SEO lead generation is a set of strategies that helps you drive traffic and capture site visitors’ contact information. Search engine optimization alone can bring a steady stream of traffic to your website, but visitors who reach your store via organic search results may not immediately make a purchase. They become leads, rather than customers. Since they didn’t buy right away, you need a method to stay in touch with them. Here’s how to use SEO to capture more leads.
What is SEO lead generation?
SEO lead generation is the process of using search engine optimization(SEO) tactics to attract potential customers to your site via organic search results on Google, Bing, and other search engines. Once they land on your site and learn about your products, you obtain their information to target them for a future transaction.
If a site visitor reaches you organically through a search engine and shares their contact information with you, they’re an SEO lead. On-page lead-generation forms, demos, and newsletter sign-ups with clear calls to action (CTA) capture their contact details so you can nurture them into customers.
Lead generation is the intermediate step between casual visitor and paying customer. If you can capture visitor emails, you can nurture them in their buying journey. That’s why Leon Hughes of Piper, a private equity firm, looks closely at the ratio of site visitors to email subscribers. Since site traffic is often driven by SEO, he sees this as a critical metric for business health.
“Before we go into the deeper metrics, we look at how many email subscribers you’re generating,” Leon says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “So you have X thousand visitors, how many people are shaking your hand and allowing you to communicate with them?”
How to increase lead generation from SEO
SEO lead generation typically focuses on driving traffic to landing pages with lead capture forms or similar CTAs. A few tried-and-true strategies can help you get visitors to take that next step and enter your sales funnel:
Target the most relevant keywords
If you’re getting SEO performance but not capturing leads, it may be because your traffic isn’t qualified, meaning they’re not actually looking for what you’re selling. Unqualified traffic is often the result of ranking for the wrong keywords—keywords that are either too broad or have a search intent that is mismatched for your brand.
For example, you have a freelance business offering PR consulting services, and you specialize in supporting new apparel brands thanks to your connections in the fashion world. To maximize traffic to your website, you optimize for the SEO keyword “PR consulting services” and start getting traffic. But very few visitors fill out your contact form, since the majority of traffic isn’t from apparel brands.
In this case, you might consider reoptimizing your website for the term “PR consulting services for fashion brands.” You’ll sacrifice traffic, but the traffic you do get will be more qualified—increasing your lead capture.
You can use a free tool like Google Trends, Google Analytics, or Google Keyword Planner to start your keyword research process. Then, level up to a paid keyword research tool like Ahrefs or Semrush to identify the keywords your competitors are ranking for. Use the keywords you select in page title tags, H2 subheadings, meta descriptions, URL slugs, and anchor text for internal links.
Ask for a micro yes
Once a potential lead hits your landing page, don’t get pushy. Instead, take a cue from Jacob Sappington, director of strategy at growth agency Homestead Studio. Once SEO brings a user to your site, Jacob advises against asking for an email immediately. Instead, he recommends a “micro yes” strategy to maximize lead capture.
Instead of using a pop-up to directly ask for an email address, he asks a leading question first, such as "Do you want 10% off?" This incentivises a website visitor to click “Yes”—they’re getting something, rather than giving something.
Once they click "Yes" to this small question, they are psychologically committed. Sappington notes that despite the common marketing belief that more steps reduce conversion, this extra step actually increases the opt-in rate for email and SMS.
“As marketers, we’re taught that the more steps we add, the less conversion we have,” Jacob explains on an episode of Shopify Masters. “This runs completely contrary to that. It says we add a step, and we get additional conversion rates here.”
The added steps can also help you capture qualified leads—those with a genuine interest in your product who are most worth pursuing.
You can try A/B testing a micro-yes pop-up against a more conventional email capture pop-up to see if the strategy works for your brand.
Offer free samples
If you want to take your email sign-up incentive one step further than a discount, you could offer a free sample. Sustainable packaging company Hero Packaging employed this tactic to test demand before its full product launch. The team spun up a landing page offering a free sample and targeted high-intent search keywords using paid search. The offer generated 1,000 leads in a single week.
“We thought we would get about 30, maybe 40 signups to get free samples of eco-friendly packaging,” cofounder Anaita Sakar shares on an episode of Shopify Masters. “In a week we got a thousand people.”
While Anaita used paid search to fast-track learnings, the free sample hook can work for organic search as well. Just make sure a free sample is feasible for your brand, both logistically and financially.
Create lead magnets
A lead magnet is a free perk that encourages visitors to share their personal information. Downloadable content assets—like ebooks, white papers, how-to guides in PDF format, webinars, and quizzes—provide an incentive for SEO leads to enter their email in exchange for a digital product.
