How to Use SEO for Lead Generation

B2B businesses can use many different marketing strategies to drive leads. One of the most effective is search engine optimization or SEO—the process of creating content and optimizing your website to improve your visibility in search engines.Keep reading to learn about SEO lead generation and how to get SEO leads, or check out SEO services from our partners at WebFX to learn more.

How does SEO contribute to lead generation?

SEO is a digital marketing strategy that involves creating content and optimizing your website to improve your rankings in search engines.

Lead generation is the process of generating interest in your business, product, or service so that you can convert interested leads into customers. Typically, lead generation involves collecting potential customers’ contact information so you can establish a relationship and nurture them toward a sale.

So, how do these two strategies work together?

With an SEO strategy, you can increase your visibility in search results for search terms related to your business that your potential customers are likely to search. 

Creating relevant content that ranks in search brings your target audience to your website where you can establish a relationship with them and collect their contact information.

Is SEO effective for lead generation?

To put it simply, the answer is yes.

There’s a reason SEO is known for being one of the most effective digital marketing strategies out there. It allows you to get your website in search results where people can find it, and with a good SEO strategy, you’ll end up earning tons of traffic from Google.

SEO is also perfect for generating leads. Some marketing strategies, like email marketing, aren’t really intended to generate leads—they exist more to market to people who are already leads. But SEO helps people find your website for the first time, causing many of them to become leads. 

How to create an SEO lead generation strategy

Here’s a look at a basic SEO lead generation strategy:

1. Define your target audience

The first step is to identify your ideal customers. Say, for example, that you run a contracting company focusing on home repairs and renovations. Your target audience would be homeowners in your area.

2. Create relevant, valuable content

The next step is to create content that speaks to your target audience. In our home repairs and renovations example, you could create content about topics like how to complete basic home repair projects and how to choose the right type of deck for your home. 

As your audience finds these articles through search and visits your website, they’ll get to know your brand and begin to trust your expertise.

3. Optimize your website for search

Another crucial step in the process is optimizing your website and content to improve your rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). 

These optimization methods include content-related strategies, such as creating highly valuable and relevant content, and more technical tactics, such as improving page speed and usability. We’ll cover optimization tips in more detail in the next section.

4. Collect leads’ contact information

The next step is to implement ways to engage SEO leads and capture their contact information. Some leads might convert directly on your website through a quote form, for example. Others might sign up for your email newsletter and convert there several months down the road.

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11 tips for using SEO for lead generation

Now that you know how SEO and lead generation work, you might be wondering how to improve your rankings in search so that you can drive more leads.

SEO involves many different tactics, but here are 11 of the most important tips for SEO lead generation.

1. Write content for search intent

The first thing to get right for your SEO is to create content based on search intent. What is search intent, you ask? Simple—it’s what people are looking for when they search for a particular keyword.

That means if you write a blog post targeting a particular keyword, you’ll want to check the current search results for that keyword to see what people seem to be looking for. Then you’ll want to write your post so that it matches that intent.

If you don’t consider search intent, you’ll end up creating content that people aren’t interested in reading. That means it will rank lower in Google and your SEO will suffer, causing you to generate far fewer leads.

2. Target longtail keywords with purchase intent

It’s crucial to distinguish between “website visitors” and “qualified B2B leads.” While a TOFU page might attract a large number of visitors, the conversion rate may be low, making it less effective for generating B2B leads.

When you’re initially delving into content creation on a particular topic, targeting long-tailed keywords with lower search volumes (fewer than 100/month) is typically a more effective strategy than going for broad, high-volume keywords. Specifically, honing in on ‘money’ keywords associated with buying intent and incorporating specific geographical locations (such as “top solar panel installers in Central Pennsylvania”) can be especially beneficial for lead generation.

3. Optimize your page speed

A lot of SEO comes down to optimizing your website. A website that isn’t user-friendly will struggle to rank, and will consequently struggle to generate any leads. Thankfully, there are a handful of simple ways to improve your site’s quality, including page speed optimization.

Page speed is a huge part of SEO. A slow-loading page—by which we mean a page that takes more than three seconds to load—will cause people to hit the “back” button. 

Check out some top suggestions for speeding up your site, including: 

  • Compress images
  • Cache web pages
  • Minify code
  • Limit redirects

Improving your site speed will provide users with a better experience on your site, and it can also boost your rankings in search results.

4. Implement responsive design on your site

Another way to optimize your website for SEO is to make it mobile-friendly. This step is critical. In today’s world, the majority of web traffic actually comes from mobile devices, so failing to optimize your site for mobile will mean you rank lower and miss out on the majority of your potential traffic.

