Can you generate leads through SEO?
That’s a question that many business owners think about when weighing up whether search engine optimisation is worth their investment, or whether they should choose a different digital marketing approach.
Whichever method you opt-in for, you will most likely aim to get a consistent stream of qualified leads, at the lowest cost possible. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is often hailed for its super-power to generate business leads with a series of on-going and seemingly intricate techniques. And having seen our SEO experts at Generate Leads Online take many businesses up to the top of page #1 on Google results pages, by following a carefully put together SEO strategy, we can definitely attest to this!
Compared to some of the other online lead generation methods, it is a slow-burning process but the results are worth the wait. So, if you’re thinking of investing in SEO marketing services to generate leads for your business, it’s important you understand what goes into the process of making your website rank well on Google. In this guide, we are going to go through the steps involved in implementing a full SEO strategy and explain how to use SEO to generate leads online.
What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
SEO can be described as a process of improving your website and online presence to improve its rankings in search engines, such as Google, and drive more traffic to your website. By editing and adjusting different aspects of your website, and using the right keywords, SEO ensures your website shows up in search engines and matches the ‘user intent’ of your dream leads.
How SEO helps your business generate leads?
The higher your website ranks in search engines, the more clicks it’s going to get from users. The more visitors on your website, the higher the chance of some of them becoming interested in your products or services. Eventually, that interest turns into desire and the website visitor becomes a lead, or maybe even a conversion.
Without an SEO strategy in place, it’s very unlikely that your target audience will ever find your website amongst the competitors who are investing in search engine optimisation. Out of the 40k searches that Google receives per second, only a third of those people bother clicking through to the second results page! You really have a small chance of being found via organic search if your website appears somewhere on page 2, or beyond.
For those businesses focusing on a local clientele, SEO lead generation works particularly well thanks to the Google 2014 Pigeon update, which gave those businesses the power to compete in search engines on a local level. Reports show that 72% of consumers who perform a local search visit a store within 5 miles of their current location. Therefore, if you run a business that serves the local area, SEO can be a powerful tool for you. An important aspect of your local search engine optimisation is building out your Google My Business profile. Read our 10 Local SEO Tips to learn how to do it successfully.
Every few years, Google releases another updated version of their search engine algorithm allowing businesses to leverage SEO techniques for marketing purposes. The 2013 Hummingbird update focused on the semantics of the terms users enter into the search engine. What this means is that Google now understands the real meaning behind the words users type in, and what exactly it is that they’re after, which meant that SEO experts had to learn to consider “user intent” in their processes. Since then there has been more emphasis on websites satisfying Google’s search intent requirement in order to rank higher, which comes down to short and long-tail keywords used on your website. Learning about and leveraging the different types of keyword intent allows you to improve the ranking of individual pages on your website and as a result, generate qualified leads for those products or services.
The higher your website ranks in search engines, the more clicks it’s going to get from users. The more visitors on your website, the higher the chance of some of them becoming interested in your products or services. Eventually, that interest turns into desire and the website visitor becomes a lead, or maybe even a conversion.
Without an SEO strategy in place, it’s very unlikely that your target audience will ever find your website amongst the competitors who are investing in search engine optimisation. Out of the 40k searches that Google receives per second, only a third of those people bother clicking through to the second results page! You really have a small chance of being found via organic search if your website appears somewhere on page 2, or beyond.
For those businesses focusing on a local clientele, SEO lead generation works particularly well thanks to the Google 2014 Pigeon update, which gave those businesses the power to compete in search engines on a local level. Reports show that 72% of consumers who perform a local search visit a store within 5 miles of their current location. Therefore, if you run a business that serves the local area, SEO can be a powerful tool for you. An important aspect of your local search engine optimisation is building out your Google My Business profile. Read our 10 Local SEO Tips to learn how to do it successfully.
