Last updated on August 20th, 2024 at 12:27 am
SEO is a great way to generate leads and increase brand awareness.
I’ll never forget when, as a budding marketer, I repeatedly discovered HubSpot’s blog content through various Google searches related to online marketing.
Their content was everywhere.
It was like they were reading my mind.
That’s the feeling you can create for your target market using SEO — you can become so prevalent in the search rankings that they start to depend on you for answers to their questions and solutions to their problems.
And you’d better believe that that brand awareness turns into more leads and more revenue over time — in fact, SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate (compared to 1.7% for traditional leads).
But…
How do you use SEO to generate leads?
Let’s talk about that!
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The Relationship Between SEO & Lead Generation
Before we dive into the steps, I want to take you through a quick debrief on the relationship between SEO and lead generation.
Here’s a fact to get us started.
Your target market is searching for stuff in Google.
How do I know?
Because it’s the largest search engine in the world (by far) and virtually every target market is using it.
Okay.
But how are you going to get your target market’s attention when they’re searching in Google? Then, how are you going to capture those same people’s email addresses?
That’s what we’re going to explain in this guide.
But here’s a high-level view of the process…
- Research Keywords To Determine WHAT Your Target Market is Searching For
- Optimize Your Pages & Blog Content to Rank for SPECIFIC Phrases in Google
- Create Lead Magnets and/or Content Upgrades to Turn Your SEO Traffic into Leads
That’s the gist.
Let me give you a quick example.
REISift is a SaaS company that serves real estate investors. And one of the challenges that real estate investors face is finding cash buyers to help fund their deals.
So we wrote this article to try and rank for the phrase, “how to find cash buyers”, which gets 200 searches per month in Google.
Now a few months down the road, that article is ranking on the first page for multiple relevant keywords and driving 89 visits per month to REISift’s website.
Cool, right?
But it goes beyond that traffic.
Here’s a glimpse at the lead magnets we have throughout that article for capturing those visitors’ email addresses…
That’s just one example of how SEO turns into leads.
In the below steps, we’ll walk you through the process of making this happen for your own online business.
Step #1: Understand Your Target Market
Before you even think of trying to rank in Google, you need to have a solid understanding of your target market.
Why?
Because the search terms you target will be determined by what your ideal customers search for in Google.
But you can only find those search terms if you know the jargon that your target market uses.
If you knew nothing about real estate investing, for instance, and I told you to write content to rank in Google for real estate investors, you’d probably target some pretty basic terms like…
- Real estate investing tips — 200 search volume
- How to start investing in real estate — 2,600 search volume
- Real estate investing ideas — 10 search volume
Those are great.
But they are highly competitive search terms.
And if you don’t know the jargon of real estate investors, then you’ll miss out on all of these other search terms that are less competitive and could provide a ton of free traffic to your website…
- How to wholesale real estate — 4,400 search volume
- Wholesaling — 10 search volume
- Real estate skip tracing — 150 search volume
Unless you’re a real estate investor, you probably don’t know what any of those things are.
But they’re real terms that mean a lot to real estate investors.
That’s why — as it pertains to SEO — it’s so important to intimately understand your target market.
You can only rank for the right keywords if you know your target market and the jargon they use when searching in Google.
Step #2: Research Keywords & Understand Intent
Once you understand your target market, it’s time to brainstorm keyword ideas.
This part is a bit of guesswork.
What do you think your target market might be searching for in Google?
Make a list!
Try to write down at least 10 – 20 terms.
To determine if those phrases actually have search volume in Google, you’ll need a tool.
For a free tool, we recommend using Ubersuggest. That’ll get you started. If you need a more sophisticated paid tool, we recommend one of the following…
Once you’ve got a keyword research tool to use, enter your keyword ideas in and take note of the following information…
- Volume — This is the number of searches that the keyword receives every month in Google. More searches mean more potential traffic if you rank on the first page.
- Difficulty — This refers to how competitive the keyword is and how difficult it’ll be to rank on the first page. The higher the difficulty, the harder it’ll be to rank.
- Relevance — This is your own sense of whether people looking for this specific term fall within your target market or not. Are these people that you want to drive to your website?
When it comes to SEO, the best keywords are the ones that are relevant to your target market, have a good bit of volume, and have very little competition.
That’s why, again, it’s important to dive into the jargon that your target market uses.
Rinse and repeat this keyword research process until you have at least 5-10 keywords that you’d like your website to rank for.
But none of those keywords should be too similar — each should be distinct in the topic it’s addressing.
“How to generate leads” and “guide to generating leads” fall under the same umbrella, for instance, and Google will treat them as the same type of resource… no need to write two articles for those separate terms.
Step #3: Optimize Pages
By now, you should have a list of keywords that you’d like your website to rank for.
Some of those keywords should be targeted on your website’s blog, and other keywords should be targeted on your homepage or landing pages.
Here’s the distinction…
- Blog — If the keyword indicates that the searcher is trying to learn how to do something or improve their knowledge around a specific topic — for example, “How to generate leads for my business” — then write a blog post targeting the keyword.
