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How to Get More Leads Through SEO

by | Last updated Dec 18, 2023

How to Get More Leads Through SEO

Lead generation is a core part of marketing yourself and your company, and that means that you need to generate leads effectively to see proper success.

Through SEO, leads can come a lot faster than with other lead generation options. The trick is knowing how to use it well.

Search engine optimization is a huge part of marketing, and the SEO industry has been growing for years.

SEO services are in high demand all across the world, and SEO agencies crop up on an almost monthly basis.

If you want to succeed and gain more leads, then you want to focus on SEO leads.

Even without a dedicated SEO agency, it is possible to build your own SEO leads very effectively by using the right strategies for each situation – but that requires some very careful forethought and planning.

What are Leads?

Leads are any member of your target audience that has expressed interest in your business.

In general, leads refer to potential customers or people who are likely to convert. Building leads allows you to gain more business and make more sales overall.

However, this means that lead generation requires more than just general Google Ads posts. You need a combination of tactics to generate leads effectively, and that makes SEO tools invaluable for a long-term lead generation strategy.

What is SEO?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is all about making your website better at ranking on search engine results pages.

Search engines like Google use a specialized algorithm to dictate where different results appear in their search results.

The higher you rank on search engines, the higher you will appear for any relevant keywords your target audience searches.

Keywords are the core of any SEO strategy.

The keywords you target are the ones you are attempting to rank for on search engines, so they need to have some connection to your business in terms of relevancy.

What are SEO Leads?

An SEO lead is simply a lead generated through SEO rather than paid advertising or other non-SEO methods.

Since even a basic SEO strategy can cover countless different concepts and techniques, there can be dozens of ways of earning new leads through SEO.

Lead Generation Through SEO

Using SEO to generate leads is a very effective option, especially for a smaller company.

Since SEO itself is effectively free (not counting any SEO agency you hire or tools you buy), it is also a very affordable choice to turn to.

Lead generation can be complex, and using a mixture of SEO services and techniques allows you to gather leads from multiple sources very effectively – all without paying for a full marketing budget.

Keyword Research

Keywords are the terms people search to bring up Google search results or results on other search platforms.

Before you can begin lead generation, you need keywords.

Keyword researching is all about understanding what your target audience is searching for, then finding ways to use those keywords to promote your own business website.

If you want to increase sales and earn more high-quality leads, then you need to use the right keywords.

It is important to target keywords that are relevant to your business and that match the search intent of the people looking them up.

Intent

Not all target keywords are perfect. Some relevant keywords are not actually giving you the traffic you want.

It is impossible to lead somebody into your sales funnel and get them to spend money if they have no interest in your business.

For example, a phrase like “blue chair” is not going to benefit a company that only sells red chairs, despite the audience being in the market for a chair. This is because their intent is to buy a blue one.

The same goes for other keywords. A person might look up medical information without needing a doctor or product details without wanting to buy that product.

Keyword research should be focused on finding the best suitable keywords while making sure that you keep irrelevant or unreliable phrases out of the way.

Volume

Keyword usage is ranked by the search volume. The higher the search volume, the more the term is used.

This becomes very important for a lot of SEO services, where a high-volume keyword can be important for getting the most link-building and lead generation opportunities possible.

Keep in mind that high volume is not always better. If a keyword is being used by a huge amount of different companies, the chances of your company appearing as a search result are much lower.

Instead, you want niche but high-volume keywords that not many other businesses are using. This gives you an easy way to earn high-quality leads with very minimal effort.

Relevancy

A keyword needs to be relevant to your business to work well for any lead generation strategy.

If you are using keywords that have nothing in common with your business, then potential customers are not going to find your business.

They will be searching up terms similar to whatever their needs and requirements are, and if you are not targeting those words, you are not showing up.

It is important to target keywords that your audience will regularly search for that also match your business’s overall purpose and business model.

You want to draw people in by appearing in search results that are relevant to what you offer, not just random searches altogether.

SEO Audits

Doing a full SEO audit is a good step to take. If you are worried about your lead generation options, then it is not a bad idea to audit your own site and see what kind of results you come up with.

The more you know about your own SEO and lead generation performance, the better.

SEO is a core part of your digital marketing, and you need to understand your own performance to know where you might be failing.

If something goes wrong, you need to look at your SEO results and see what kind of problems have turned up during your SEO work.

Keep in mind that a full SEO audit is not always flawless. You might run into problems where there is not really an alternative option or where the weak points are just due to customer behavior.

Even so, thinking about these kinds of details ahead of time makes a big difference, and it is important for staying sure of your own SEO potential.

Basic Site SEO Work

SEO covers a lot of different kinds of tasks, and some of them are more obvious than others.

However, more SEO is not always better SEO – sometimes, the simplest options are the most reliable, especially if you are working with a limited set of resources.

Some of the most powerful lead generation options are those that you can set up quickly and reliably.

Good SEO strategies are not always about overall power and reach but about how quickly you can set up and modify the strategy to capture a sudden spike in keyword traffic or change in audience demographics.

