Why SEO for Lead Generation Matters: 5 Best Practices to Follow

What if you build a commercial space in the middle of the city, but no one knows about it because no billboard promotes it? Likewise, if your business is not visible, lead generation can be a daunting task.

So, how to improve visibility for your business? 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves optimizing your website for better rankings and visibility on search engine result pages (SERP). So, if you want higher rankings on Google search result, improved lead generation, optimization becomes crucial. 

However, you will be competing against more than 1.13 billion websites live online. Therefore, SEO acts as a clear differentiator and enhances the capability to generate leads. 

This article focuses on why you need to care about SEO for your lead generation strategies and the best practices to follow. 

What is SEO?

SEO is the practice of making your website visible and accessible to users. For example, if you manufacture basketball shoes, your website must appear whenever a user searches for “basketball shoes” on Google or Bing.

Ensuring that whenever users search for a specific phrase or keyword related to your website needs to be visible on the SERP. SEO helps your website improve search engine rankings and quickly find the content users seek.

Why do I need SEO for lead generation?

To understand the importance of SEO for lead generation, we must understand how most businesses generate leads. 

Conventionally lead generation mainly included outbound sales where businesses would reach out to customers. Another way was inbound sales, where most of the audience comes to the business through nurturing, targeted campaigns, and organic promotions. 

Besides social media, outbound sales calls, and other means, websites are a great way to generate leads. This is where SEO helps businesses generate more leads through better visibility. 

However, why is SEO more important?

In the current predicament, more than 5 billion people are on the internet. Therefore, SEO is essential if you want to be visible across the internet and maximize website traffic. 

Some key benefits of SEO for your website are

• SEO improves visibility and increases organic traffic to gain potential leads.
• It enables websites to improve rankings, making finding the site easier for users.
• Targeted optimization for specific keywords and phrases, attracting relevant leads
• SEO offers enhanced user experience and site performance, encouraging visitors to engage and convert.
• Offers a cost-effective marketing strategy compared to traditional advertising methods.
• SEO offers long-term results and sustainability, generating leads even when you are not actively investing in paid campaigns.
• You can easily track SEO efforts’ effectiveness, making continuous improvement and optimization easier.
• SEO offers higher conversion rates compared to conventional approaches.

Search engine optimization has several benefits, but you must understand its potential at different stages of the lead generation funnel.

Impact of SEO at different stages of lead generation funnel

Lead generation is a process of generating consistent sales-qualified leads, which you can convert through nurturing. Generating leads consistently requires a well-planned marketing campaign with several strategies and assets. For example, you must mix paid marketing, landing pages, pillar content, e-books (lead magnets), and calls to action.

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Lead generation requires an amalgamation of all three stages of the funnel,

• Top of the funnel (Tofu) is where you need to create more awareness on what are the key problems solved by your product or service. SEO helps improve awareness and attract customers through better viability across search engines.
• In the middle of the funnel stage where customers may be aware of what problems and solutions are available in the market, including yours. Therefore, you need to nurture these leads to convert better. SEO has a considerable impact on this funnel by improving user experience.
• In the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) stage where most of the customers have decided to take a specific action but require more information on a product. Here, SEO can help improve the conversion rate of your sales-qualified leads through BOFU campaigns.

Now that we know the significance of SEO for lead-generation and conversions let us discuss some best practices. 

Best practices to enhance SEO for lead generation

SEO optimization is key to generating sales-qualified leads, nurturing them, and increasing conversions. Some best practices you can leverage to improve search engine optimizations are, 

#1. Keyword Research 

Conducting thorough keyword research helps you identify the terms and phrases the target audience uses to search for products. You can use several tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or Ahrefs to find relevant keywords.

Here it is important to determine the keyword density and use multiple types of keywords. This includes long-tail keywords, short phrases, and more.

#2. On-Page Optimization

On-page elements optimization is important for SEO, including page titles, Meta tags, heading, and others. This includes creating high-quality, unique content and (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness)EEAT-based content is crucial. 

EEAT is a critical element of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which enables evaluating quality search results. So, if you want to optimize SEO for lead generation, EEAT becomes vital to your content strategy.

#3. User Experience (UX) Optimization

Providing a seamless UX on your website enables lead generation and further boosts conversions. To optimize UX, you must improve page load speed, ensure mobile responsiveness, and make the navigation intuitive. 

Further, you can include compelling calls-to-action (CTA) throughout the website with action-oriented language and visually appealing buttons. This will prompt visitors to take action like subscribing to a newsletter or downloading an eBook.

#4. Enhanced security

Website security can improve SEO and help generate more leads. It improves the trust users have in your brand and increases customer association. However, maintaining security for your website does not necessarily mean more marketing spending. 

You can get the low priced or cheapest SSL certificate from leading certificate authorities (CAs) like Comodo, DigiCert, and others. These CAs are trustworthy and issue certificates after a thorough vetting process. 

This means users can trust your website to browse securely. In addition, an SSL certificate helps deploy HTTPS protocol, which is a critical factor for SERP rankings.

#5. Link Building

Backlinks are the backbone of SEO and are crucial to forming authority for your website. You should get backlinks from high-authority websites to improve organic traffic. Link-building activities can include guest blogging, influencer outreach, and content promotion.

Conclusion 

SEO is essential for businesses looking to generate leads and improve conversions. It can help improve visibility, web traffic and nurture leads to increase conversion rates. Optimizing the search engine ranking for your website enables the generation of sales-qualified leads. 

So, there is no denying that optimizing the SEO for lead generation is crucial, considering its impact on the entire funnel. You must employ best practices like enhanced website security, optimized on-page elements, UX, and more to generate better leads. However, which best practices to use depends on your business requirements.