What are the most important things to have on your website? Product information, case studies, customer testimonials, pricing information, the ‘About’ page?
What if we tell you that the answer is ‘None of the above’?
The most important thing you need on your website is a way to generate organic leads!
When it comes to lead generation, you don’t want to rely solely on paid advertising.
Instead of just spending money on Facebook Ads or Google Adwords, why not try organic lead generation directly from your website?
But how?
That’s the question we’ll tackle in this article.
We’ll share with you the 6 key steps that will help you get started with organic lead generation from your website.
What is Organic Lead Generation?
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Organic Lead Generation is the process of generating leads through unpaid or natural search results. This is in contrast to the use of paid advertising, such as Google AdWords, where advertisers pay for their ads to appear above and beside organic search results.
Organic Lead Generation relies on optimizing a website for search engines so that it appears as the top result for relevant keywords.
The goal of Organic Lead Generation is to help you grow your business without spending money on advertising or marketing campaigns.
The best part is that leads that are acquired organically can immediately be classified as “warm leads” and can even be “hot leads”. Furthermore, these are also automatically “Information-qualified” leads because they have given you their information on your website.
(If you’d like to know what the above terms mean here’s a quick read on the different types of sales leads you could encounter)
What is Inorganic Lead Generation?
Inorganic or Paid Lead Generation is the process of generating leads through paid advertising, such as Google AdWords.
Paid ads are typically placed above and beside organic search results.
You can use Inorganic Lead Generation to rapidly grow your business by quickly generating a large number of leads.
6 Key Steps in Organic Lead Generation
Step 1: Keyword Research
Keywords are the search terms that people type into a search engine like google.
If you would like your website to rank high in organic search results, you will need to know which keywords your audience is using.
Finding the keywords your target market is searching for is called Keyword Research.
There are three main factors in Keyword Research:
- Search Intent
- Commercial Intent and
- Traffic Potential.
Search Intent answers the question – “What exactly is the searcher looking for?”
Commercial Intent refers to whether the searcher is likely to make a purchase based on the keyword searched. This tells us whether they are likely to click on an ad that has the keyword associated with it.
Traffic potential refers to how many people are searching for a specific keyword.
Keyword Research is the most important step in organic lead generation because you will optimize your website and the content on it for your target keywords.
If you target the wrong keywords, you may end up with insufficient traffic on your website or with the wrong type of traffic. With either of these scenarios, you will not generate any organic leads.
Step 2: Content Development
In the Content Development step you will develop content for your website which will rank in search results when your target audience searches for one or more of your target keywords.
Website content can include product information, blog posts, educational articles, eBooks, Infographics, Videos, Slide shows, etc.
Always try to make website content engaging and unique to entice people to share it on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, which in turn, will bring in more organic traffic back to your website.
Step 3: Content Optimization
During the content development step, you write the content for human beings – that is for those searching your target keyword.
But these searchers will only get to see your content if search engines find it in the first place. So now you need to optimize your content for search engines. This is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO.
If you’d like to study SEO in detail here’s an excellent guide from Ahrefs.
Once a searcher – who could be a potential customer – reaches your website to consume a piece of content, you will need to guide them toward a Landing Page where you can get their contact details. You typically do this using a bait called a Lead Magnet.
Step 4: Landing Pages
Landing Pages can be the first page of your website that a visitor sees. This can happen if you’re running an email campaign and have included a link to your landing page.
However, when a visitor reaches your website organically, they have probably reached an information page or a blog post based on the keyword they searched for in a search engine.
On the information page, you could offer a Lead Magnet that takes the visitor to the Landing Page.
The sole purpose of the Landing Page is to a Call to Action which in our case will be to encourage the visitor to give us his or her contact details through a web form.
We ask for this information in exchange for the Lead Magnet.
Step 5: Lead Magnets
A Lead Magnet is a piece of content that you give away for free to entice people to give you their contact details – for instance by joining your email list or signing up for your newsletter.
Lead Magnets can include eBooks, PDFs, templates, access to webinars, online courses, toolkits, product trials, etc.
People give you their contact information so that they can download something useful to them without having to pay for it. In return, they provide their contact information, which you can then use for future marketing campaigns.
Step 6: Collect & Track Contact Details
Once visitors to your site have voluntarily given you their contact information, you can use this information in future marketing campaigns.
And now we can say that you have organically generated a lead from your website.
It’s possible that you’ll receive a lot of leads from your website and so you’ll be better off using a CRM for tracking them.
As you nurture these organically generated leads, over time some will convert into paying customers.
Summary
A key goal of your website must be to generate new leads to grow your business.
Organic Leads are those which are generated without paying for them. These typically come through natural search results in a search engine.
To generate organic leads from your website, you need to optimize your website and content for your target keywords, develop engaging and unique content and develop an attractive landing page to collect contact details in exchange for a lead magnet.
Remember that organic lead generation requires planning, hard work, consistency, and a lot of patience.
But once the leads start to roll in, the effort will have been worth it.
