Whether you work at an agency or you’re managing a marketing budget in-house, you’ve probably had the classic debate before: do you focus on organic lead cultivation through SEO or try to generate as many leads as possible with aggressive tactics right now? 

I won’t pretend to be impartial: When you have the choice, favoring SEO is almost always the better investment. This isn’t an unfounded hunch, either: in our client programs here at TopRank Marketing, organic traffic consistently converts at a higher rate than overall traffic across a range of conversion types. 

Marketers tend to argue that SEO is important because it’s essential for “long term” growth. The time’s come to reframe that argument: SEO is essential because it unlocks the true potential of a brand’s lead conversion. 

Here are the big ways SEO unlocks that potential, with real-world examples from TopRank’s case studies.

Brand awareness generates more leads than demand generation over time

When the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) noticed that brand marketing was “losing the budget war” to lead generation a number of years ago, they conducted a large scale study to find out why. 

At first, this study confirmed the conventional wisdom that led to marketers emphasizing lead gen over brand marketing in their budgets. Direct response efforts yield much faster results that translate to a quick spike in leads. Marketers can point to these short-term results as a measurable win. 

As they looked at the results, however, the IPA noticed something else: brand marketing driven by SEO took longer to ramp up than lead gen, but while these lead gen tactics fizzled out quickly, the brand marketing’s effectiveness kept rising.

Ultimately, the IPA study showed that SEO-based brand marketing initiatives reliably generated more leads for the same share of budget than their direct response counterparts. On average, your money goes further when you use it on brand marketing than when you spend on lead gen.

This conclusion led the IPA to formulate the famous “60-40” rule, which states that the optimal balance of brand and demand is 60% branding and 40% direct response. Your lead gen efforts guide your customers through your sales funnel to conversion, but your SEO brand marketing is what brings them into that funnel in the first place. 

As this study proves, when you emphasize brand marketing, you simply put your brand in front of more leads overall than you would with lead gen alone. And if you want to maximize your lead gen potential, SEO is a clear necessity. 

Intent-driven SEO provides the right kind of visibility for lead gen

Impressive as these numbers may be, the best argument for the importance of SEO has more to do with quality than quantity. In today’s SEO, search volume isn’t the end-all, be-all it once was. When determining which keywords to pursue now, SEO experts carefully consider a combination of search volume, keyword difficulty, and — most importantly — search intent. 

Search intent attempts to understand why a search engine user types in the keyword they’re looking for. Understanding this intent is the best way to provide best answer content to these users. As search engines become more intelligent, intent is increasingly the best way to rank highly in Search Engine Result Pages. But understanding and capturing search intent is also one of the most important things you can do to generate leads. 

Your ideal leads have specific intent whenever they use a search engine. If you can understand this intent and provide users with the information they’re looking for, the quality of traffic to your site will rise. The people who find you via organic search will be looking for what you have to offer. Through your best-answer content, get to know your brand, start to associate you with your area of expertise, and then look to you for help if and when they become leads. 

The right intent-focused SEO doesn’t just raise your brand visibility; it brings you the right visibility to generate leads. And, as the IPA proved, it continues to do so effectively over time.

An example of how this works: one of TopRank’s clients, a public accounting firm, came to us for help raising their brand visibility. Instead of focusing on general visibility, we developed a highly-focused SEO strategy to zero in on the relatively low-volume but high intent keywords the firm’s highly-educated, relatively technical audience would be looking for. 

This strategy helped the client rank for over 55 new keywords in SERP positions 1-3 and earn a 96% year-over-year gain in new keywords in top search positions. Even more crucially, however, the keywords we were able to rank for drive the right kind of audience to the firm’s site permanently. The client has become visible to the right people for the right reasons, and the leads follow.

Strong SEO can multiply the effect of all other lead gen initiatives

As the examples above show, SEO strategies aren’t just for raising brand awareness. Instead, it’s more accurate to think of them as the central hub of any digital marketing strategy. 

After all, everything you do — from your long-term brand raising efforts and content marketing to your SEM lead generation — feeds back to your site. The more effective you can make this hub, the more all your other efforts will benefit as a result.

When a luxury home décor retailer approached TopRank Marketing, they were looking for a way to stand out against much larger national brands and e-commerce juggernauts in their competitive category. To do that, they would need to carefully manage a long, multi-touchpoint customer journey.

To help them achieve their goal, TopRank incorporated every tool in our tactical mix into an integrated, multifaceted strategy with SEO at the heart. 

Through competitive auditing and analysis, our SEO experts identified high-intent keywords our client’s audience was searching but their competitors weren’t winning. We pivoted the client’s SEO and content strategies to focus on these opportunities, then used a combination of lead-generating influencer marketing, social media marketing, and video and content affiliate marketing to drive leads back to the newly SEO-optimized pages.

The result of this strategy was a 11.2% month-over-month increase in revenue, driven by +28.6% MoM gains in organic traffic, +30.9% gains in total website sessions, and a +55% return on ad spend. 

By starting with SEO strategy, TopRank was able to provide the backbone that the rest of the initiatives needed. First, organic SEO, focused on intent, captured the attention of the right audience. Then, we retargeted this audience with social media and influencer lead generation advertising. Finally, these ads led the audience back to search engines – and back to the high-intent pages we optimized to give them what they wanted. 

It’s time to stop thinking of SEO and lead conversion as two separate objectives to be pursued in isolation: they are both a part of the same buyer’s journey. If you want your marketing to convert leads as effectively as possible, building a strong SEO strategy should be one of your top priorities.

For more help using SEO to drive the measurable results you need, check out our Top SEO Strategies for Lead Generation.

About the author

Harry is one of TopRank Marketing's Content Strategists, and has been a professional digital content specialist since 2016. During this time, he has honed his content writing skills and worked closely with SEO and SEM experts to enhance his understanding of how to most effectively create high-quality content that performs well on both search engines and social media. Harry is passionate about creating content that represents the voice of his clients well and provides genuinely relevant, insightful information that his client's customers will find helpful and entertaining to read. When Harry isn't writing content, he's usually reading it, or watching movies. He watches a lot of movies.