How to use SEO for lead generation
Lead generation is the term used in marketing and eCommerce to describe the process of turning strangers into loyal customers by establishing and nurturing their interest in your company or brand.
One way to manage the lead generation process is through informative marketing, such as company newsletters, emails, and follow-up calls. However, these methods can be time-consuming with limited payoff.
Alternatively, SEO can be an even more effective means of attracting customers to your website by improving your visibility and customer engagement to produce a service that consumers are not only interested but willing to invest in.
How can SEO help lead generation?
Through a focus on strong and engaging content that prioritises search engine optimisation, you can better understand what your target customer demographic wants and how to provide that service for them. Producing attractive content is important, but implementing SEO into your lead generation strategy is what will make potential customers click through to your website above others in the first place.
If your website looks appealing and is easy to use, utilises relevant links and helpful keywords, and demonstrates authority on your product or service, you are much more likely to rank higher on SERPs (search engine results page). This will in turn drive more consumer traffic to your website, and turn leads into customers.
“Think of your SEO efforts as a brand awareness strategy. The more your company appears for various informational and commercial keywords, the higher chance your company has of becoming the first choice for the target audience.
An effective SEO strategy made up of useful content and tech SEO work is a reliable method of generating those all important leads” – Ben Carter, SEO Account Manager.
3 stages of lead generation
To make sense of what lead generation is, and how you can use SEO to attract customers and maintain stable B2C (business-to-customer) relationships with them, it’s helpful to think of it as a three-step process.
Stage 1: Attracting leads
This is to do with the reason why someone might come across your website and can be massively boosted by an effective SEO strategy. This process begins before customers even visit your website through what’s known as product-led content work. This involves marketing strategies and advertising techniques in order to establish your company as a viable business option.
Think about what you’re selling and consider why it’s different from other companies selling similar products. What makes your services stand out? What is your USP (unique selling point?)
Things like blogs or social media posts are common methods for attracting leads as the production of online content makes potential customers more likely to come across your website. It’s important to create relevant, authoritative and accessible content to increase your website’s CTR (click-through rate).
One of the best ways to boost your website’s rankings is through high-quality content which uses relevant keywords and anchor texts in order to present your business as a trustworthy topical authority for your product or service. By targeting topics that people are already searching for, you’re much more likely to generate more online traffic.
Boosting your website’s SEO rankings will help you develop your B2C relationship to get them off the search engine results page and onto your star-quality website. Essentially, the more relevant your content, the higher up you’ll rank, and the more traffic you’ll bring to your website. Sparking the initial interest is only the first step.
At Embryo, our content strategy is key to attracting potential leads. We produce genuinely informative and interesting content for our target audience, helping to raise our brand awareness whilst also positioning ourselves as the go-to experts for answers, advice and expertise.
Stage 2: Nurturing the pipeline
Nurturing the pipeline is all about maintaining your customer’s interest. Once you’ve made your website and services visible, you need to develop those relationships with potential customers. This is incredibly important as you need to ensure that you can provide the service you’re offering to a high standard, so that your customer is willing to move through what is known as the sales funnel, and ultimately to pay for the service you’re providing to them.
Again, keywords are incredibly important here, but they’re most effective when used in conjunction with coherent and accurate content that your customers will find compelling. It’s not enough to just match existing keyword searches.
Instead, you should try and bring a unique perspective to the information you’re presenting. Not only will this make for more compelling content, promoting customer engagement and allowing your web pages to climb up the rankings, but it will also demonstrate a sense of authority around the topic and encourage other web users to link to your articles.
You can research which keywords are most useful to your website through a keyword research tool such as:
As well as the quality of your website’s content, the SEO will also be impacted by the visual presentation of any information. While you want to make sure that your website looks professional and is easy to navigate, it’s a good idea to have topic-specific pages so that you can create back-links. This will encourage your customer to delve deeper into what you have to offer, increasing the chances that they’ll invest not just their time but their money in your company’s services.
3. Paying customers
No, not you paying them, but customers who want to pay you for having provided such a great service. Once you’ve built strong relationships with your customers and tailored your services to their needs, you need to focus on maintaining those relationships in order to establish a stable revenue stream.
Without the people that make up the foundation of your business, both the employees and the customers, your business is unlikely to be as successful as it could be.
Leading customers to your company
Rather than leaving it up to informative marketing or advertising, SEO is a great way to transform organic traffic into paying customers whilst ensuring you’re providing a high-quality service packaged in aesthetic and professional packaging.
By maximising SEO through well-written, engaging, and informative content, you’ll naturally foster an effective lead-generation strategy in order to build a loyal and satisfied customer base.
To learn more, get in touch with our team today.
FAQs
Answered by our SEO team
Does lead generation apply to returning customers?
Whilst Lead Generation largely applies to acquiring New customers, it’s just as valuable for Returning customers too as businesses can secure future revenue by building a loyal customer base that returns for future purchases.
Is quality or quantity of leads more important?
We would argue that the quality of leads is the most important, as you want to ensure all of the Sales and Marketing efforts that are put into generating that lead delivers the highest Return on Investment.
What percent of leads should convert into sales?
This varies from business to business, but you want to make sure that the revenue from the percentage of leads that convert into Sales is enough to make your Sales & Marketing efforts profitable.
What is the best way to track and manage website leads?
By using 1st-party data analytics and storing information in a secure CRM. This way, you can keep tabs on your individual leads and nurture them to convert if needed.