The best way to make a mobile-friendly site is to use responsive design. Responsive design is a type of web design where your site pages automatically adjust to fit whatever screen they appear on. So, a page will look one way on mobile and another on desktop.

By using responsive design, you avoid the hassle of creating every page twice while still harnessing all the potential leads you can earn through mobile.

5. Create a visit-to-lead path

Attracting visitors to your website is only the beginning of the lead generation process. Once you get visitors in the door through SEO content, you have to convince them to complete a conversion action, such as filling out a form to contact your sales team, signing up for a demo, or starting a free trial of your service. That’s what turns content consumers into actual sales leads.

For example, on any Nutshell blog page you’ll see a “Start free trial” button in the top right corner of the page, a “Ready to try Nutshell for free?” sidebar form that follows you on the right side of the page, and occasional CTAs within the article copy that ask you to download a relevant content offer or start a trial of our software

The point is you have to make sure your visitors know that you offer something of value beyond just your content. No matter what page they land on, make sure the visit-to-lead path is clear and coherent.

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6. Keep your target persona in mind

When creating your SEO lead generation strategy, begin by defining a target persona. This enables you to pinpoint your ideal audience and understand their needs. It’s essential to incorporate the keywords your target persona typically uses when searching for information on your website. When you have a thorough understanding of your ideal audience, you can create content that will be meaningful to them.

For effective customer engagement, share valuable resources that prospective customers can readily access or download. Convey the message that the services you offer represent the solution to their challenges or needs.

7. Update your blog posts consistently

A great way to drive more leads via SEO is to update your blog posts regularly. Search rankings fluctuate over time, and regularly updating your posts helps you keep up with the continual changes that impact your rankings.

Rankings may change due to shifts in user search intent, new or updated competing pages, algorithm changes, and more. It’s also important to update the information in your posts so that the information remains up-to-date and relevant.

Regularly updating your content keeps your content fresh, relevant, and high-quality and may also increase the likelihood of attracting additional backlinks, improving your chances of ranking.

8. Create a Google Business Profile

Not every SEO tactic happens on your website. You can also boost your Google visibility by creating a Google Business Profile. These profiles are public and include information about your company, like your business name, location, contact information, and reviews.

The most common way for people to find Google Business Profiles is by performing local searches. So, let’s say you run a metal fabrication company in Austin, Texas. If someone in Austin searches “metal fabricator,” they might see a local 3-pack that includes your profile.

That can lead lots of people to further research your company, with many of them visiting your website and ultimately becoming leads.

Google considers a lot of factors when ranking websites in search results. One of those factors is reputability. That is, Google prioritizes sites it sees as authoritative. So, how do you get Google to view your site that way? One important strategy is to earn backlinks.

Backlinks are where other websites link to your content. By earning backlinks, you show Google that those sites see you as reputable. To earn backlinks, you can look for linking opportunities on other sites and recommend that they address those opportunities by linking to your content.

However, be sure you aim for reputability and relevance in your backlinks. That is, try to earn backlinks from sites that are relevant to your industry and are considered authoritative. Two or three reputable backlinks are worth more than 100 average ones.

10. Test out visual materials and resources

Written content is undoubtedly useful, but visual materials such as infographics or videos also prove very effective for B2B marketing purposes. 

Because we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text, it is far easier for people to remember visual information than the same information in a written form. Visual content also lends itself well to sharing on social media, and infographics may earn links from other pages that include them, both of which can positively influence rankings.

11. Keep up with SEO and customer analytics

Finally, something that’s vital to SEO for lead generation—as well as any other marketing campaign—is analytics. You absolutely must track metrics related to your SEO performance so you can see how well you’re doing.

For SEO, there are a few types of metrics you’ll want to track. The first and most obvious metric is rankings. It’s important to know which keywords your pages are ranking for and how high they’re ranking for those keywords.

You’ll also want to keep up with the amount of traffic coming into your site. Keep an eye on how much of that traffic comes from Google, which searches produce the most traffic, and which pages that traffic gravitates toward.

Finally, for the purposes of SEO lead generation, measure how many leads you earn as a result of your search traffic. Measuring all these things will help you improve your SEO, but it will also help you understand your audience better so you can market more effectively and drive more sales.

Let us help you drive up your lead generation

Anyone can learn the basics of SEO and start driving more traffic to their business’s website. But if you want to save time and maximize the value you get for your SEO spending, we recommend investing in SEO services from our partners at WebFX—the agency behind $3 billion in client revenue. 

Just click the button below to get started!

Photo by NisonCo PR and SEO on Unsplash

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