Every few years, Google releases another updated version of their search engine algorithm allowing businesses to leverage SEO techniques for marketing purposes. The 2013 Hummingbird update focused on the semantics of the terms users enter into the search engine. What this means is that Google now understands the real meaning behind the words users type in, and what exactly it is that they’re after, which meant that SEO experts had to learn to consider “user intent” in their processes. Since then there has been more emphasis on websites satisfying Google’s search intent requirement in order to rank higher, which comes down to short and long-tail keywords used on your website. Learning about and leveraging the different types of keyword intent allows you to improve the ranking of individual pages on your website and as a result, generate qualified leads for those products or services.
What’s more, contradictory to what many people assume, SEO can result in more conversions than Pay-Per-Click ads, which appear above organic search results. Statistics show 70%-80% of people ignore the sponsored results in favour of organic listings. Although, unlike paid advertising, SEO does not offer the ability to retarget the web users who once visited your website but didn’t convert, ranking well in organic searches may soon win you more leads and conversions than those using PPC retargeting. With more concern over user’s privacy, companies such as Apple and Google have announced big changes that involve blocking third-party cookies. This will make it harder for marketers to set systems in place that track and follow web users when they leave without converting.
70%-80% of people ignore the sponsored results in favour of organic listings
More and more businesses recognise the huge potential of investing in SEO as a lead generation method. So if you don’t want to fall behind, adding SEO to your digital marketing efforts is no brainer. Now, before we discuss how to generate leads with search engine optimisation, let’s look at the different types of SEO practices.
Types of SEO Practices
SEO can be broken down into three types:
- You can think of technical SEO as all the things you need to do in order to ‘pay’ for your fast-track entrance onto the search engine results pages. It is all the processes that enable search engines, such as Google to crawl your website and add them to its database.
- Once you get onto the search engine you’ll perform the on-page SEO to improve your ranking by satisfying Google’s criteria. This is where most of the lead generation potential lies. However, without technical SEO, your on-page SEO will not bring the best results.
- Off-page SEO is the promotion of your business website on other platforms and backlinking it to other respectable sites. This supports your website and helps to bring it up higher in search.
For an SEO strategy to work your search engine expert will ensure that he or she covers all three types of search engine optimisation, and keeps up with the demands of the strategy on-going. Without a sustained effort, even websites at the top of page results will see a drop to lower positions as competition catches up.
12 Steps To Generate Leads Online with SEO
A good search engine optimisation strategy will cover all three types of SEO in order to drive organic traffic and generate you leads online. Our 12-step guide will show you what goes into each type of SEO and how it assists the process of getting leads from organic searches.
- Steps 1-6 focus on technical SEO.
- Steps 7-11 refer to on-page SEO practices.
- Step 12 talks about off-page SEO techniques.
Table of Contents
Step 1 – Index your website
Step 2 – Take time to consider the site architecture & crawl budget
Step 3 – Optimise your site’s load speed
Step 4 – Set up any necessary redirects
Step 5 – Check your website offers good user experience (UX) & is accessible
Step 6 – Add structured markup to the schema of your website where relevant
Step 7 – Perform continuous keyword research & optimise for intent match and search entities
Step 8 – Keep on creating high-quality content to assert your authority & build trust
Step 9 – Capture your leads
Step 10 – Assign title tags, meta descriptions & perform image optimisation
Step 11 – Track, analyse & improve your content and rankings on a regular basis
Step 12 – Secure as many high-value inbound links as you can & promote your content
Generate Leads With Technical SEO
It’s important to start with the foundations which are included in technical SEO. The thing about technical SEO is that it’s directly connected with your website design. Here at our web design and SEO agency – Generate Leads Online, when a new SEO client comes to us, the first thing we look at is their website. Very often we end up redesigning their websites before even starting on SEO as this helps us to establish a foundation for a strong search engine optimisation strategy. Similarly, when building websites we suggest designs that take SEO into consideration, even if the client isn’t planning to invest in search engine marketing services with us. We practice holistic web design and this is just one way it’s expressed in our work.
So, let’s look at what technical steps should be taken and how do they help you to get SEO leads?