Doing SEO for your own site is a good example. Through SEO, business websites can be improved to have a stronger presence on relevant search SEO results.

By creating content and adjusting web design to match your chosen keywords, you can get a lot more attention with very little effort.

Web Design Changes

Sites rank higher on Google and other platforms if they are well-made and function properly. You want your web design to be suitable for the overall purpose of the site, especially any landing page that you are sending customers to.

You do not want the website’s visitors to immediately back away from service pages because they can’t navigate the landing page or because the site is not loading fast enough for them to do anything.

Good web design involves taking these elements into account.

This applies to both Google Ads paid ads and normal SEO service options. Prospective customers will only have so much patience, and there is no telling how many clients you might lose because your site turned them away from joining your sales funnel.

Beyond that, a nice-looking site is easier to trust.

It is far too easy to assume that an outdated site is full of viruses and threats. Even if it is not, refusing to update their web design has resulted in many companies finding that their landing pages are being immediately abandoned.

Content

Potential customers are often drawn in because of a single piece of content, whether that is a blog post or something much more practical like a product description. Either way, lead generation relies on good content to keep the user invested.

You want to make sure that every important page on your website has enough content to offer you the results you want, right down to even the most basic pages. If a user visits a page for a certain piece of information and there is nothing there to hook them in, they might simply leave.

This means that you should put a lot of focus on your content work.

Create content that will rope a potential customer in and contribute to generating leads, as well as something that can hook in organic traffic that might not initially be within your target audience.

Most of your SEO efforts will rely on having good content at the endpoint, so do not waste time trying to throw together complex SEO business campaigns that point straight to a bland and nearly-empty landing page.

Link Building

One of the best ways to improve your SEO rankings is through link building. Approaching other sites and getting backlinks from them can allow your own site to grow in popularity and power fairly quickly, but only if you are getting links from good sites.

That means that you need to spend some time finding places to insert links. Look for major directories, blogs, or other reputable websites that you know you can trust to get the job done well.

Whether you are creating the content yourself or paying them to create it for you, having a link on somebody’s site pointing back to your own website helps a lot. Backlinks transfer some of the authority – the overall power – from the original site to the link destination, which can improve your SEO rankings overall.

Local SEO

Focusing on local SEO can be great for any business with a physical presence. A local SEO campaign allows you to focus on local customers with far less competition, giving you more ways to market to them and more freedom in the keywords that you choose.

While this varies from company to company, remember that local often gives you a smaller audience in exchange for easier marketing.

You are only competing against similar businesses in your own niche, and that can mean that you get more control compared to larger-scale marketing.

Local marketing also provides a lot more flexibility since you do not need to make content for every single audience.

If you are only focusing on a small subset of people, you can tailor your content towards them without driving away anybody who would not understand, or who is not meant to be targeted by that kind of content.

We delve deeper into popular local SEO tools in this article.

Landing Pages

Updating your pages with new content and visual additions can be important. Landing pages are the places that you are expecting customers to be sent when they visit your site, and that means that they are a major part of any SEO service or strategy you decide to use.

Constructing the right landing pages does not take an SEO agency to handle this – especially not if you are focused on lead generation. All you need to do is make sure that the landing page itself is beneficial to your lead generation options.

A landing page can be an invaluable SEO and lead generation tool, as well as a major draw for organic traffic. However, it needs to be a good landing page because a poorly-designed or badly-written one can turn almost anybody away from your sales funnel.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is another major part of SEO that many people underestimate. Putting your own content out there for lead generation purposes, rather than just keeping the content on your site, can be incredibly effective if you manage to do it well enough.

Paying for content on other sites, or even just having your articles posted there, can result in you getting links back.

Not only are these links going to boost your SEO, but they will bring in more traffic, making it a double form of lead generation.

Beyond that, doing this kind of content marketing gives you a lot of control over how you market yourself. You can choose any range of keywords, any number of topics, and countless different options for refining the audience that you are aiming for.

This is a great digital marketing tool and a common strategy for many businesses, but it is not always perfect.

It relies on your own digital marketing skills to bring in a mixture of organic and SEO clients, and you need to be able to produce good content that actually makes an impact.

Internal Linking

Websites link between their own pages to allow navigation, and that can be an indirect contributor to SEO.

While you can’t transfer any authority from your own site back into itself, you can still see problems begin to surface if you are not careful.

Bad navigation can result in a lot of users leaving in frustration, often within only a page or two.

If this happens often enough without much time between them arriving and leaving, then it can harm your SEO, as well as annoy people who were potential customers.

Creating an effective navigation system might not directly boost your SEO, but it makes the site more usable, and that can be a ranking factor on many search engines.

Social Media Marketing

Using social media for SEO can be tricky. It will not directly help your ranking factors, but it can draw in more customers in other ways. This makes it a valuable option, even if your social media is not going to provide many SEO benefits.

