How To Get More Leads Through Your Website Using SEO

How to get more leads through your website using SEO

Having a website is not the same as getting leads from it. Plenty of businesses have a good-looking site that nobody finds. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the work of making your website show up when the right people search for what you sell, in Google’s results and, more and more, in the AI answers that sit on top of them. In this article, we walk through how to get more leads through your website using SEO.

We have been doing this work for clients since 2012, and the pattern holds: the businesses that win from search treat it as a lead source, not a ranking report. If you want the full picture of how we approach it, see our SEO and GEO work.

Why SEO Leads Are Worth the Effort

SEO leads are different from most other leads, for three reasons:

1. They are already looking: Someone who searches for your service is actively trying to solve the problem you solve. You are not interrupting them; you are answering them.
2. You do not pay per click: Ads stop the day the budget stops. A page that ranks keeps bringing in visitors without a charge for each one.
3. It compounds: Every page you improve and every link you earn makes the next ranking a little easier. Most businesses start to see meaningful movement in 3 to 6 months, and the gains build from there as long as the work continues.

Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is a critical step in the SEO process. It involves identifying the keywords or phrases that potential customers use to search for products or services related to your business. This step provides insights into the language that people use when they are looking for businesses like yours.

Keyword research helps you understand the search demand for your products or services, what people are looking for, and the level of competition for each keyword. It’s essential to conduct keyword research regularly because search trends can change over time, and new keywords can emerge as your business evolves. Here are some tips to conduct effective keyword research:

1. Start with your business objectives: Begin by defining your business objectives and goals. This will help you identify the keywords that are most relevant to your business and align with your business goals.
2. Brainstorm keywords: Create a list of potential keywords that people might use to find businesses like yours. Use Google’s autocomplete suggestions and the “People also ask” questions in search results to see how people actually phrase their searches.
3. Use keyword research tools: Keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, and Ahrefs can help you identify the search volume, competition, and relevance of keywords. These tools provide insights into the keywords that potential customers use to find businesses like yours.
4. Analyze your competitors: Analyzing your competitors can help you identify the keywords that they are targeting and the level of competition for each keyword. This can help you identify gaps in the market and opportunities to target keywords that your competitors are not targeting.
5. Focus on long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific search phrases that are less competitive than broad keywords. They may have lower search volume, but they often have higher conversion rates because they are more specific to the searcher’s intent. They also look a lot like the full questions people now type into AI tools.
6. Analyze search intent: Analyze the intent behind the search queries related to your business. Are people searching for information, products, or services? Understanding search intent can help you create content that matches the searcher’s intent and increases your chances of ranking higher in search results.

By conducting effective keyword research, you can identify the keywords that potential customers are using to find businesses like yours. This knowledge can help you optimize your website’s content, build a targeted backlink profile, and improve your website’s visibility and ranking in search engine results pages.

Optimize Website Content

Optimizing your website’s content is crucial for SEO because search engines use it to determine the relevance and authority of your website. Here are some tips to optimize your website’s content for SEO:

1. Include target keywords: Use the keywords you identified during your keyword research to optimize your website’s content. Include them in your website’s page titles, meta descriptions, headers, and body text. However, avoid keyword stuffing, which can lead to penalties from search engines.
2. Write engaging content: Your website’s content should be informative, engaging, and relevant to your target audience. Your content should answer your visitors’ questions and provide solutions to their problems. Use headings, subheadings, and bullet points to break up your content into easily digestible chunks.
3. Use internal linking: Use internal linking to create a hierarchy of information on your website. This helps search engines understand the structure of your website and the importance of each page. Link to other pages on your website that are relevant to the content on the current page.
4. Optimize images: Use alt tags and descriptive file names to optimize your website’s images for SEO. This helps search engines understand the context of your images. Use compressed images to reduce the page load time, which can improve your website’s user experience.
5. Create quality content: Quality content is essential for SEO because it attracts links from other websites, which can improve your website’s authority and ranking. Create content that is unique, informative, and valuable to your target audience. Use multimedia such as videos, infographics, and images to make your content more engaging.
6. Update content regularly: Regularly updating your website’s content can help improve its ranking in search engine results pages. Create a content calendar and update your website’s content with fresh, relevant, and engaging content regularly. This can also help increase the time users spend on your website, which is a positive ranking factor.

By optimizing your website’s content, you can improve its visibility, authority, and ranking in search engine results pages. This can lead to increased traffic, leads, and sales for your business.

Make Your Pages Easy for AI Answers to Cite

Search no longer ends with ten blue links. Google’s AI Overviews reached more than 2 billion monthly users in 2025, and many buyers now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for a recommendation before they ever click a result. Getting your business named in those answers is called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and it builds on the same foundation as SEO.

1. Answer the question directly: Put a clear, plain answer near the top of the page, then the detail. AI tools pull short, quotable passages.
2. Be specific about who you are: State what you do, where you do it and who you do it for in the same words on your website, your Google Business Profile and your directory listings.
3. Earn mentions, not just links: Reviews, local press and industry sites that name your business help AI tools trust that you are a real, relevant option.

Want to see whether AI tools mention you today? Run our free GEO scan.