Step 1 – Index your website
This is like applying for that fast-track ticket to get onto the search engine results pages, which we mentioned above. You’re applying to be added to the database of Google so that they can show your website in searches. You’ll need to create a sitemap of your website and submit it to Google Search Console. Although we’ve put this as the first step, you shouldn’t really index your website until your on-page SEO is done. In this way, you’re giving your website the best chance to rank well from day one. We’ve put this as Step 1 as it is one of the most fundamental things you need to do to connect your website to the search engine. Note that there is a propagation period and it can take a few days or even weeks for it to start showing up on Google.
Step 2 – Take time to consider the site architecture & crawl budget
Websites have a duty to provide accurate information to the user and wow them with the design. But besides what the user can see or read, the design of your website needs to make it as easy as possible for the search engine to detect the context of the website and show it in organic searches to those who are looking for it. For this to happen web spiders crawl your website whenever new content is added. These Google crawl spiders land on your page and tries to index the information they can get to, in order to make sense of it and match it to intent keywords and entities.
It’s important to create a robots.txt file to tell the crawler where to go and where not to go. There is a limited number of times the crawler will attempt to scan your website and if the way you have interlinked the different pages on your website isn’t allowing him to scan the pages you actually want him to scan, he will simply give up and leave those pages unindexed, resulting in them not showing up on Google. Therefore, the architecture of your website and your interlinking strategy should be done in a way that doesn’t waste your crawl budget. Apart from the robots.txt file, adding links from your homepage to all those pages you want to be indexed is another way to optimise your crawl budget.
Step 3 – Optimise your site’s load speed
In the era of instant gratification and short attention spans having a website that loads instantly is very imperative for your on-page lead generation strategy. In fact, bounce rates increase by 50% if your website takes more than 2 seconds to load. The higher your bounce rate the more likely Google will deem it as an irrelevant source of information for users with specific search intent. Over time, despite having a good keyword strategy, your website might rank lower if users are ‘bouncing off’ your page quickly due to load speed issues.
There are a few different things you can do to improve the speed of your website. The simplest ones to try first include, installing a WordPress Caching plugin (or find an equivalent for your CMS), optimise images by compressing file sizes, ensure all plugins are up to date and avoid uploading video or audio files straight onto the website. Every time you apply a speed optimisation technique, run a test on GTMatrix to see if it helped. If you’re still facing issues, an experienced web developer will be able to help you with more advanced methods, which we won’t discuss in this article.
Step 4 – Set up any necessary redirects
If your website is being redesigned or you’re moving some pages to a new URL, those old pages need to be redirected. There are several different types of redirects that your SEO expert can set up depending on the circumstances. Without those redirects, the site crawlers can come across a 404 page, also known as an ‘error page’, which can hurt your rankings. Same can happen to a web visitor who will then, most likely, head back to the search results and go for one of your competitors instead. This not only hurts you but may even help to boost your competitors SEO!
When considering redirects in terms of SEO, one of the most useful redirects to apply is a 301 redirect. It indicates that the content has been moved permanently from one URL to another. The benefit of using this type of redirect is that it passes 90%-99% of link equity to the redirected page. We will discuss the relevance and importance of link equity as part of your SEO strategy later on in our guide.
Step 5 – Check your website offers good user experience (UX) & is accessible
Pages that offer a pleasant user experience rank higher in SERPs (search engine results pages). Google’s aim is to offer users the best experience in terms of speed of finding what they need, the relevancy of the information and the process of finding it. This again points to the idea of holistic web design, which we practice here at Generate Leads Online, whereby pages are designed considering the experience of the user. This determines the layout of the content and what content we provide where. It has an impact on the placement of the buttons and the interlinking we do between pages.
User experience can also be improved by paying attention to small details such as having at least 14px font size, adding subheadings to break down long pieces of text and limiting pop-ups.