- Page — If the keyword indicates that the searcher is looking for products or services like yours — for example, “project management software” — then create a landing page to try and rank for that specific keyword.
By the way, you should only choose ONE keyword to try and rank for per page or per blog post. Choose a “parent keyword” (i.e. a keyword that encompasses many other keywords) and gun for it.
How?
SEO might seem a little mystifying to you… but optimizing your homepage and landing pages is actually super simple.
You’ll want to include the exact keyword phrase in your title tag, meta description, and URL for the page…
That’s what Moz does when I search for “SEO tool” in Google.
On the page itself, Moz has put that term or some variation of it in the title and subtitle…
And that’s a big reason why it’s ranking!
Because Google knows what the page is about.
That’s your goal.
If you want a landing page or homepage to rank for a specific keyword, put that keyword in the title, subtitle, meta description, and URL of the page.
Then watch to see what happens.
Step #4: Create & Optimize Content
The second part of SEO — in some cases, the bigger part — is writing blog content that ranks in Google, drives traffic, and builds brand awareness.
Sound good?
Well, this is something I’ve been doing for clients for over 5 years now.
Here’s the basic process I use…
Choose a Keyword
Choose a keyword that you know quite a bit about. It’s far easier to write a long-form piece of content when you know the topic material really well. Again, only choose one keyword for each blog post that you write.
Look at the Top 10 Results
For your article research, you’re going to type your target keyword phrase into Google and look at the top 10 results in detail.
Take note of what each article talks about and add those to your outline.
Your goal is to write something that’s more complete than those articles.
If you want to rank #1 for this phrase, then your content needs to be more thorough and valuable than all of the articles that currently sit on the first page.
Optimize On-Page Elements
Once your article is finished, we have some simple housekeeping elements to cover.
These are the same as what you’d do when you’re optimizing a homepage or landing page to rank in Google.
Simply add the target keyword phrase to your URL, title tag, and meta description.
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Step #5: Use Content Upgrades
You know how to find great keywords to target… and you even know the basics to create content that’ll rank on page 1 of Google for those specific keywords.
But there’s still a gap between traffic and lead-gen.
That is, how do you turn SEO visitors (people who find your content through Google) into leads?
The answer is with content upgrades.
This is where, in the midst of your visitors perusing your content, you offer them something extra special… for free.
To get it, all they have to do is give you their email address.
These are called lead magnets, bribes to subscribe, or content upgrades.
You could offer a checklist…
An eBook…
Or some other downloadable resource.
The key is to offer something that’s…
- Free
- Awesome
- Relevant to the content the person is currently consuming
HubSpot does a great job of this on their blog articles.
For example, one article titled, 5 Steps to Create an Outstanding Marketing Plan [Free Templates], offers content templates as a content upgrade…
This resource can be pretty simple.
And you should have one relevant resource on every single asset that’s ranking in Google — that’ll create a lot of different “doorways” for people to join your email list.
From zero to hero, that’s how you turn SEO traffic into leads.
To finish, let’s talk about some important housekeeping SEO tips.
Step #6: Consider Load Speed
For obvious reasons, Google only wants to rank pages on the first page that load quickly and smoothly.
Multiple SEOers have researched this tendency and found that improving your load speed directly impacts your website’s rankings.
You can test your site’s load speed over here.
How’d you do?
If your website loads in over 2 seconds, then you’re likely tanking a hit in terms of your SEO.
Here are some quick tips for improving your load speed.
- Improve Your Website Hosting
- Compress Your Images
- Reduce Redirects
- Reduce CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
- Get Rid of Unnecessary Plugins
If that sounds confusing, then either hire a technical SEO person to help or change your hosting service to a company focused on performance.
Step #7: Build Links
Links are one of the most important factors Google uses to determine the authority and trustworthiness of a page.
More links from high-quality sources improve the reputation of your own site (those are called “backlinks”).
But this is also true of internal links on your own website — that is, pages and blog posts on your website linking to and from one another.
However, these links should be relevant — you don’t want to spam them like a Wikipedia page.
Try to add at least three relevant internal links to every blog post you write.
And make sure the anchor text you use fits the keyword that you’re trying to rank for.
For example, imagine that I’m adding links from this blog post you’re reading right now to another blog post on our website that’s trying to rank for the term “lead generation sales funnels”.
Oh!
See what I just did there?
I hyperlinked to that blog post using the exact term that it’s trying to rank for — and the text I hyperlinked upon is called the “anchor text”.
When you’re building backlinks or internal links, the anchor text should match your target keyword as closely as possible.
Final Thoughts On SEO for Lead Generation
SEO is currently one of the most powerful marketing methods for generating high-quality leads.
But how do you do it?
That’s what we’ve shown you in this article — from understanding your target market and identifying key search terms to creating SEO content, turning visitors into leads with content upgrades, and adding internal links to your site.
That’s the process.
Click the link below if you’re ready for a challenge.