For example, Canyon Coffee cofounders Ally Walsh and Casey Wojtalewicz built up their email list by offering free travel guides with recommendations for trying good coffee around the world.
“We actually wanted to find a way to incorporate travel into our company, and to this day we make free travel guides,” Casey says on Shopify Masters. “That’s how we started our email list. We’d go to Portugal and make a travel guide with all these beautiful photos and commentary.”
Building a solid SEO foundation for lead generation
- Build topical authority with content pillars
- Study what works for competitors
- Improve site speed
- Earn high-quality backlinks
A successful SEO lead generation strategy is built on a solid foundation. Here’s how to anchor your strategy in SEO fundamentals:
1. Build topical authority with content pillars
Content pillars are groups of related content internally linked together and displayed prominently on-site. They’re beneficial for SEO lead generation because they build top-of-the-funnel informational authority on a topic. This helps all linked content rank better over time and gain more visibility in search results. Deeply informative content organized into relevant pillars helps signal to both Google and your target audience that you have authority on a given subject.
Linking is an SEO superpower. Since 2012, Google has been using the Knowledge Graph, a process that takes all pages linked together and interprets that the content is all about a single entity. This is how Google knows URLs are about the same topic.
Google relies on links to discover and understand content across the web and connect them, so strong internal linking helps your pages rank higher and attracts more users. Link articles to their pillar pages, and link back to the pillar page within articles, ideally on first reference.
Linking content pillars on the homepage is beneficial for SEO lead generation because Google wants to know the content is an important part of your brand and will rank it higher. The homepage is the most important page on your site, as it provides the strongest signals to Google of subject matter expertise. Place some form of CTA within the content pillar, either on each article page (a form, a non-invasive pop-up, a request for action at the end of an article) or the main pillar itself.
2. Study what works for competitors
Search competitors are sites competing for your desired target keywords, search rankings, and placements in search. You can identify them in two ways. Look at a variety of SEO tools’ competitive views, which give detailed information about which competitors are ranking for which keywords and how much search volume they capture. Or, check Google to see which websites appear at the top of the search results for your priority keywords.
Ahrefs and Semrush both provide lists of main organic competitors for domains that surface for common keywords. The tools outline how much of the organic search traffic the competitors currently hold, highlighting the pages that rank for keywords you do not currently rank for and content opportunities.
Review the content your competitors publish. How do they target keywords for their blog content versus product pages? What is the customer journey from search engines like? Do your competitors deliver CTAs in the form of pop-ups, splash pages, or something else? Consider how you may adopt strategies to work for your customers.
3. Improve site speed
A study by Google found that an extra 0.5 seconds for a page to load causes a traffic drop by 20%. The same source found that 79% of shoppers are less likely to shop again with a site whose performance was bad. Therefore, your site—and the user journey on-site—should be optimized.
Speeding up your site involves improving both your first contentful paint and time to first byte—two critical metrics that determine how fast your pages load. Your ecommerce platform and hosting infrastructure have a meaningful impact on these numbers. Shopify stores, in particular, render 1.8 times faster on average than stores on other platforms.
4. Earn high-quality backlinks
Backlinks are links from one site to another, signaling to search engines that a webpage has quality information worth ranking in search results. The more backlinks a page earns, the more domain authority it builds and the higher it’s likely to rank.
Backlinks are also a signal of trust. If an external website is voluntarily linking to your site, it’s a valuable recommendation to the reader to check out the offerings of your business. The most effective way to earn backlinks is by producing standout content that people want to reference, like data reports, case studies, or guest-authored pieces that naturally attract links.
SEO lead generation FAQ
How do you use SEO to get leads?
The best way to attract high-quality customers through SEO is to create quality content and optimize it by targeting the right audience. By focusing on the right topics, delivering a strong user experience, and using clear calls to action, you can steadily generate quality leads that become loyal customers.
What is the fastest way to generate leads with SEO?
The fastest way to generate leads with SEO is to target search intent with relevant content, ensure your site is technically sound and indexable by Google, and create landing pages that include lead capture forms.
What are the best SEO lead generation tools?
The best SEO lead generation tool depends on your needs and business objectives, and even your CMS. Tools like HubSpot, UpLead, Typeform, and OptinMonster are all great lead generation and management suites. SEO Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush have great backlink and competitive analysis features, which help identify areas of opportunity. SeoClarity is often considered one of the best for lead generation and SEO analysis.
