How Lead Generation and SEO Work Together For Your Marketing Strategy

Lead generation tools and SEO may have a lot in common in more ways than one. This article introduces you to how to tap the power of lead generation tools for your SEO campaigns.

You might be wondering what lead generation tools have to do with search engine optimization. This post will help you understand how your marketing success ultimately relies heavily on blending both of these strategies. Marketing strategies are often done separately. Two of the most critical campaigns, lead generation, and search engine optimization, hardly get time to collaborate actively and hit two birds with one stone. A lead generation campaign would have a standalone set of tasks that attract leads in the hopes that they buy a particular product or service your company sells. On the other hand, SEO would have an entirely different set of activities that increase your website’s ranking on search engines.

But the trends and the overall market are evolving. The buyers and customers are demanding more from your company. How do you, being the head of the company, address this? You may have covered a lot of scope and combinations of marketing strategies but, perhaps, resulted only in minor successes. This may sound unprecedented but, maybe, you need to consider SEO for your lead generation projects, and also tap into the hidden potentials of lead generation tools to boost your SEO campaigns.

This article provides you with ways to use lead generation tools to help you boost your search engine optimization projects. This article gives you insight on how lead generation works, the benefits of lead generation marketing, the various tools you can use to supplement your online marketing strategies as well as utilize these tools to improve your overall search engine rankings.

What Is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is a marketing strategy that allows you to get more potential clients for a particular product or service. These potential clients are called leads, which, through specific marketing methods, can eventually turn into customers. That is the primary goal of lead generation, to convert those potential clients to product buyers. These leads are vital to keeping your business afloat. With that in mind, you must have a steady stream of leads so that your business would thrive and evolve into something bigger.

Often, you’d have limited information on your leads. You can have a name and a phone number or an email. Leads often open the lines of communications to your business after responding through a newsletter signup, trial offer, or subscription, among others.

Standard practices of attracting potential customers or leads include:

  • Blog creation
  • Coupons
  • Job applications
  • Live events
  • Newsletter
  • Video Tutorials
  • Online subscription
  • Product trials
  • Facebook Lead Ads
  • Twitter Lead Gen Cards
  • LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
  • Pay-per-Click Ads (PPC)

Why Do You Need Lead Generation?

A business needs to generate sales to keep it going. An online business cannot do so if it cannot attract new buyers. While you may have loyal customers already, the numbers can dwindle if you don’t know how to keep your patrons.

As part of your safety net, you need new clients who might be interested in buying your products and services. That is why lead generation is essential. You need more customers and clients to come in, so you get more sales and, hopefully, an increase in profit. Part of online marketing is catching the interest of that prospect customer by providing information about what you offer. This is the whole premise of lead generation.

What Are the Types of Lead Generation Strategies

Online lead generation has conversion as its central focus. Most often, you’d see a suggestive call to action as a path for readers to become leads. Before you understand the benefits of lead generation ideas for B2B, you should know what strategies most online marketers use.

  • Email Marketing
  • Content Marketing
  • SEO
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Paid Advertising
  • Website Optimization
  • Marketing Automation
  • Growth Hacking

How Can You Benefit From Lead Generation?

Lead generation may cost you some money, but in total, it is drastically more cost-effective when compared to the more traditional paid forms of advertising, such as print media and digital ads. Lead generation allows you to target your audience in various parameters such as their age, location, and gender.

Lead Generation Basics

Before you delve further into lead generation, you should have enough understanding of the basics of lead generation. Let’s begin with your ideal leads.

Who Are My Ideal Leads?

Not all leads are great leads. In fact, less than 30% of your leads would be converted to sales. To further increase the chances of lead conversion, you have to identify who your ideal leads are. These high-quality leads have higher chances of being converted to customers. Create a buyer persona so you can categorize that specific set of people. Perhaps these questions can guide you who these leads are:

  • Who would most likely buy from you?
  • How old are they?
  • What is their educational level?
  • What are their hobbies?
  • What do they do for a living?
  • What are their pain points related to your product?
  • Where do they look for information?

Your ideal leads are part of your organic audience, which has a higher conversion yield compared to the paid ones because they are visiting your site because they want something from it. Organic traffic has a high level of intention. If you can provide organic traffic with the right solutions, chances are, you’d gain a new customer.