Create Quality Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the most important ranking factors for SEO. A backlink is a link from one website to another. Search engines use backlinks to determine the relevance and authority of a website. Here are some tips to create quality backlinks:

1. Guest post: Look for opportunities to guest post on relevant blogs in your industry. This allows you to showcase your expertise and link back to your website.
2. Participate in online forums: Participate in online forums and communities related to your industry. This allows you to engage with potential customers and build backlinks.
3. Engage on social media: Engage with your audience on social media platforms and share links back to your website. This helps to build backlinks and increase your website’s visibility.
4. Monitor your backlinks: Use tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to monitor your website’s backlink profile. This helps you identify any toxic backlinks that can harm your website’s SEO.
5. Conduct a backlink audit: Before you start building new backlinks, conduct a backlink audit to identify the current links pointing to your website. This will help you understand your website’s link profile and identify any low-quality or spammy backlinks that could harm your SEO.
6. Create high-quality content: Creating high-quality content that’s relevant to your target audience is one of the most effective ways to attract natural backlinks. When your content is informative, engaging, and valuable, other websites are more likely to link to it, which can improve your search engine ranking.
7. Build relationships with other websites: Building relationships with other websites in your industry can help you get more backlinks. Reach out to other websites, offer to contribute to their blog or collaborate on a project, and include a link back to your website.
8. Use infographics: Infographics are a highly shareable and linkable form of content. Creating visually appealing infographics with valuable information can help you attract backlinks from other websites.
9. Participate in roundup posts: Roundup posts are blog posts that feature contributions from multiple experts on a specific topic. Participating in roundup posts can help you build relationships with other experts in your industry and earn backlinks from their websites.

Remember, the quality of your backlinks is more important than the quantity. Focus on earning links from relevant, reputable websites to improve your website’s search engine ranking and drive traffic to your website.

Optimize for Local Search

If you have a local business, it’s important to optimize your website for local search. Local search is the process of optimizing your website for search queries that include location-based keywords. Here are some tips to optimize your website for local search:

1. Optimize your Google Business Profile: Google renamed Google My Business to Google Business Profile in late 2021. Claim your profile and keep it accurate and complete, including your business address, phone number, hours of operation, services and photos.
2. Create local landing pages: Create landing pages for each of your business’s physical locations. This allows you to optimize your website’s content for location-based keywords.
3. Build local citations: A local citation is a reference to your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) on other websites, such as online directories or review sites. Building local citations helps to increase your website’s visibility in local search results.
4. Encourage online reviews: Encourage your customers to leave online reviews on your Google Business Profile, Yelp, or other review sites. Positive reviews can improve your website’s visibility and credibility in local search results.

Turn the Traffic Into Leads

Rankings only matter if visitors take the next step. A page can rank first and still produce nothing if it is slow, vague or hard to act on. Here is what turns search traffic into leads:

1. One clear next step on every page: A visible phone number and one obvious button, such as “Get a Quote” or “Book a Call”.
2. Short forms: Ask only for what you need to follow up. Every extra field costs you submissions.
3. Fast follow-up: A lead that waits a day often goes to a competitor. Route form fills straight into a CRM so someone responds quickly. We cover this in depth on our lead generation page.

Monitor and Analyze Your Website Performance

It’s important to monitor and analyze your website’s performance regularly to track the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. Here are some tools to use for website analysis:

1. Google Analytics 4: Google Analytics is a free tool that provides insights into your website’s traffic and user behavior. Google Analytics 4 replaced Universal Analytics, which stopped processing data in July 2023. Use it to track your traffic sources, engagement, and the form fills and calls that count as leads.
2. Google Search Console: Google Search Console is a free tool that provides insights into your website’s performance in Google search results. You can use it to track the queries you appear for, your average position, click-through rate, and impressions.
3. Ahrefs or Semrush: These tools provide insights into your website’s backlink profile and help you identify opportunities to improve your website’s SEO.

Monitoring and analyzing your website’s performance is crucial to ensure that your SEO strategy is effective in achieving your business goals. In addition to the tools mentioned above, here are some unique and relevant ways to monitor and analyze your website’s performance:

1. Track user engagement: In addition to tracking traffic and conversions, it’s essential to track user engagement on your website. This includes metrics such as engagement time, scroll depth, and click-through rates. Tracking user engagement can help you identify which pages and content are resonating with your audience and optimize your website accordingly.
2. Conduct A/B testing: A/B testing involves comparing two versions of a webpage to determine which version performs better in terms of conversions or user engagement. By conducting A/B testing, you can identify what works best for your audience and optimize your website accordingly.
3. Monitor site speed: Site speed is a critical factor in SEO and user experience. Google measures it through Core Web Vitals, which since March 2024 include Interaction to Next Paint (INP), a measure of how quickly a page responds when someone taps or clicks. Use Google PageSpeed Insights to check your pages and find what is slowing them down.
4. Analyze competitor data: Analyzing your competitors’ website data can provide insights into their SEO strategy and help you identify opportunities to improve your own. Use tools like Similarweb or SpyFu to analyze your competitors’ website traffic, backlinks, and keyword rankings.

By monitoring and analyzing your website’s performance using a combination of these tools and strategies, you can make data-driven decisions and continuously improve your website’s SEO strategy to achieve your business goals.

Conclusion

SEO is an effective way to generate leads and grow your business. However, it requires a strategic and consistent approach. To get more leads through your website using SEO, you need to conduct keyword research, optimize your website’s content, make your pages easy for AI answers to cite, earn quality backlinks, optimize for local search, turn visits into leads, and monitor your website’s performance regularly. By following these steps, you can improve your website’s visibility in search and generate more leads for your business.

If your website is getting visits but not leads, start with a 15-minute call. Book a 15-minute call and we will tell you where we would look first.