After you are done building your business website and you are yet to generate any organic traffic one year later.
You will be worried because the purpose of your website is to bring in paying customers.
So, you likely ask yourself questions like, why is my website not seen by my target customers? Why am I yet to get any leads that will turn into paying customers?
Well, the right answer to that question is that it takes more than just setting up a website and using digital platforms to generate quality leads.
You need to have a good marketing strategy if you need a lead for your business.
There are two direct ways you can generate leads for your business, It is PPC or SEO.
While most business owners decide to spend huge bucks of dollars on a pay-per-click advertisement (PPC) to build their visibility and traffic.
PPC is not designed to provide a long-lasting result, unless you want to keep spending on ads every day.
This is the main reason why you need to make use of SEO for your business lead generation campaign.
In fact, you should make it your primary strategy and then support it with email marketing, remarketing ads, PPC, and social media.
SEO is a better way to acquire quality leads that will increase your sales.
It is an online marketing strategy that deals with your website's search engine visibility.
The higher your website is visible to your target customers, the more quality leads you will acquire.
Before we get to the reasons why you need to use SEO for a lead generation campaign, you need to know the meaning of SEO and Lead generation so that after reading this article you will be able to decide if you will use SEO for your lead generation campaign or not.
What Is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
SEO is a digital advertising method that deals with website optimization in order to generate organic traffic from the search engine.
To increase your website visibility and ranking on the search engine you will need to invest in search optimization.
The search engine is an important part of our life, as it is the go-to place for most of us if we are searching for solutions to a problem.
It is a software that online users use daily as it indexes billions of information on the web.
According to computerhope, search engine is a software accessed on the internet that searches a database of information according to online users' queries.
Examples of search engines that people use daily are Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.
Search engines will then serve the information to online users based on their keyword queries.
If your website is properly optimized it will become visible to your target customers when they search for queries that are related to your business or industry.
The optimizations that are needed to improve your website visibility include website layout, UX, website speed, website content published with appropriate keywords, etc.
The main reason you need SEO is to increase your visibility to your target customers that are already showing interest in your business.
Online users visit search engines to solve their problems, they do not go there to chat with friends like they do on social media channels.
So when they want to solve their problems your website should be able to become visible to them if you can solve it,
Now, let’s move to the definition of lead generation and how your SEO campaign will help you to generate qualified leads that are ready to purchase from you.
What is a Lead Generation Campaign?
Lead generation as the name implies is a digital advertising campaign that focuses on acquiring online users that are ready to become paying customers.
Leads are online users that show interest in a business.
They can show this interest by signing up for the contact form on your website, or signing up for a free trial if you are into SaaS business.
SEO is not the only digital advertising method that can be used for a lead campaign, you can use other advertising methods like Pay-Per-Click Advertising, and Social media, but SEO is the best method as it focuses on capturing online users who are actively searching for your business.
Lead generation campaign is essential for the growth of your business, and if you are in an industry with high competition, it becomes a necessity that you invest in a lead generation campaign.
Now that you already know what SEO and lead generation is, it is time we talk about how SEO can help you acquire qualified leads for your lead campaign.
How SEO Reinforces Your Lead Generation Campaign
You need to use SEO for lead generation campaigns if you want to increase your sales and retain your customers while maximizing your customer's lifetime value.
As I have said earlier, SEO focuses on optimizing a website to become visible to target customers on the search engine.
While lead generation focus on the increase of potential customers that are ready to become paying customers.
SEO will reinforce your lead generation campaign by increasing your website's search engine visibility to potential customers that are ready to be your paying customers.
The more frequently your website shows up in the search engine to your potential customers the more opportunity you have to acquire them as leads and turn them into paying customers.
More than 93% of online customers that want to buy a product or solve a problem start their journey from the search engine.
In fact, Google's search engine processes more than 500 million searches a day. This is why SEO is essential for any business that wants to increase its sales and revenue.
When it comes to lead generation, SEO is your best bet, you can’t go wrong if you do it the right way.
That is the reason you need to hire an SEO expert that will follow search engine best practices and increase your website visibility so that you can acquire qualified leads and increase your sales.
Now that I am done explaining to you what SEO and lead generation is and how they support each other.