With 87% of smartphone users using a search engine at least once a day it’s crucial to ensure your website works well on mobile devices as well. In March 2020, Google announced that they will be switching to mobile-first indexing which means that sites that don’t work well on mobile will receive lower rankings in search engines. Having a website that uses a mobile-first web design approach will help you to satisfy Google’s requirements and may trigger an uptick in the number of inbound leads.
Ensuring that your site’s content is available, and its functionality can be operated by everyone allows you to meet the accessibility requirement and helps your rankings. This can be achieved with clear navigation, site structure, meaningful use of subheadings and image alt text that actually allows a user, who may be visually impaired and relies on assistive technologies that read out the alt text to them, to understand the context of the page.
Step 6 – Add structured markup to the schema of your website where relevant
There are ways to add additional data to the schema of your web pages that offers Google extra information on the content provided. This gives your content a chance to make its way into, what is called, rich results. Those are specifically designed to highlight key information that the user is looking for and appear at the top of search results, often as an image or carousel. In the below example, the structured markup code these three websites used gave Google data on the different elements of these results, such as the images, the names of the organisations providing the recipes, the reviews and the baking and preparation time.
Someone searching for chocolate cake recipes will find these results very useful and is more likely to use one of the three top recipes rather than scroll through the many results that show up below the rich results area.
Using structured data markup does not guarantee you will make it to the rich results but it puts you ahead of the competition who aren’t practising this SEO technique. The structured data markup codes can be generated almost for any piece of content on your website which doesn’t mean that’s what you should be doing. Use it on the information that actually adds extra value to users looking for that information. This is closely related to user intent, which we will discuss further in the next section. If your website is built on WordPress, adding structured data becomes easier with the use of plugins.
One way to take up more space in SERPs and boost your rankings by utilising structured data markup is to add it for FAQs. By targeting the question queries your target audience is searching for, your content may appear in the ‘People Also Ask’ section.
In the video below, Beth, our content specialist explains how adding keyword-rich FAQs additionally improves your position on Google results pages.
It’s important to note that websites that make it to rich results may see a dip in their click-through-rate for some queries since users can get a quick answer to their query without having to go into your website. Knowing this should help you decide where adding structured data markup may result in a boost in your organic search rankings without it negatively affecting your business objectives.
The following three steps focus on the actions you can take directly on each page of your website to generate leads with SEO.
Generate Leads With On-page SEO
A huge chunk of on-page optimisation comes down to your content and how well it’s optimised with the right keywords that match the search intent. A well-thought-out keyword strategy can result in rising numbers of organic search web visitors your business is receiving. Once your content is optimised there are a few technical things you can do in the backend of your website to make it more Google algorithm friendly.
Step 7 – Perform continuous keyword research & optimise for intent match and search entities
To find the best keywords for each page of your website you need to define who your dream leads are. Who is your product or service designed for? What sort of problems does it solve?
Get clear on your target audience segments and speak to that audience within your service pages, demonstrating how you can provide the solution to their problem.
The key is to use the language your audience would use to search for these services so that Google shows them your website when they do use these queries. But how do you know what those are exactly?
The great thing about SEO is that it is based on data. So to nail down what those search terms are you’ll need to perform thorough keyword research. This can be done using various tools.
It’s always good to start with a simple Google search. Type in the search phrase you think your audience would use to find your services and see what comes up. What phrases are competitor websites using? What else comes up in the suggested dropdown?
You can then use other free tools such as Ubersuggest, Also Asked or Google Trends to find other related keywords or ones that your competition is ranking for. Finally, use Google Keyword Planner to see what the volumes of searches and competition levels are for some of the keywords you are considering using. If you choose high volume and high competition keywords, the likelihood of you outranking some of the more established domains is quite low. Rather, focus on high volume, low competition combinations or refine your keyword to go more niche.
It’s best to collect as much data as you can on the potential keywords to use and then narrow down on the ones you are going to focus on – the optimal ones for your chosen objectives. We find gathering your keywords in a spreadsheet and using the filter option works best when narrowing down on your strategy. Your goal is to define groups of keywords for each page of your website, which you believe, based on your research, will optimise the rankings of that particular page in search engine results and drive relevant traffic to those pages.
