How To Generate SEO Leads in 2024

Generating leads is a fancy way of saying “getting contact information for potential customers.” The defining characteristic of a lead is that your potential customer has a problem you can solve, and they’re looking for a solution. However, lead generation in 2024 looks different than it did in 1994. While it’s still necessary to remain top of mind for when your customer has questions, how we do it now looks very different. 

Getting in front of your customers no longer requires a brick-and-mortar location or even a phone number. Lead generation is more pointed than it was back then. It must also be strategically geared toward appearing on search engines. This search engine optimization, or SEO, requires more than simply brainstorming keywords and incorporating them into your writing. 

SEO involves improving your website so it’s easier for search engines to crawl and navigate while simultaneously providing great value to readers. In this post, we’ll break that down into steps you can implement to get in front of your potential customers at the perfect time. 

How To Generate SEO Leads in 2024

SEO content can bring potential customers to your site, but how do you turn them into leads? In each of your SEO posts, add opportunities for visitors to leave their contact information in exchange for something of value to them. This can be a newsletter with member-only discounts, exclusive content, a discovery call, etc. Get creative and bring in that information so you can reach out and continue the sales process.

But before you even consider creating SEO content, you’ll want to look at what you’re working with, get to know your audience, and start answering their questions better than the current results. Let’s break these down further.

1. Take Inventory of Your Site With an Audit

Search engines have ranking factors that put certain web pages on their first page, which gets significantly more results than any other results page. Google has over 200 ranking factors, which they don’t actually disclose, but general rules for audits include checking for:

• Relevance: If your site is about pickling vegetables but a search engine is ranking your blog post based on how to build your own deck, it likely won’t perform as well as a deck-focused site.
• Website health: This is measured by things like the number of broken links, security on your site, and more.
• Backlinks: Are other websites finding your content relevant and linking to it? The more backlinks you have from relevant sources and/or those with high domain authority (DA), the better.
• URLs, page titles, and descriptions: Are you accurately naming your posts and adding relevant descriptions? Your URL should say more than just “yourwebsite.com/blog-post-3.”

Audits are a high-effort process, but they can make a world of difference when optimizing your SEO to bring in leads. But don’t stop there. The next step will boost not just your SEO efforts but also your overall marketing approach.

2. Get To Know Your Audience (Online)

Knowing your audience is a huge part of marketing. You want to know who they are, what they like, what they struggle with, etc. However, this doesn’t always translate to their online behavior. Let’s look at an example. Imagine that you sell a coffee subscription, and your customers want to know different ways to make their coffee. You might assume that you should offer them a how-to blog post that they’d inevitably find because it would automatically rank on the first page. Wrong. 

While your customers may want to learn how to make coffee, their behavior online might show that they’d much prefer to watch a video, so writing that blog post could be a wasted effort by your marketing team. The amount of unseen online content is astronomical, and you don’t want your content to fall into it. So, what should you know about your potential customers’ online behavior? Here are some things to start learning:

• What are the needs and pain points they’re searching for online?
• When and how do these pain points appear throughout the buyer’s journey?
• What terms are your customers using to get answers?

Once you learn these things, prioritize what you’ll target first by considering these criteria:

• Where does it land in the sales funnel? Will it help them learn about your brand, or will it reach them when they’re ready to make the purchase?
• How many people search for this every month? It’s great to be the first link on the results page, but what if only 20 people search for that term every month? Prioritize your efforts toward big, relevant audiences.
• How difficult is it to get on the first page? If over a dozen high-DA sites are also targeting that keyword, you may want to wait until your score is better to tackle it. On the other hand, if it’s relatively scarce on that first page or the results are pretty bad, put that keyword higher up on your to-do list. 

3. Create the Content They Need

Finally, get to work on that content! Create a list of keywords and prioritize them according to the above criteria. You already have the knowledge because you’re the expert on the subject. Educate potential leads with your valuable insights. Make a content calendar of when you’ll work on these posts, how long they’ll take, who is in charge of each stage, and your publish date. Try to publish regularly (two to eight times per month, depending on capacity), and Google will start to reward you for it. Remember, it’s a long game, but it’s entirely worth it to organically appear in front of leads.

Need a Hand? We’re Specialists

Now that you’ve learned all about how to generate leads via SEO efforts, you may be eager to get started. Let’s say, however, that your marketing team is fully booked for the foreseeable future but you want to start getting organic views and generating leads right away. There’s no need to wait to get started! Outsource your SEO efforts to the specialists at Single Origin Media, where we create individualized programs to get you results. Learn more about generating more business opportunities with SEO and get started today.