generation features for better engagement

Web Forms Builder: You can create customized web forms to capture your website visitors’ information and access the data from your CRM.

Live Chat & Chat Journeys: You can implement Live Chat on your website to solve customer queries and engage with them. Chat Journeys initiates the conversation with your website visitors when your customer support executives are unavailable.

Meeting Schedulers: You can add a meeting scheduler to your website so they can directly book a meeting with you.

Once you have the information, you can start your outreach and connect with the leads.

Salesmate offers an email marketing feature to send customized bulk emails to achieve various business goals. You can track your email performance and automate your email campaign for scaling your business.

Final thoughts

SEO for lead generation is a sustainable marketing effort that creates a robust base for future business objectives. A good SEO practice will drive consistent traffic to your website, and you can move forward further by nurturing leads for sales.

So, try out Salesmate’s advanced features and start generating more leads for your business!