Before you make your final decision on the keywords to focus on, check whether the user intent behind them matches what your business is offering. When performing competitor audits on Ubersuggest to check what type of keywords your competition ranks for, you might come across some high search volume terms that may seem like an obvious keyword to go for. Just because they’re searched a lot and have relatively low competition doesn’t mean they carry the right search intent for your business. So for example, searching for “apple” will bring up several results of the tech giant Apple, and not many on the fruit apple. It’s important to research the real meaning behind your chosen keywords before you try to rank for them. Your target audience might be using completely different search terms to find what you offer.
99% of all search terms fall under 4 different intent categories: informational, navigational, commercial and transactional. To generate leads with SEO, the content on your product or service pages needs to match the search intent of those looking for such a product or service. In this way, Google will bring up your page in SERPs and expose it to those who are looking for what you offer. If your content doesn’t match the search intent very well i.e. it doesn’t answer their query, users will leave your site after a few seconds, having realised it’s not what they were looking for. This increases your bounce rate and when it happens frequently it tells Google to lower rankings, resulting in less traffic to your website and ultimately fewer potential leads.
Your keyword strategy should include short-tail and long-tail keywords so that you can target different variations of the relevant queries. Long-tail keywords are also useful when trying to capture those who might be browsing the web using voice search devices, such as Alexa. Statistics show that 50% of consumers use voice search daily when searching for businesses around them and those queries tend to be long-tail.
The content on your website can be further optimised for search engines by considering the search entities. Those refer to anything that Google knows about. And the more it knows about, the more it connects the different entities together. For example, if you type in a query ‘current prime minister UK’ it will bring up a knowledge panel for Boris Johnson, the current prime minister in the UK. At the same time if you typed in ‘Boris Johnson’ you’d learn about the role Mr Johnson currently has i.e. UK’s prime minister.
Google’s algorithm constantly analyses the queries people put in and the content websites provide and learns what keywords relate to one another. Viewing the image Google results demonstrates it best. Sticking to our example of Boris Johnson query, when we switch to the images tab, at the top we see several related keyword suggestions, including brexit, eton, london, mayor and nigel farage. These are the keywords Google connects Boris Johnson to. Now, if you were to write a blog post on our prime minister, you could optimise it using these search entities. You could craft your article around these entities to make sure you include them without keyword stuffing. By mentioning them you’ll get Google to trust your content as it’ll see the related keywords being mentioned all together.
Last but not least, all of this keyword research we just explained should be revisited on a regular basis. Keyword trends change and evolve and so should your SEO strategy.
Step 8 – Keep on creating high-quality content to assert your authority & build trust
Content marketing should be at the heart of any SEO strategy. Updating your website with fresh content on a regular basis shows Google you’re active. What’s more is that, when you add valuable content to your website that your audience is interested in, visitor sessions will become longer and bounce rate will decrease. This indicates to Google that your content is useful for your web visitors. The more value your web visitors get from the content you share, the more likely they are to share it themselves. Sharable content indicates to Google that your website is a popular and trusted source that deserves a higher ranking in SERPs. To build up authority, publish blog posts with more than 2000 words so that search engines see that you really know your stuff. It also gives you more opportunity to use relevant keywords within the body of the text. To keep the reader engaged, you can also get creative and break up the text with images, graphics and videos.
So speaking of keeping users engaged with the use of videos, here’s Beth again – this time explaining the benefits of updating your blog regularly.
Publishing blog articles on your website can become a lead generation method in itself. It is a great way to attract potential customers who are somewhere in the middle of your sales funnel. You can use your blog to answer any of their objections or shape their opinion by providing them with the information they’re looking for.
