Last year, U.S. companies spent 3.05 billion U.S. dollars in digital lead generation through advertisements. Huge, right? How can you compete in your space when your competitors have monster advertising budgets? Organic traffic.
Organic traffic is one of the best parts of search engine optimization. Besides putting you on the top of the organic search results pages, organic traffic can give you quality leads that improve your conversion rate.
Today, I’ve gathered five examples of organic lead generation strategies you might want to consider using in your business.
What is Organic Traffic?
Organic traffic is made of prospects who come from unpaid sources. They find your product or company through organic search queries.
Today, Google processes over 99,000 search queries every second. We’re using Google and other search engines to answer almost all our questions. In fact, organic traffic generates up to 53.2% of web traffic, making it a great source of high-quality leads.
What Are the Benefits of Organic Traffic?
- It is cost-effective for lead generation. It is more affordable compared to pay-per-click ads.This means that it can help you save money on marketing costs and generate passive income once established in the search engine result page using diverse monetization methods.
- It offers higher credibility. According to SemRush, organic search generates 53% of all site traffic while paid search is responsible for 15%. Ranking high in search engine results can help build trust with potential customers. This is because people tend to trust search engines to provide them with the most relevant and trustworthy information.
- It gives you a competitive edge in your industry.
- Building a strong organic presence takes time and effort but guarantees you long-term success.
How to Generate Quality Leads from organic traffic
Let’s dive right in., shall we? Even if you’re in a niche market, you’ve got to be at the top of SERPs (search engine results pages) —to get their attention!
So how do you get to the top of the search engine results pages and generate traffic to your website and convert your warm leads? Here are five strategies you should use.
Create your Target Personas
What does a buyer persona have to do with organic traffic? Everything. When running paid ad campaigns, we target our audiences with pinpoint accuracy, thanks to the advancement of targeting data. Organic targeting gives us the same opportunity.
A buyer persona is a detailed characterization of a person who represents your target audience. Also known as a customer persona or a marketing persona, this character is the foundation of your marketing strategy.
Defining your target audience helps you understand their search intent. You then focus on addressing your customers’ priorities and not yours. What kind of information are they searching for? What type of content do they consume?
Actual data and your strategic goals will help you create a character who is your perfect fit. How can you go about it?
Thoroughly Research your Audience
Begin your research by looking at your existing customers, social media audience, and competitor audiences. Data from your social media analytics, such as Facebook audience insights, will give you details such as age, location, interests, challenges, and spending patterns.
Quora and Reddit are great social platforms you can use to identify what users are asking about your products. The keywords they use will come in handy when performing a keyword search for organic leads.
Tools like Buzzsumo can help you scope out the target audiences of your competitors.
Identify your customers’ goals and pain points
Even if your products and services don’t align with your persona’s goals, their pain points will. Goals are professional or personal. Your research should be to identify their hassles and your potential to solve them.
How can you help?
With a clear picture of your customer and their pain, it’s time to understand how you can help. Think beyond the features of your product and analyze the actual benefits. How will your product make your customers’ lives better or easier?
Perform Keyword Research
Keywords are the terms your potential buyers use when searching for your products or services. Relevant keywords help you understand your potential customers’ mindsets at the beginning of their customer journey.
Performing comprehensive keyword research helps you hit two targets:
- You improve the search engine ranking of your pages and posts
- You target your audiences better, helping them find you.
And it’s all organic traffic. You don’t have to spend money on paid ads. Here is how to search for keywords.
- Create a list of broad topics that are relevant to your business. E.g., Dog food, Pet food
- Expand each broad topic with a list of phrases your customers may use. E.g., Organic dog food.
- Find related search terms, also known as long-tail keywords. E.g., How to make organic dog food at home.
- Use a keyword planner such as Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console to analyze the strength of your selected keywords. Keywords Everywhere is a free chrome extension you can use for a start.
Take a look at this chart on how the search volume changes on long-tail keywords.
Create a Content Strategy
Having identified your users and the type of keywords they’re searching for, it’s time to align your content and cater directly to them. Your users will love your content if they find it informative, educational, and engaging.
Keyword-rich content will elevate your SERP rankings, positioning you to be discovered easily. For more leads, ensure you don’t publish blog posts alone. You can add whitepapers, infographics, videos, and SEO-optimized landing pages.
To begin with:
Update All Your Existing Content
Assess your current content to ensure the language is clear and concise. Replace anything that is outdated that users will not find valuable. Ensure headers and sub-headers are well-organized for search crawlers.
Google Analytics and AMP can help you know how your content performs. You’ll identify pages with high bounce rates (over 60%) and improve them accordingly.
Publish Quality Content
Optimized, high-quality content will help you generate quality leads. In fact, Google is working on the Helpful Content Update, a ranking algorithm update that will reward content that provides a satisfying user experience.
For lead generation, ensure that your content has:
- Keyword-rich phrases.
- Well-structured posts and headings (H1s- H2s- H3s, etc.)
- Eye-catching and punchy titles.
- Well-incorporated images.
- Well-placed CTAs
- A hook that attracts attention and links.
Remember, for search engines; content is King. Consider using a content calendar to keep your content organized and keep track of your content goals. You may even consider using affiliate marketing software to further drive your content and traffic.
Improve Page Speed
Page speed is a critical ingredient in lead generation. Web users need to get results fast. According to Google, when a page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, the bounce rate goes up by 32%.
You don’t want your leads abandoning your page because of a slow-loading page. To keep up with Google’s constant updates on-page experience, take advantage of the search engines’ tools. Google PageSpeed Insights tool is free and will show you how fast your page currently loads.
Google will also give you suggestions on how to boost your page speed. Research by Walmart shows that their conversions increased by 2% for every 1-second improvement in page speed.
Create Conversation Points that Compel Interactions
Now that the audience has been drawn to your website, it’s important to convert this traffic to leads. This is not just your “contact us” page. There’s more to lead generation.
When your reader finds a really helpful blog or video on your page, giving them concise steps for creating a social media calendar, for instance, they’re excited to get started. If you add a button that prompts them to get a free social media calendar template, you’ve provided a better user experience.
Instead of a button, you can also add a QR code. This is especially useful if the desired action is taken on a mobile device, like an app download.
Conversation points help solve immediate problems that your visitors have. Lead magnets are great conversation points. You provide a free product to your web visitor in exchange for contact details which is lead generation gold.
Use lead magnets to drive consideration, position yourself as an expert and encourage your leads to buy.
Once your leads give you their contact details, LeadsBridge is a great tool to process and export your data. It saves you the struggle of manually exporting data. You can also import data from your paid ad campaigns.
To Wrap Up
Understanding how to generate organic leads from your online presence is key to growing your business through sales. However, it takes time and requires a consistent content marketing strategy These five strategies are a great starting point for you to re-energize your brand.
Remember to keep your audience characteristics (target persona) in mind, create quality content that they’ll find useful, and attract them with the right keywords. Once you have them, ensure your web pages load fast and have great conversation points for immediate engagement and conversion.