SEO and lead generation are two of the most important aspects of digital marketing.
While the first one is focused on increasing the visibility of a website in search engine results pages, the second is all about capturing potential customers and converting them into paying clients.
When these two strategies are combined, they can power up sales for businesses.
With that said, here are ten SEO lead-generation tactics that you can use to drive more conversions and ultimately boost your revenue.
Why Is SEO Important for Your Business?
More than 90% of all pages on the internet do not receive any organic traffic.
Do you want to be among those websites and businesses that are not being found by users through search engines?
Of course not.
That’s where SEO comes into play.
It’s all about everything you can do to increase your content online visibility. Whether it’s keyword research or on-page optimization with DIY SEO software, these practices can help you rank higher on search engines and attract more visitors to your website.
So, what does it mean for your business?
More traffic means more leads, more conversions, and, ultimately, more sales.
If you’re not investing in search engine optimization, chances are your competitors are, and they could be stealing away potential customers from you.
How Can Lead Generation Boost Your Business?
Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting potential customers into leads – people who have shown an interest in your product or service.
The more leads you have, the more opportunities to convert them into paying clients.
It’s a critical aspect of any business because, without leads, there can be no sales.
Lead generation tactics can vary from building landing pages to running email marketing campaigns.
Whether you are working on your call to action, using catchy images, or attractive colors and fonts with the assistance of a robust design tool, the goal is to capture the user’s attention and ultimately guide them toward making a purchase.
Your ultimate mission should be to build a buzz around your business and generate interest in what you have to offer.
Can You Combine SEO and Lead Generation?
Yes, you can.
Combining both of them can create a powerful strategy that could significantly impact your business success.
When you optimize your website for search engines and use lead-generation tactics to capture potential customers’ interest, you have a higher chance of converting them into paying clients.
Did you know that 49% of marketers claim that organic search offers the highest ROI among all marketing channels?
That’s because SEO and lead generation go hand in hand.
Search engine optimization drives traffic to your website, while lead generation turns those visitors into leads that you can nurture and convert into sales.
10 SEO Lead Generation Tactics to Improve Sales
Now that you understand the importance of both SEO and lead generation, let’s take a look at some tactics that you can use to improve your sales.
- Understand Your Target Audience;
- Focused Keyword Research;
- Optimize Website Content;
- Leverage Local SEO;
- Generate Quality Backlinks;
- Create a Mobile-Friendly Site;
- Gather Good Testimonials;
- Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’s Strategies;
- Use Social Media Platforms;
- Monitor and Analyze Results.
Understand Your Target Audience
Understanding your target audience is the first step to any successful marketing strategy.
By knowing who your potential customers are, their interests, needs, and pain points, you can tailor your content and lead generation tactics to better appeal to them.
The first step to achieving this is by creating buyer personas.
These are fictional representations of your ideal customers, and they can help you gain a deeper understanding of who you are trying to reach.
To create a buyer persona, start by researching your current customers and looking at their demographics, behavior patterns, and motivations. Then, use this information to build a detailed profile of your ideal customer.
Here’s a template you can use:
So, what you should do is gain valuable insights by examining factors like age, gender, location, interests, and buying patterns. Utilize this data to create targeted and personalized campaigns that increase your chances of converting leads.
The information you collect can help you segment your audience and create custom content for each segment, making your marketing efforts more effective. Let’s take this digital marketplace for example. They can segment their audiences based on those interested in online courses, sports prediction software, trading platforms, dropshipping solutions, and other kinds of sellable digital products.
Pro Tip 💡: Be bold and update your buyer personas as your business grows and evolves. Regularly revisiting them can ensure that your lead-generation tactics continue to align with your target audience’s preferences and needs.
Focused Keyword Research
Keyword research is a crucial aspect of both SEO and lead generation. By researching the queries that your target audience is using to search for your products or services, you can optimize your content and website to rank better on search engines.
There are various tools available that can help you with keyword research, such as Google’s Keyword Planner and Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer.
Take the time to identify high-volume, low-competition terms that are relevant to your business and target audience. These are the ones that you should focus on in your content creation and optimization efforts.
To find lead generation keywords, think about the terms potential customers might use when searching for a solution to their problem. For example, if you own a finance blog, some viable lead generation keywords could be “personal finance tips” or “investment strategies.” Or, if you own a photography business, relevant terms could be “wedding photographer” or “family portraits.”
Remember, you can also leverage trending topics to attract more leads and increase your website’s visibility.
Once you have seed terms, fetch them into Ahrefs ‘ Keyword Explorer to see which related keywords are most popular.
