Organic lead generation

It can sometimes be a struggle to increase traffic to your website. Sure, you can put some money towards paid search ads if you need an immediate boost but this is not a viable long term solution.

A more effective approach would be to work on building your organic leads. An organic lead is a lead from a someone who comes across your website by searching for a product, service or query on Google or another search engine. Organic leads are great because so many of us use search engines to find answers to our questions, whether they be how to create a customer journey or the definition of autonomous marketing.

Here are some ways to help you generate organic leads without having to fork out the big bucks:

1. Research keywords

The first step to increasing your organic leads is knowing what keywords your customers are using. This means finding out what words or phrases your customer is typing into their search engines or uttering into their speech recognition apps such as Siri. You will need to know what keywords your competitors are using across the internet, too.

Remember: your customers will be looking for keywords that match exactly what appears on your website, blogs, or social media platforms. Therefore, it’s important to select appropriate — and specific — keywords that define your products. Once you’ve compiled a list of keywords, you’ll be in a position to incorporate them into the content you create.

2. Publish good content consistently

Once you’ve gathered a solid list of keywords, it’s time to get started on writing lots of amazing content. It is a good idea to create a content roadmap that maps out your writing and publishing schedule for the quarter (or any timeframe you decide on) before you put pen to paper — or, more appropriately, keyboard to screen.

As marketers, we must remember to avoid the all-too-easy temptation to do the hard sell when writing content; doing this will alienate a lot of readers. Instead, devote your energy into writing content that people actually want to read. We’re talking about content that’s informative, educational and inspirational as well as being keyword optimized for search.

You also need to publish content regularly. This is because search engines and readers value consistency. Therefore, the more content you can churn out, the more organic traffic you’ll get. And we all know that more traffic equals more leads.

3. Understand your customers

When developing your content roadmap, remember to think about what sort of customer your content is attempting to reach. After all, there’s no point creating remarkable content if it doesn’t appeal to your target audience — and this will impact your organic rankings. The more information you have about your customers, the easier it will be for you to create content that will resonate with them. Identifying your ideal customer involves asking yourself the following questions:

What are their characteristics? (demographics, behavior, etc.)
What kind of searches do they conduct online?
What websites do they browse regularly?
What are the biggest problems they are trying to solve?

It is likely that you’ll identify more than one type of customer. In this case, you can group clusters of customers with similar characteristics and market to each group accordingly; this is called segmentation.

4. Consider adding video content

Did you know that search results containing video have a 41% greater CTR? (Forbes)

And did you know that websites that incorporate video are 53 times more likely to appear on the first few pages of Google search results? (Izideo)

Written content is great, but video content is more attention-grabbing and more useful for link building — in fact, a few seconds of video can drastically increase your organic leads. This is because Google cares about quality content and videos are more likely to contain educational and informative content that succeeds in answering queries. Furthermore, videos make readers stay on your site longer, which means that your content is flagged as more relevant and credible.