What Are Your Target Keywords

Now that you understand the search intent of your audience, the next step would be to predict the keywords your audience would likely use. These keywords can belong to one of these categories:

  • Informational

These are the keywords that seek answers and insight. These would answer W-H questions such as what, which, who, and how, among others.

  • Navigational

These are the keywords used when people are looking for a particular brand or service. One great example would be your brand name.

  • Transactional

Transactional keywords are those keywords used when leads are ready to convert. Words belonging to this category often have low search volume but high conversion rates. Sample words include buy, purchase, discount, where to buy.

  • Commercial

Commercial keywords are those keywords used when your customers and leads are ready to buy. You can include words “shipping”, “deals,” and “discounts”.

SEO for Lead Generation

Search engine optimization is about fine-tuning website pages, so these rank higher in search engine results. The goal is to land on the first page of search engines; hence, your website has higher chances of having organic traffic and would have more online visibility, thus, increasing your relevance and reputation.

There are quite a few factors that you should take note of when optimizing your website for search engines.

  • Headlines

Adding your keywords to your headlines and sub-heading helps.

  • Organization

Putting ideas in an orderly manner using H tags.

  • Meta Description

Adding at least one keyword on the meta description allows readers to know more about what the content is at first glance.

  • Images

Adding keywords alt texts or tags to images on the pages also improve your page’s ranking.

  • Keywords

Perhaps the most crucial aspect of SEO. Understanding targeted words narrows your content to what your audience needs and wants.

But what does SEO have to do with lead generation? How does one help the other?

You might think there is nothing connecting lead generation and SEO, after all, the former is about increasing your buyers and customers while the latter is about increasing web traffic.

Here is a surprising fact: When you combine SEO and lead generation in your campaigns, you tend to have not only more leads but high-quality ones. To tap into this enormous opportunity, create quality content, and optimize it, so search engines see value in it. Potential buyers would want to signup or buy because of it.

There are some other good reasons why you need to combine SEO and lead generation tactics.

Reputation and Awareness

As mentioned earlier, when you increase your search engine rankings, your credibility and reputation also improve. If your brand becomes more recognizable, it becomes more trusting to your leads and customers.

Wide Scope

Compared to lead generation, SEO campaigns can be used in all levels of your sales funnel. Most of the time, lead generation is often placed at the end when the customer is ready to purchase the product.

How to Merge SEO and Lead Generation

While SEO is not a strategy for lead generation, it is still a powerful tool that can drive visitors to your site. There is so much marketing potential with these visitors that it is a must to optimize your webpages. Compared to your traditional advertising, an optimized website of a local business yields a higher chance of closing a deal.

Know Their Intent

The secret of a successful SEO and lead generation integration lies in your understanding of what SEO means. Questions like “Why are they using these keywords?” or “What are the purposes of searching for these keywords” are the two primary questions you should ask yourself to understand your buyers deeper.

Why do I need to know buyer content?

It is all about user intent, or the reason behind why people type in words in the search query box. The simplest way to know what kind of intent most often users have is to use the search engine. For example, Google aims to provide the best user experience, so the results, based on the algorithms, will show you what people generally seek when using a particular word or phrase.

You must understand that there are two kinds of user intent:

  • To inform

This means the search query aims to know more about something

For example, if you type “lead generation,” you’d find that the first page of your search engine query provides you with strategies on how to use lead generation.

  • To buy

This means the search query aims to purchase something.

For example, if you type in “email marketing,” you’d notice that your search yields more on software companies offering their email marketing solutions.

By knowing the purpose behind each query makes it easier to provide the kind of content your audience, on the average, seeks. Using the examples above, you’d understand that the lead generation content should include highly valuable information your readers need. On the other hand, content for email marketing should have a strong product page that highlights your email marketing products.

But here’s the reality of all of this: at some particular point, you need to step back and analyze whether your SEO and lead generation strategies are working for you or against you. You see, buyers have more freedom now, more than ever. You can lead them down your sales funnel, but you can’t dictate them to take action whenever you want them to. They can move at their own pace.