But wait. It does not end here.
Find useful information such as keyword difficulty, search volume, and click potential.
The bottom line is that you should search for long-tail terms with lower competition that can help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) while also attracting more qualified leads.
Pro Tip 💡: With Ahrefs, you can steal your competitor’s best-ranking queries by entering their website URLs into the Site Explorer tool and looking at the “Organic Keywords” report. Filter the results by search volume to find relevant terms that your competitors are ranking for. Then, include them in your content marketing strategy.
Enhancing your search engine optimization strategy is critical for achieving marketing excellence, playing a vital role in securing new customers and leads. Strategic application of local SEO can bring significant rewards to your firm. Precisely adjusting this essential factor can unlock new possibilities for your business’s growth.
Optimize Website Content
Did you know that before making a purchase decision, 53% of US consumers use search engines to research products?
This makes it crucial to have optimized website content that is informative, engaging, and easy to find.
Creating valuable, informative, and engaging content is key to attracting potential leads.
Optimize your website’s main pages, such as the homepage, about page, and product or services pages, with targeted keywords in mind.
Include calls to action (CTAs) and lead magnets on these pages to encourage visitors to take a specific action that can help convert them into leads.
For blog posts and other forms of content, use relevant keywords naturally and include internal links to other relevant pages on your website.
Always consider these four key points during the optimization process.
Your content should be:
- Clear (easy to understand for your target audience);
- Valuable (providing useful information or solving a problem);
- Unique (standing out from competitors);
- Relevant (to your target audience’s interests and needs).
These factors not only help with SEO but also make it more likely for potential leads to engage with your content and take action.
Pro Tip 💡: Include your target keyword in the title, the URL, the body of your content, the meta description, and the alt text of images to increase your chances of providing relevant results to your buyer personas and attract them from search engines to your website.
Leverage Local SEO
Local SEO is crucial for businesses that have a physical location and want to attract local customers.
By optimizing your website and content for local search, you can increase your visibility in Google’s Local Pack and improve your chances of generating leads from nearby potential customers.
To do this, make sure to include your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) on your website and in online directories.
Also, create a Google My Business listing and update it with accurate NAP information, business hours, photos, and customer reviews.
Creating your business profile on Google is free, and it can help you rank higher on Google Maps and local search results.
You can also optimize your website content with location-specific keywords like “RV rentals in Phoenix”. Take Cruise America as an example—a leading RV rental service that strategically structured its data to boost local SEO, ensuring better visibility for those seeking RV rentals in the Phoenix area.
Or, for instance, if you have a physical store, you can create location-specific landing pages for each of your store locations and optimize them with the relevant keywords.
Pro Tip 💡: Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews on your Google My Business listing, as positive reviews can improve your search engine ranking and attract more leads.
Generate Quality Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites that point back to your website.
Search engines view backlinks as a sign of trust, making them an important factor in SEO. By having high-quality backlinks from reputable websites, you can improve your brand’s authority and increase your chances of ranking higher in search results.
To generate quality backlinks, focus on creating valuable and shareable content that other site owners would want to link to naturally.
You can also reach out to relevant websites and offer them guest posts or collaborations, including a link back to your business in the content. By doing this, you not only generate backlinks but also expose your brand and content to a new audience, potentially attracting more qualified leads.
To find relevant sites where you can guest contribute, use Google search operators.
For example, you can search for “guest post opportunities” AND “lead generation” to find opportunities related to your industry.
Once you have a list of potential sites, you can reach them with a personalized message, like this one:
The secret here is to offer something valuable to the website owner, such as a well-researched, quality piece of content that they can share with their audience.
Pro Tip 💡: Monitor your unlinked business mentions and reach out to the source (using a tool like Semrush or Ahrefs), asking them to include a link back to your website. This tactic can help you generate more backlinks, improve your SEO, and ultimately generate more leads.
Create a Mobile-Friendly Site
Did you know that as page load increases, bounce probability increases dramatically?
It means that having a slow-loading website that is not mobile-friendly can have a significant impact on your lead-generation efforts.
In other words, faster sites encourage users to stay longer and purchase more.
So, ensure your website is optimized for mobile and loads fast on all devices. This includes compressing images and other media, using caching plugins, and choosing a reliable hosting provider.
The hosting service you choose should meet your website’s future needs. The most used one is VPS hosting, as it’s fast and stable and can meet your website’s growth. Even more, a Windows VPS option gives you more freedom if you want to manage your hosting yourself.