Not having a social media presence can limit the amount of exposure your customers have to you, which tends to make overall SEO slightly less effective.

As a side note, social profiles are a different site, meaning that they appear differently in search platform results.

With the right keyword options, this can mean that you appear in the top spot, with your social media appearing second – giving the competition less space to appear in the first three results.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is another option that does not directly impact SEO but still offers some major benefits.

Email should be a core part of your digital marketing strategy, even if it is just to remarket towards customers who signed up to your site once before.

All the SEO wisdom in the world will not help you draw customers back once they have forgotten about your site.

Through email marketing, you can try to reach out and re-ignite their interest or at least make them aware that your business exists again.

Customer Reviews

Customer reviews directly impact SEO. This means that managing them well is a vital part of making sure you are doing SEO correctly.

Reviews from most trustworthy platforms will act as a signal of your overall quality, both to potential customers and many search engines.

If your business listing is hitting a low star rating, then you might appear less in results due to the penalties the low rating carries.

Negative Reviews

Negative reviews have a major negative impact on how your business is perceived in terms of SEO. Not only can they make it harder for you to rank higher, but even if you do, customers will be less likely to actually visit due to the lower rating.

You can’t just delete these reviews, even if you want to, but there are other options.

You do not need to be an expert to approach the person who left a review and offer some kind of compensation for whatever happened – such as a free service.

Doing this means that you can negotiate for the reviews’ removal or adjustment to a more positive rank if they are willing to follow along. Not everybody is, but even changing half of your negative reviews to positive ones can be enough.

If done correctly, you can expect to see your SEO improve along with your public perception. Not only that, but if the reviews mention that you sorted the issue out ahead of time and it was adjusted back to a high rating, then it might make new visitors even more trustworthy of your business.

Positive Reviews

Good reviews, as expected, will have a positive effect on your SEO. However, this only applies if the reviews themselves are legitimate, something that most search engines will try to figure out.

If you keep buying reviews, most search platforms will eventually notice. Not only do bot reviews damage your overall reputation, but they can cause your SEO to get penalized, even if you are doing everything else legitimately.

If you want a high SEO score, then you need to make sure that you can earn qualified leads and good reviews naturally.

It is not a bad idea to try and nudge new customers into leaving good reviews after they make a purchase – even a small increase in positive reviews can make a big difference.

Unconventional Options for Search Engines Optimization

SEO is a very varied field, and not all tools or strategies are conventional. Sometimes thinking outside the box can lead to excellent results further down the line.

For example, you might attend networking events and get your business named and linked to on the official site.

This is an unconventional way of earning more links, but it might also work, and the authority from the event site could be powerful. Of course, you have no idea how long that site or link will stay up, and it could only be temporary.

Using long-tail keywords is another less conventional option. While many people prefer single-word keywords or short key phrases, long-tail keywords can be ideal for specifying something much more clearly.

These are keywords that use multiple words to form a short sentence, trying to capture a very specific audience. This is very hard to pull off, but the results can be well worth it.

Ranking Higher on the Search Engine Results Pages for Lead Generation

All of the options up above can be used for lead generation in different ways, but that does not always mean that you should use each of them. With so many different ways to approach SEO, it can be hard to know where to begin.

One of the biggest factors to consider is whether or not to hire an SEO agency. A digital marketing agency often offers the skills you need to make a big difference to your lead count, but it comes at an added cost.

There is also the alternative of hiring a lead generation agency. These specifically focus on generating leads, but they might default to using paid options instead of a cheaper SEO strategy.

Remember that you can always ask a lead generation agency to focus on SEO, but that might limit the options that they can work with. The only thing worse than no optimization is optimization that can’t actually hit any goals you set, despite you paying a professional for it.

Whatever you choose, there are a lot of ways to customize and adapt your marketing efforts in the future. Do not commit to something straight away – explore your options first.

What To Do Next

Whether you rely on internal links and free tool options or budget out a huge amount of money for third-party services, SEO is a great field to turn to for more leads.

The only problem is being able to gather these leads effectively without causing even more problems within your own marketing. Given how confusing SEO can be, it is easy to end up overwhelmed.

Take your time to explore your future options, and put together a decent plan of action going forward. The more you prepare, the better.

By having an actual defined plan in place, you can make sure that you stick to the basics of what you are aiming for, only deviating when you are sure that there is no other option. This allows you to avoid a lot of hassle that you would otherwise face when trying to create a strategy from thin air.

Of course, digital marketing is a costly changing field. This means that there is no guarantee that one strategy will work as well in another situation or for another company.

Take your time and figure out the best options for every single situation. From there, you can develop a strategy that suits your needs and does not push your budget or staff too far beyond your normal limits.

Remember: you get more than one shot at every marketing method. If something does not work, do not discard it right away – take a look and see if you missed any obvious flaws or details that might explain the lack of success.

Useful Guides

Please see some useful guides related to generating more business leads.

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  2. Free SEO Tools
  3. SEO Tips
  4. Negative SEO