Lead generation is essential for any business. While everyone implements it into their activities, there are many useful strategies a lot of CRO experts miss out on. We’re going to discuss a few of these techniques focused on harnessing your SEO for more awareness or even sales, especially as they relate to improving CTR and funnel processing.

If you’re wondering how to generate more leads from your website, here are the main takeaways:

• Lead generation requires fixing up your landing page (learn more about landing page optimization here)
• You may be using FAQs wrong
• SEO lead generation requires a different approach than regular SEO
• Lead conversion requires effective CTAs, page elements, and lead-ins
• Measure your lead-gen SEO effectiveness with CTR, heatmaps, and on-page metrics to find areas of success or failure

Why is Lead Generation Important? (& How SEO Helps)

Lead generation is crucial to online marketing because it generates awareness or sales and leads your target group down the funnel to an actual purchase. It allows companies to turn content, webpages, marketing materials etc. into effective conversions.

SEO can be a great way to aid these efforts because it is a natural way for potential customers to find your website. They often click on your page content because they are interested in resolving a problem or have questions. This is where you can help them by providing your services or product since they are a self-selecting interested party.

SEO is great for being discovered organically, which can be a powerful aspect to harness. The object is to not just use SEO as a means of making your website more active online but to turn the interest into an effective lead. This requires prompting from content to product interest through marketing, turning it into accessibility and then funnelling toward sales portals with unique propositions.

The process is best explained by the lead generation funnel:

So, with the basics out of the way, let’s discuss how to increase inbound leads.

Landing Page Elements You Need to Have

For lead generation campaigns to work, here are some must-haves:

• Good content is a given: Answer your target group’s questions. If you are a SaaS company that provides a marketing service, target the pain points of your potential customers. Look for terms like “how to improve my marketing performance” or similar actionable questions. Answer these within your content.
• Add CTAs: CTAs are where your content becomes a lead-generation tool. Within the content add phrases like “You can also have a look through our services in order to solve (the issue they clicked on the content for)”.
• Spice up the CTA selling points: CTAs are most effective when they resolve a problem and help the reader avoid pain points. In this way, try to make the CTA more effective by mitigating effort, showcasing how much they can save, costs they can avoid by using your service, what they’re missing out on (FOMO), how trusted your service is, etc.
• Use buttons or widgets: Interactive elements can be great for redirecting the reader to appropriate pages and can avoid the monotony of reading static text. Buttons and widgets help content stand out and draw the reader’s eye. Create custom elements and test them.
• Create region-specific content: For local lead generation, you should target content more specifically and add widgets that emphasise benefits for that region. For example, write articles geared to the region and add buttons with text like “We have special offers and discounts in your area”.

It’s important to note, people click away quickly if your content doesn’t answer their queries and seems like a front for selling you something. You should be providing value while promoting your service, so make good content first and then sell them on your service (not vice versa). Website engagement is the first step.

Lead Generation Landing Page Tips

• Proper SEO elements are crucial along with associated keywords for your product (more on this is the SEO section)
• Good UX practices allow for a proper flow throughout the page
• Custom URLs help your SEO (helps build more SEO authority). Avoid “.wordpress” or “.demopage” domains
• Appropriate keywords are necessary
  • If you’re selling a product, use keywords related to competing products
  • Long-tail keywords can be handy for more specific product categories
• Get proper backlinks by asking websites to link to you while keeping good quality outbound links as well

Here’s what should you avoid when developing a search-optimized website landing page:

• Avoid broken links: check your page performance regularly to find these
• Do not over-optimize with the same keywords: Google will penalise you for it
• Do not copy content: you can use data or quotes from others but original content is crucial
• Don’t worry about length: a common piece of advice is to make content longer. This is a misconception as landing pages that are longer tend to have more keywords and relevant info. Those are the things you should focus on instead of worrying about length.
• Optimise for mobile: Keep paragraphs short and preview your articles for the mobile format.

Another way to make use of SEO is through FAQs, but not in the way they are standardly used.

Turning FAQs into Leads

FAQs have become standard practice for a lot of companies as they can help answer common questions within the Google page using search terms and longer questions. It’s good to use them as a default, but there are ways to implement them better.

You can improve your FAQs’ click potential by adding hyperlinks to the text. These links take users from viewing a question to learning more about it (or another topic they would be interested in). FAQs, as they stand, answer a question but don’t lead to a click (at least when they’re on Google).

If you’re not fully in the know, FAQs can be created with schema websites like Saijogeorge or with WordPress plugins like WordLift. They are handy at getting eyeballs on your work and can stand out on the front page of Google. Be sure to use them with links for maximum effect.

Lead Generation & SEO Metrics to Look Out For

Leads acquisition: Measure acquisitions per channel. This can be further streamlined by having entry surveys per lead with questions like “How did you find our website?”.

Cost per lead: This is a great measure of judging how efficient your marketing is. Continue to measure how many leads you get vs how much you spend, especially as you add more and more elements to pages. This will allow you to assess the effectiveness added per element.

CTR: CTR stands for clickthrough rate. The number of clicks you get per item posted is crucial in measuring the effectiveness of your SEO. You can optimise the visual exploration of CTRs through heatmaps (for a primer on how handy this can be, check out our web design case study for the EU ADA pool).

Average session duration: If people aren’t staying on your site for long, you need to either create more engaging content or improve UX and page speeds.

Bounce rate: Where are your visitors leaving? Find out and try to target them towards the right areas. In this case, it would be funnelling them to the sales portals.

Lead conversion rate: Another effectiveness rate that will help keep you on track.

Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas on how to increase lead conversion rates.

Alternatively, if you’re wondering how to generate leads with digital marketing, we can help with that. Cut out the headache of managing all your own marketing and check out our services page for more lead-gen info. Let the professionals sort it out for you.