Monitoring your Google Search Console data gives you an insight into the sorts of questions people have about your products or services. Filter through the various question words, such as how, what, where, why to find the sort of questions you could answer in a blog format. Once you’ve got the topic suggestions, follow the keyword research steps again to make a list of short and long-tail keywords worth adding within your main body text, or as subheadings. Just remember what Beth said in her video – try to use those keywords naturally!
Step 9 – Capture your leads
Creating great content that drives quality traffic to your website is one thing. But what is the use of web visitors if you’re not converting them into leads? To keep your marketing funnel going you need those web visitors to take the next step. And the action they take needs to offer you the opportunity to stay connected with them and follow up. Depending on the school of thought, and the industry you’re in, it is believed some consumers will need up to 12 touchpoints before they decide to buy from you. This shows how important it is to capture those visitors.
One way to capture leads within the content you post on your website is to offer a lead magnet. Giving freebies away in exchange for their email address is one of the best ways to capture those consuming your content. This can include free eBooks, downloadable checklists, video tutorials, or in our case, a free SEO audit for which you can apply by filling out the form at the bottom of this article.
This ‘transaction’ process of capturing a lead and providing them with a free resource that expands on the topic your post is about can be automated with the email marketing tool you use. One of the biggest mistakes we see business owners make is capturing the email addresses but never doing anything with them! If you’re going to be capturing leads, make sure you have a process in place that will then nurture that lead over time.
Optimising the conversion rate of your website can be done on other pages too, not just where you post your regular long-format content, such as your blog page. Adding contact forms where it’s likely for users to convert is a good way to increase your conversion rate. By adding a thank you page you can track the number of conversions you get and where they come from.
Our conversion rate optimisation (CRO) guide can help you to understand what else can be done on your website to generate more conversions.
Step 10 – Assign title tags, meta descriptions & perform image optimisation
To ensure you’re making the most of your content on each landing page and optimising the click-through rate from results pages, there are a few technical features in the backend of your website that you can utilise. Start by assigning an H1 header tag to the targeted keywords that relate to the title of the page and the content of that page. You can then assign the H2 tag to any subheadings that contain similar keywords. These tags help search engines to understand the content on your landing pages.
Next, filling in your meta description boxes with great copy that explains to your audience what they’ll find on your landing page helps to increase the click-through rate from SERPs. Use SERP Snippet Optimisation Tool to get the right amount of characters in your descriptions.
Lastly, when uploading images to your website it is good practice to optimise their file size beforehand. This keeps the load speed down. Additionally, you can name your image files using the keywords you’re looking to rank for, which will elevate your SEO game when the website gets indexed.
If you have a WordPress website, installing the Yoast SEO plugin is highly advisable. It audits your SEO efforts and provides you with suggestions on what else can be done to improve the ranking of your pages or blog posts.
Step 11 – Track, analyse & improve your content and rankings on a regular basis
Once your technical and on-page SEO is up and running, the aim is to continually improve it by analysing the data. Keyword research and matching the user intent should be something you do regularly – SEO, in general, isn’t a ‘set it and forget it’ technique. It’s like a muscle that needs to be trained to stay strong.
Every now and then it’s good to run a quick SEO audit using SEO Site Checkup tool to scan your website for any errors and see which of the recommendations are worth implementing. You can also monitor the page load speed with GTMatrix to keep the bounce rate low and improve user experience.
Similarly, using Google Search Console, you can measure how well your website and the content you post is performing. This is where you’ll see data on your search impressions, or in other words how often you appear in search results, for what sort of queries and which of these result in a click.
Analysing this data helps you to make decisions with regards to your next piece of content, or any changes that you need to implement in your keyword strategy or a piece of content you posted in the past that perhaps isn’t ranking so well.
For example, let’s say your blog post is showing up on the first page of Google results for a specific keyword yet the bounce rate from that particular page is high. With more and more people indicating to Google that they didn’t find your information useful, over time your rankings will dip. Rewriting that piece of content to match it to the search intent of those inputting that query is not a bad idea to improve the click-through rate and potentially generate leads. Compare the article against those at the top of the fist page – what do their blog posts have that yours doesn’t? Once you notice what gaps you need to fill, you can rewrite the article and monitor its performance.
