When we talk about SEO (search engine optimisation), it’s often about achieving higher search engine rankings. But there’s a fair bit more to it than that. You don’t want to attract just anybody to your website, you want it to be the people who are most likely to be interested in what your business offers – your target audience.
SEO lead generation is all about getting leads from your website content (or other unpaid digital marketing activities). According to a recent Hubspot report, generating more leads is a top priority for marketers in 2024. Consequently, converting those leads to customers is another top priority.
In this guide, we’ll show you why an SEO lead generation strategy is important for your business. We’ll explore how to attract leads through effective sales and marketing efforts. Importantly, we’ll show the most effective ways to convert leads into potential customers with the right SEO content.
How can SEO lead generation boost your business?
SEO lead generation can provide a big boost to your business. The key benefits include:
- Makes your business more visible: an effective SEO strategy drives organic traffic to your website. That traffic includes potential leads and potential customers.
- Stand out from competitors: successful SEO will help your website to rank higher than your competitors on search engine results pages (SERP). Users are more likely to click on links that rank highly on the first page of SERPS than those lower down.
- Attract a qualified, target audience: when you create relevant, optimised content with target keywords, you’re more likely to attract users interested in that subject. Their search intent will match your target keywords, and search engines will prioritise your web page in the search engine results.
How do I get quality leads from SEO?
When you understand your target audience, you can create better, high quality content that’s more likely to resonate with them. This notion’s at the core of inbound marketing strategy – attracting potential customers to your brand by aligning with their needs and values.
Creating valuable content is a key marketing strategy that helps you drive customer engagement and growth. That’s when you start generating leads. It’s at the point when you’ve attracted organic traffic to your site and need to convert them into sales. Our focus here is on the quality leads that come to your website via sales or marketing efforts.
Sales vs marketing qualified leads
A sales qualified lead is really valuable as they’ve shown that they’re interested in your business and could well become a paying customer. For example, they may have filled out a form on your website to find out more about your product or service.
A marketing qualified lead has engaged with your marketing efforts but probably isn’t quite ready for a sales call. They need to know more about your offering and become more engaged before that step. For example, they may have submitted a landing page form for an introductory offer.
The lead generation process
Typically, there are four steps in the lead generation process. And your marketing strategy will look at ways to make the most of each of these steps and to ensure the user experience along this journey is as seamless as possible.
- Discovery: the potential customer discovers your business via a marketing channel (search, social media, email)
- Call to action (CTA): the potential customer is interested enough in your messaging to take action and respond to a message or click on a button
- Landing page: once they’ve clicked on the CTA, they’re taken to a specific landing page or web page designed to provide the valuable content they’re after in exchange for their details
- Lead capture: the potential customer provides their details (eg filling in a form) in order to get the content or information that they’re interested in.
The SEO lead generation process
Follow this simple, step by step process to capture customer data. These proven techniques are effective ways to attract potential customers and generate quality leads for your business
- Discovery: create high quality, informational and helpful content that ranks, and provide it for free. This is what will attract your potential customer to your website
- Lead magnet: include a relevant lead magnet within the article. For example, that could be an associated checklist, template, or step by step guide
- Lead capture: don’t forget the all important call to action (CTA) to encourage the user to act and provide their details for you to capture.
Find more ways to attract quality leads
5 of the best SEO content marketing tactics
The lead generation process sounds pretty straight forward. But in order to gain that all important customer information, you need to offer them valuable, high quality content otherwise they won’t give away their details. To work, it has to be an enticing, compelling offer.
Your content needs to attract and meet the needs of your target audience, but also those Google search engine algorithms. Satisfying both of these parties is the holy grail.
16% of marketers say that the winning combination of content and SEO delivers the best ROI (source: Hubspot). So, let’s look at five of the best ways to create SEO optimised content for lead generation and delivering healthy conversion rates.
Blogs
An active blog comprising high quality, relevant content sends a really strong signal to search engines that your website’s worth visiting. It’s also a really effective way to provide informative, engaging content to your target audience. Do your keyword research to find the search queries that your target audience make, and then create your blog content to meet that search intent. Tailor your blog content around your ideal customer and provide great content that they’ll love, or at least find useful.
White papers
An excellent way to share your knowledge and position you and your business as an expert in a specific field, a white paper provides deep insight and information that provides value to your target audience. Typically, white papers are made available when you sign up. They play a valuable part in email marketing as an enticing reason to join the email list. E-books and downloadable guides provide similar opportunities. As an example, Slack created a report on the state of work to share useful insights with business leaders who sign up to access it.
Landing pages
Landing pages explain the details of your services. Ideally, you should have one for each service you offer and it needs to be optimised to rank in organic search for the most relevant keywords. Visitors to landing pages want specific information on products/ services rather than general information around a topic (blogs are better for this). You can also create specific landing pages for a marketing or SEO campaign to drive the right people to that content.
Videos
Showing people your products or demonstrating a service can make really engaging content. Similarly, visuals that hit the right tone are brilliant for your reputation and brand awareness. Videos work exceptionally well on social media channels, and can add an extra dimension to a blog. But it’s important to include an obvious CTA alongside the video to drive people to a landing page. Webinar videos are a convenient way of sharing your expert knowledge to a community of people who sign up to join in the conversation or training session.
Downloads
Provide your potential customers with super useful free tools. That could be a downloadable pdf template or checklist for example. Make life easier for your potential customer by giving away a template that does some of the work for them. In this example, Highland Solutions provide a handy digital product financial worksheet in exchange for user details.
Key SEO tips to remember
It’s important to remember fundamental SEO principles with this content too.
Conduct keyword research – use SEO tools like Moz, SEMrush or Google search console to find the best search terms for your business. Define an SEO strategy, taking search volume and keyword competition into consideration. List the primary and long tail keywords to use for SEO lead generation.
Link building – identify opportunities to gain backlinks from other trusted websites, social media channels or through guest posting with influential, relevant blogs.
Technical SEO – ensure you implement on-page SEO tactics such as using relevant keywords in the metadata, title and descriptions, and check your website functions as well as it can. Nobody sticks around for a slow loading site.
How can I measure the success of SEO in lead generation?
If you’re going to invest time, energy and resources into an SEO lead generation strategy, then you need to know if they’re working. There are many useful metrics that you can track to see how effective your SEO content and marketing efforts are performing.
Google analytics is a simple tool to measure your website’s performance. Check your organic website traffic numbers, where your website visitors are coming from and the bounce rate for pages.
This knowledge informs your next steps. You can see the pages that you need to optimise better, the best referral paths to your website and the marketing efforts that are most effective, and more.
Keep an eye on your search engine ranking position. Once you attain a position on the first page, you need to stay there by regularly updating and optimising your web pages.
Then of course, there’s your email marketing list. Use your CRM to track and safely store customer data. Here, you’ll be able to see how and where new data has come from. If you’re using lead magnets, it’s really important to the email submissions (conversions) to see the effectiveness of the marketing effort.
Key takeaways for SEO lead generation
SEO is generally lower cost, and often more effective, than advertising like PPC when it comes to lead generation. Attracting the potential customers that are most likely to buy from your business gives you the best chance of high conversion rates. So, it should be well considered and defined as part of your wider digital marketing strategy.
We can help you to do it right. MGX Digital is a trusted SEO agency with a wealth of experience in SEO lead generation. Our SEO services span global, national and local SEO, so wherever your target audience may be, we can help you to reach them.
Please get in touch and we can discuss your specific business needs, and ways that we can help.