Lead generation is an internet marketing tool applied by online marketers to produce inquiry or interest of potential customers in a particular product or service. Marketers aim to generate leads for various reasons, and this includes building list of prospective clients, acquiring files for an e-newsletter or to win customers to increase future sales. Leads are generated in many ways including pay per click advertising, search engine optimization or SEO and through social media. One successful contractors license bond website attributes nearly 40% of their new business to the proper use of online lead generation. The fact of the matter is internet marketing WORKS when done properly!
SEO is aimed at increasing the page rank of a site so that the website comes up on the first page of the search result for a particular search term. The best source for generating leads for both B2B marketers as well as for B2C marketers is SEO. According to a recent online marketing survey, SEO is better than social media and pay per click advertising. About 57% of B2B marketers believe that SEO is their primary source of lead generation while 41% of B2C marketers believe agrees with this. Hence, most of the online marketers are focusing their online marketing campaigns on SEO compared to other marketing methods.
Marketers believe that organic website traffic is the prime source of lead generation for online marketing. This is mainly because customers that come to their website via SEO are potential customers. This is because the clients were visiting a particular website by SEO are searching for a particular search term. And SEO provides relevant results according to the keywords search performed by online customers on a particular search engine. Therefore, when a visitor comes to a particular website through SEO result, he is searching for that particular product or service. Hence, people coming to any website through SEO are more likely to sign up for a newsletter or any other information about the product or service on a given website. These are genuine leads as the visitors come to the website with the intention of buying or inquiring about a particular product or a service.
On the other hand, people visiting a website through pay per click advertising come through sponsor links. Hence, there are fewer chances that a particular visitor may be the potential customer. Therefore, he is less likely to sign up for a newsletter and provide his email address and other details for inquiring about a product or service. Hence, generating leads with pay per click advertising is not very effective.
Similarly, people coming to a website through social media may or may not be potential customers. This is because these are the visitors who visit a particular site mostly on recommendations of their online friends and other people with whom they socialize. Some individuals who visit a given website via social media may be potential customers while others may just come to a site on their friend’s recommendations. Therefore, there are fewer chances of generating leads through social media as well.
Thus, SEO or search engine optimization is the most appropriate and relevant way of generating leads for any product or service on the internet. This is the main reason why many marketers prefer SEO over other marketing methods to generate leads for their products or services.