You should also monitor the conversions on your website, which can be done using Google Analytics. This will give you insight into where most conversions happen and might suggest little design adjustments on your landing pages to improve the conversion rate.
Generate Leads With Off-page SEO
Finally, in this last step, we get to off-page SEO, which as the name suggests refers to all the search engine optimisation processes done outside of your website. Working on this aspect of your SEO strategy helps to improve the perceived relevance, reputation, trustworthiness, popularity and authority of your website to the search engine crawlers and users themselves. Below we’ll explore how this is done.
Step 12 – Secure as many high-value inbound links as you can & promote your content
Your website’s search engine ranking improves when other platforms or people whose websites are deemed as high-authority ‘vouch’ for the quality of the content on your website. This can be done by creating backlinks from their sites to your site. There are three main types of links:
- Natural links are earnt without you having to take any actions. For example, if a blogger with a large following decides to mention your product or store in one of their articles and links your name to your website URL, you’ve earnt a natural link.
- Manually-built links can be generated by asking your clients to link back to your website or asking influencers to share your content.
- Self-created links are those that you or your SEO expert can create by listing your business on relevant directories. Paying for a press release or guest blogging would also be considered as a self-created link. Some self-created link practices are seen as black-hat SEO and are condemned by search engines so be sure to choose a white-hat SEO agency to help you with backlinking.
Regardless of how you get your inbound links, the ones that matter the most are those with high link equity. Search engines rank pages based on how well they can pass on authority and value onto another website. This will depend on several factors, including how popular that website is, how related the two pages that are being linked are, the authority of linking page’s domain and how many other links the linking page has. All of this increases the link value of the linking page.
As we discussed, as part of your on-page optimisation you can frequently add high-quality content to your website. It’s great to write value-packed blog posts but you’ll only really reap the benefits when you promote that content and drive traffic to it. Social media is one way to get there. Every time you or someone else within your industry posts on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn and adds a link to your website, a backlink is created and helps to boost your SEO.
By adding high-authority links to your site, specific to your industry, you improve your reputation and drive traffic to your website. With an optimised, user-friendly website (technical SEO) and valuable, easy-to-read content (on-page SEO) the users who come to your website through those backlinks (off-page SEO) find what they need easily and stay on your website, indicating to search engines that you provide the user with value. Search engines, such as Google, will then reward you by ranking your page higher when relevant queries are being searched. The more people see your website in search, the more people are likely to view it and convert, which means your SEO efforts are generating you leads.
Lead generation and SEO
You can see how ALL of the elements of search engine optimisation come together to drive traffic to your website from organic search. The more web visitors, the higher the chance of getting leads.
Marketing your business by following a search engine optimisation strategy that covers all those elements can be a sustainable way to get inbound leads without spending too much per lead. Every investment you make into the optimisation of your website for search engines is going to push it forward incrementally.
Finding an experienced SEO specialist to do it for you will ensure that the strategy is aligned with your business goals, tracked and optimised at all times. Another benefit of paying someone to do your SEO is that it avoids any ‘beginner’ mistakes that can hurt your rankings.
Although the strategies we discussed in the on-page SEO section have the most power to directly affect your ability to generate leads with your SEO strategy, specifically the continuous keyword research and high-quality content that strategically answers the questions of your target audience, these will not yield great results unless backed up with the technical SEO and promoted with some of the off-page SEO techniques mentioned above.
With some of the technology giants behind the famous browsers such as Safari, Firefox and, in a couple of years, Chrome blocking third-party cookies, retargeting to people who have visited your website in the past will no longer be as easily available. Therefore investing in search engine optimisation services ahead of these big changes to ensure your website shows up at the top of results pages in organic searches will put you ahead of the game.
If you’re looking to generate more leads with SEO, apply for our free SEO audit below and let our experienced team where your search engine marketing strategy could be optimised!