And, if you are using WordPress, you can use plugins like WP Rocket to optimize your site speed and improve user experience.
Moreover, you can also opt for a responsive theme that adapts to different screen sizes and devices.
Pro Tip 💡: Test your website speed using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to identify areas for improvement and take action accordingly.
Gather Good Testimonials
It turns out that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
In other words, the more positive reviews and testimonials you have, the more likely potential leads will trust your brand and want to do business with you.
To help you with that, encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews on your website or third-party review sites like Google My Business, Yelp, or Trustpilot.
You can also feature these reviews on your website and social media channels to showcase social proof and build trust with potential leads.
Pro Tip 💡: Reach out to satisfied customers and ask them to leave reviews on third-party sites, as these carry more weight than reviews on your website. You can also incentivize customers by offering discounts or rewards for leaving a review.
Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’s Strategies
An effective way to generate leads is by researching your competitors and analyzing their SEO strategies.
Start by identifying your top competitors in the search results for your target keywords. Then, use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to analyze their website content, backlinks, and keywords.
You can also use tools like SimilarWeb to understand your competitors’ traffic sources, audience demographics, and more. By studying your competitors’ tactics, you can identify what works for them and adapt those strategies to your lead-generation efforts.
For instance, you can visit the Facebook Ad Library to find targeted campaigns that are performing well on the platform by entering a term. You can search for “content marketing” to look for a list of companies and individuals running ad campaigns centered around this keyword.
You can also directly explore their website to analyze their strategy and target audience. This way, you can uncover opportunities and gain new ideas to create engaging content.
But wait – there’s more.
To steal your competitors’ advertising strategies, search for their names to find their ads and promoted posts. These ads contain precise words and phrases that effectively captivate the audience’s attention.
You can then use these terms in your content strategy to attract leads and boost your SEO efforts.
Pro Tip 💡: Take advantage of competitor analysis tools like SpyFu or BuzzSumo to get an in-depth view of your competitors’ strategies. These tools can help you identify their top-performing content, keywords, and backlinks, allowing you to create better and more successful lead-generation tactics. You can also set up alerts with these tools to receive notifications whenever your competitors publish new content, giving you an edge in staying updated with the market.
Use Social Media Platforms
Social media is a powerful tool for generating leads and driving website traffic.
The key to success on social media is to create engaging content that resonates with your target audience. This can include informative blog posts, entertaining videos, eye-catching graphics, and engaging video presentations.
Post regularly and use relevant hashtags to reach a wider audience.
You can also run paid advertisements on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram to reach potential leads based on their demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Try also communities like Quora and Reddit, where you can establish yourself as an industry expert and answer questions related to your business. This will allow you to connect with potential leads and provide valuable information that can take them back to your website.
Pro Tip 💡: Use social media analytics tools like Sprout Social or Hootsuite to track your posts’ performance and identify the best times to post for maximum engagement.
While topline metrics offer a glimpse into performance, diving deeper with social media analytics tools illuminates the nuanced factors separating viral victories from lackluster launches.
By scrutinizing engagement trends across diverse dimensions like timing, format, and messaging, these powerful platforms equip strategists to distill data-driven insights for optimizing future content, transforming surface-level observations into targeted enhancements that compound gains.
You can also use these tools to monitor your brand’s online reputation and address any negative comments or feedback promptly. This will help you maintain a positive image and attract more leads through social media.
Monitor and Analyze Results
Finally, to continuously improve your lead-generation tactics, it is crucial to monitor and analyze your results regularly.
Use tools like Google Analytics to track website traffic, conversions, and other key metrics. This will give you insights into which strategies are working well and which ones need improvement.
You can also use A/B testing to experiment with different tactics and determine which ones perform better in terms of lead generation.
By continuously monitoring and analyzing your progress, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your SEO lead-generation tactics and see a significant improvement in sales.
Pro Tip 💡: Use a combination of tools and techniques to track results, such as Google Analytics, heat maps, and conversion tracking. This will give you a comprehensive view of your lead-generation efforts and help you make informed decisions for future strategies.
Takeaways
Implementing these ten SEO lead-generation tactics can help you attract more qualified leads and drive sales for your business.
Remember to keep track of your results, continuously monitor and adapt your strategies, and always prioritize providing valuable content to your target audience. With patience and persistence, you will see a significant improvement in your lead-generation efforts and overall business success.
What other tactics have you used to generate leads through SEO?
Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Article by:
Erik Emanuelli
Erik Emanuelli has been in the online marketing game since 2010. He’s now sharing what he has learned on his website. Find more insights about SEO and blogging here.