Every SEO campaign, from the biggest national keyword blitz, to the smallest local plan, has the same goal, to bring more organic visitors onto the site. What action you want those leads to take once they hit your site, however, can vary based on what kind of business you’re running. For example, most 1Digital Agency clients want their organic visitors to look at their products and make a purchase, but what about the SEO campaign we run for ourselves? We want our organic users to read about our services, fill out a contact form and ask us to give them a call. Optimizing for visitors that will take this kind of action is called lead generation SEO. It’s SEO that targets folks who are interested in a service, rather than a product. It’s not as black and white as the traffic to conversion metrics of eCommerce SEO, but it’s just as important. We are committed to using our expertise to help clients who want to generate leads.
If your business needs to create leads rather than make transactions, we know the struggles you face all too well. Here are a few of our tips which we use when we plan out a new keyword list for clients interested in lead generation SEO.
Consider User Intent
When brainstorming keywords we like to look closely at the user’s intent. Let’s take 1Digital as an example. We want to attract visitors looking for web design information but we need to be specific about their intent. Someone search for Web Design Classes is looking for web design information, but they don’t want our services. Someone searching for Web Design Partner or Web Design Service, on the other hand, is looking for the kind of information we’re able to provide.
When planning an eCommerce SEO campaign we might work with terms like Buy or For Sale to determine a transactional intent. With lead generation SEO, these terms are often more industry-specific. An insurance client we created an SEO campaign for focused on variations of the term Liability and Insurance Quote. Brainstorm some of these intent words for your industry. By adding them to your keywords you can easily splinter one keyword out into multiple variations.
Understand Your Audience
This is good advice for any kind of marketing, but especially for lead generation. You’ll waste time and resources if your staff is reaching out to unqualified leads. More people filling out your contact form isn’t always better, if the people filling it out aren’t a good fit for what you offer. You can help separate the wheat from the chaff by choosing your SEO keywords carefully.
Many tools can provide you information about your customers. The Audience section of Google Analytics is a good place to start finding out about who is searching for you on Google. Analytics data from social media accounts, Youtube videos, and your website can all help too. Don’t be afraid to target a more specific keyword with a lower search volume instead of a more general keyword that gets more searches. If the term is more relevant to what you offer it will be easier to rank for and deliver you better-qualified traffic. When we plan out a campaign we like to have a long talk with the client first about who they are marketing to. After all, we may know lead generation SEO but nobody knows your business, and the kind of customers you serve best, better than you.
Think About the Long Term
I tell my SEO clients all the time, PPC turns like a car. SEO turns like a boat. It will take you a long time to rank for the keywords you choose, so make sure you’re set on them before you start. Otherwise, you could throw six months to a year of work down the drain. That means you should consider Evergreen terms when creating your keyword list. Is there some service in your industry that’s red hot right now but liable to fizzle in the next few months? Save those keywords for PPC advertising.
For example, a lawyer’s office might be running a lead generation SEO campaign when a rash of lawsuits related to a product recall pops up. We would recommend not switching course to work on new keywords related to the product recall lawsuits. By the time the client builds up enough authority to rank for these terms, the trend will be over and the work will be wasted. When choosing SEO keywords you want to focus on the services which are the core of your business, the ones that you know you’ll be offering year after year into the future.
SEO is an investment of time and resources in the future strength of your domain, and it all starts with a keyword list. These are three good tips for choosing keywords, but keep in mind that when setting up a lead generation SEO campaign there a quite a few factors to consider that aren’t covered here. You need to consider what your competition is doing, how much domain authority you already have, what the best way is to build authority for the keywords you’ve chosen.
If you’re looking for assistance setting up an eCommerce or lead generation SEO campaign, reach out to the digital marketing experts at 1Digital Agency. We can help you choose a list of strong but achievable keywords that will get your SEO campaign on the path to success.
A Fourth Strategy: Build Pages That Match Lead Intent
The three strategies above get the right visitor to the site; this one converts them once they arrive. Lead-generation SEO fails most often not at the keyword stage but at the landing-page stage — ranking a generic services page for a high-intent query and watching the visitor bounce. Each priority keyword should have a dedicated page that mirrors the searcher’s intent: the problem stated in their language, proof you have solved it (case examples, credentials, specifics), the objections answered, and one unambiguous call to action above the fold. A “web design partner” searcher and a “web design cost” searcher want different pages even though both are commercial; sending them to the same URL wastes the ranking you worked to earn.
Measure Lead Quality, Not Just Lead Volume
The article rightly warns that more contact-form fills is not automatically better. To act on that, instrument the funnel so you can see quality, not just count. Track conversions in GA4 as events tied to the organic landing page and the entry keyword, then have sales tag each lead’s outcome (unqualified, qualified, opportunity, closed). After a quarter you can see which keywords produce leads that actually close versus keywords that produce volume that wastes your team’s time — and shift on-page emphasis and internal links toward the former. This closes the loop between SEO and revenue, which is the entire point of lead-generation SEO.
Internal Linking as a Lead-Gen Lever
Service businesses usually under-link internally. A well-structured set of supporting articles — each answering a specific informational question your prospects ask before buying — that links into your core service pages does two things at once: it earns informational rankings that build topical authority, and it routes those readers toward the commercial page when they are ready to act. Treat your blog not as a publishing obligation but as the top of the lead funnel that feeds the pages designed to convert.
Patience Is a Strategy, Not a Disclaimer
The boat-versus-car analogy in the original is worth taking literally for budgeting. Because lead-gen SEO compounds slowly, the right move is to run PPC on the same high-intent terms during the months SEO is still ramping, then taper paid spend as organic positions mature and the cost per qualified lead from organic drops below paid. Sequencing the two channels deliberately — rather than treating them as an either/or — is how experienced teams avoid the “six months of nothing” gap that makes owners abandon SEO right before it starts paying off. If you want help building a keyword list and conversion-mapped pages that are strong but realistically achievable, reach out to the digital marketing team at 1Digital Agency.