It is no longer a streamline pattern where once the buyer realizes a problem, then uses search engines to search for solutions to land on your site and signup for an email or buy a product. In many cases nowadays, your potential buyer won’t straightaway purchase from you. He would most likely check social media profiles first or read older content on your site.

Optimize Your Content

Your engaging content sure helps you a lot, but what’s more important is how you strategize your content so that you cover every stage of the sales funnel. It doesn’t guarantee either that creating any content means having leads. Optimizing your content so that it turns up or ranks higher on the search engines whenever your buyers are ready to search for those keywords for their purchases is your safer route.

Putting the right kind of content for the appropriate buyer also increases your chance of being noticed. For those entry-level buyers, they want to understand more about an idea or product, so provide them with entertaining content such as infographics, guidelines, and the likes. Your keywords should target information data and easy to understand explanations.

On the other hand, notice that the keywords being used by or generated for ready-to-buy leads are different. Such keywords and content have strong buying intentions, include reviews, product endorsements, vendor comparisons, and primarily product pages. That being said, you need to optimize your content to target those keywords to increase your chances of your products being purchased.

Use Targeted Keywords

Relevant and targeted keywords should be added to your content, but don’t overstuff it as your site’s going to get penalized for it. Instead, add your primary keyword sparingly, depending on the number of words your content would have. Also, add secondary keywords or commonly called semantic keywords in the content, but be careful not to duplicate those too as your site will get penalized for it too.

However, keywords should not only be in the content. You must also add them the following to increase your organic leads:

  • URL
  • Title
  • Meta Description

Use Long-Tail Keywords

Long-tail keywords are often associated with ready-to-buy leads. It might be cumbersome to you, but these keywords with little to no search volume target the visitors that converts and buys your products.

A Mobile-Friendly Website

Scouring the Internet using mobile phones has been getting traction in the past few years as more people prefer mobility over getting stuck at home surfing the web using their desktop computers. An easily viewed and responsive website on the phone not only makes website access very viable, but you are also tapping into the potential of an excellent online experience. The latter is one of the factors that drive purchase decisions.

Optimize Your Landing Pages

Your landing page is one of the best pages to channel leads because it contains content that is highly targeted to a specific set of customers.

Create a Lead Magnet

Lead magnets attract leads through incentives on your site. It has a give-and-take scheme where you give them a checklist, cheatsheet, or anything of value to your readers in exchange for their information. You can add this as a popup or in the top bar where your audience can easily see it. A content upgrade can also work as a lead magnet. This allows your audience to view a more in-depth take on a topic when they provide you with their contact information.

A Strong Call-to-Action

A solid call-to-action at the end of your content can give you lead results on the spot just as a strong headline can catch the attention at first sight.

Top Lead Generation Tools for Your SEO

Acquiring organic, high-quality leads is one of the most difficult challenges for any digital marketer. According to this Marketo article, 96% of your website visitors are not ready to buy but can provide you with their information in exchange for some valuable information. What this implies is you might be missing out on the value of your visitors if taking care of them is not on your priority list. A solid strategy is just as crucial as your leads.

Here are some lead generation marketing tools that you can use together with your SEO to get better yields.

Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing is an essential component of the most cost-effective lead generation marketing campaign. Eight-one percent of the respondents by a study indicated that email marketing is an effective channel to put your content in good use. You can send an invitation for a webinar, promote a new service, or host an event.

To effectively use email marketing tools for your SEO, segment your list of subscriptions for leads, so each of these segments is more interesting for them. Then, you can now create content that targets their interests and preferences.

To Promote Content

Email marketing is one way to promote your content. In this case, you are not downright promoting or advertising- you are offering free yet valuable information. You are also less likely to be flagged as spam when you add insightful information in the content. There are two ways you can make use of email marketing for SEO

  1. As a newsletter

You can email your leads of a regular newsletter that highlights new content on your website. The advantage of this tactic is you don’t have to do something outrageous to feature such material. Simply take an excerpt or summary of new posts and send them in via email.

  1. As special offer blast

If you are using email to send off as a special blast such as special offers or links to high-value research, make sure that you cover the groundwork of your marketing piece. This would be the highlight of your email. You are giving them something valuable in exchange for some data. The advantage of this is, you are guaranteed instant conver