Let’s now look at the 6 reasons you need to use SEO for your lead generation.
6 Reasons to Use SEO For Lead Generation
1. It Maintain Long-Term Traffic
Many digital marketers and business owners look at SEO to be a free advertisement strategy.
This is because once your website content is been paid for, it will become yours forever, and once content has been posted on the web, it will remain there as long as the website exists.
What this means is that you can continue to generate quality traffic from your website's evergreen content.
You can’t get this same result from your pay-per-click campaign; you will continue to pay for ads as long as they are visible.
Once you stop paying for your ads, your campaign will be out of the web, and the traffic it generates will also disappear.
This is one of the benefits of an SEO campaign- you are creating your own website content and posting it.
After it has been posted then you can share it on your business social media accounts or on any third-party websites that will give your business more reach.
2. It Increases Your Business Local Foot Traffic
Many business owners waste their fortune on ads when they can use local SEO campaigns to generate more foot traffic to their physical store.
With local SEO campaign, you will need to make sure that your business shows up at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) for keywords that are related to your business.
95% of today’s web users conduct google search on their desktop, laptop and mobile devices.
Unless some of them have disabled their phone location capabilities, when they search the search engine will serve them result according to their location.
So if they are looking for what your business offers, and they geographical area is close to you then your business is likely to show up.
The value of local SEO search is that business listings usually show up above the number one page of Google results.
3. It Builds Your Business Authority and Trust
Spending money on PPC ads that generate quick results and website traffic will not help to build your business's trust and authority.
In case you have not been told, a lot of today’s customers hate adverts but prefer to read or watch valuable content on your website, and with the presence of ad blockers, it is possible your target customer does not even get to know you at all.
If you really want your business to be seen as a trustworthy business, then you should focus on delivering high-quality content for your target customers.
If you don’t have any content on your website yet then you should build a blog page on your website and start publishing content regularly.
By optimizing the relevant keywords throughout your blog post, you will be able to rank in search engines.
And if the topic of the content you wrote is relevant and valuable to your target customers, then they will likely visit your website through Google search engine results pages (SERPS).
The goal of your content should be to deliver quality; engaging pieces of content to your customers and you will see your customers stick around your website to explore your business products and services.
Your website content will help you to establish your business as an authority and this will make your target customers trust you enough to buy from you.
4. You will target High-Quality Leads that Converts
Every marketing campaign that you implemented should have a specific target audience.
Otherwise, you are likely to generate web traffic from customers that are not interested in what your business does.
Your SEO campaign should revolve around your target customer’s interests and needs.
For example, if you are a criminal lawyer, that represents defendants facing criminal charges in state or federal court, then you will likely create content on “everything that is needed to be known about a criminal lawyer”.
Another method you use to get ideas on what content to write about is to go to Quora and other forums to know about the types of questions that are been asked and your industry-related discussions.
You can answer the questions that are related to your industry if you know about it and go back to write more insightful content about that question and post it on your website blog.
5. It Drives More Traffic to Your Site from High-Authority Sites
Guest blogging is another way that will help to boost your website's SEO campaign.
Both websites are ranking for keywords and include backlinks to your business website.
Google will consider both when they want to rank your website content.
The basic idea of this is to get your web content published on other websites with high domain authority.
You can use Moz to check the domain score of a website before offering them guest blogging. Your domain score pick should start from 30 upward.
The websites you choose should be relevant and related to your business industry. If not, your website will be flagged as spam by both Google and web users.
You need to also know that Google wants to serve the internet users with the best high-quality content so they can keep coming back.
A blog about engineering would not be useful to users that are interested in farming.
6. You will Use Different Types of Content
Another great thing about an SEO campaign is that you can make use of different forms of content to rank high on the search engine.
Today, search engine ranks not only blog posts but also images, gif, videos and even social media posts.
You should take advantage of this and spread your content on any online platform your business has the presence to serve your target customers everywhere they might be present.
Another interesting fact is that there are also a growing number of online users that prefer to watch a video over reading a long blog post.
Nevertheless, there are still online users who will prefer reading so it is ideal you have both contents on your website.
If you are worried about coming up with new content every now and then, you can repurpose some of the old content of your blog posts and also use them for short videos.