How to Build a Lead-Generating SEO Funnel

Did you know that retail stores use a “forced path” or loop design to ensure you take the route they’ve planned for maximum product visibility and sales? Building an SEO lead generation funnel helps you do the same for your business, guiding prospects through a predetermined journey to conversion.

How can SEO help with lead generation? A good SEO strategy helps ensure that 90% of B2B decision-makers who begin their search for a product or service with a search engine discover your company and products. A well-designed SEO lead generation funnel builds brand awareness, educates leads on what you offer, encourages prospects to consider your products in their search, and motivates hot leads to convert.

What are the parts of a lead-generating funnel? Top-of-funnel (TOFU), Middle-of-funnel (MOFU), and bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) are the three stages or parts of a lead-generating funnel—this is the journey potential clients take to convert.

• Top-of-funnel (awareness): Building familiarity with informational content
• Middle-of-funnel (consideration): Encouraging clients to consider your offerings with persuasive, data-driven content
• Bottom-of-funnel (conversion): Focusing on converting qualified leads with persuasive, data-driven content, case studies, testimonials, and competitor comparisons

By creating tailored, SEO-friendly content for prospects who are in each stage of the SEO sales funnel, you can “walk” them through the sales cycle, providing the information they need to convert.

Step 1: Identify Target Audience

Building top-of-funnel awareness, motivating middle-of-funnel consideration, and encouraging bottom-of-funnel conversion starts with identifying your target audience.

At the top of the SEO sales funnel, you’re working with cold leads (haven’t yet shown interest and need to be educated about your product), not hot leads (close to making a purchase). Middle-of-funnel leads are warm and already know who you are and what you offer, demonstrating some type of interest in your brand, while bottom-of-funnel leads are hot and ready to convert.

How do I know which leads to target? Buyer personas can help categorize different types of buyers during their journey through the sales funnel and understand how to create SEO content that appeals to them with the right keywords and information. To create accurate personas, you need to know how to attract different personas and what motivates them:

• Platforms they use
• Level of familiarity with products like yours
• Pain points
• Budget
• Competitors they may be considering
• Keywords they use

To draw in prospects from search engines, create keyword-enriched content with your buyer personas in mind. Content should become more persuasive and detailed as prospects approach the bottom of the funnel.

Step 2: Optimize Your Site With Best SEO Practices

Using established best SEO practices will help you optimize your site for SEO lead generation and appeal to buyers in every stage of the funnel. Follow these guidelines:

• Clean landing pages: Modern, easy-navigable design helps simplify your landing pages and create a good first impression with prospects.
• Good URL structure: URLs should be standardized sitewide, easy to read, short, and contain the page’s keywords to ensure search engines understand and display the page.
• SEO meta tags: Meta tags, including your page titles, descriptions, and headings, help search engines crawl and display your content to prospects.
• Optimized images: Images can increase conversion rates and optimizing images for SEO helps boost your ranking position.
• People-first content: Google rewards “people-first” content with relevant keywords, in-depth research, and original information.
• Technical SEO audit: Having a professional SEO agency run a sitewide technical audit helps uncover and solve any issues that hinder your ranking potential.
• Link-building: Building a library of backlinks from authoritative websites signals that your site is credible and trustworthy to search engines and users.
• Competitor research: How do competitors approach each stage of the SEO sales funnel? What works, what could be improved, and what keywords are they winning on?

Step 3: Organic and Paid Marketing

Organic marketing campaigns are a cost-effective way to target prospects in each stage of the SEO sales funnel through SEO, social media, and content. Setting up a great marketing campaign across these channels will maximize your visibility on different platforms.

If you create a new piece of MOFU content, optimize it for search engines (meta tags, keywords, images, good URL structure, etc.) to attract prospects from search and share it with a compelling caption on social media to drive another source of traffic to the page.

Organic marketing takes time to start outranking the competition in search results, and social media reach can be limited to existing followers of your company page. For faster results, paid marketing can be a great solution. Paid marketing and advertising campaigns, like pay-per-click (PPC), Facebook or LinkedIn ads, and influencer marketing campaigns, have one thing in common: you’ll pay to generate leads.

To set up an effective paid marketing campaign, focus on top, middle, or bottom-of-funnel users and target your buyer personas, A/B testing, and optimizing ads to reduce your cost per click (CPC).

Step 4: Nurture Your Leads

Generating top-of-funnel leads is the start, but finding which leads are warm or hot and nurturing them to the point of conversion is the goal. Roughly 55% of B2B marketers say targeted content and landing pages are the most effective way to move prospects through the SEO sales funnel, boosting conversion rates by 72%.

Try a scoring system to rate leads and determine where they are in your sales funnel by actions taken:

• Subscribing to emails: 5 points
• Downloading an eBook: 10 points
• Visiting the site 5 times/month: 20 points
• Visiting a pricing page: 25 points
• Signing up for a demo: 30 points

Outline what you consider a warm or hot lead—maybe 50 points indicate warm leads to be nurtured, while 70+ points indicate a hot lead you should contact right away. Targeted content and email follow-up become critical at the MOFU stage to move prospects to the bottom of the funnel.

Setting up lead-nurturing email campaigns, sharing special offers and promotions, and creating tailored landing pages for MOFU and BOFU leads are essential to staying top of mind with prospects and driving more conversions.

Step 5: Analyze and Retargeting

As you generate and nurture leads through your SEO sales funnel, metrics from Google Search Console, Google or Facebook ads, and website analytics help you keep your finger on the pulse of users as they move through the funnel. You’ll be able to see where leads tend to drop off, where most conversions happen, and what landing pages or paid campaigns are most effective. If you’re skilled at using Google Analytics, set up Events and Conversions to help you track these metrics.

By analyzing your metrics, you’ll be able to improve your keywords and uncover potential keywords that you haven’t been targeting with content. A/B testing with analytics tracking enables you to compare different iterations of landing pages, ad copy, calls-to-action (CTAs), and content to see which version results in the best conversion rates.

Retargeting helps you stealthily nurture and convert lost leads that drop out of the funnel. A retargeting ad pixel “follows” users who already took an action—like viewing a landing page or making a past purchase—and shows them personalized ads elsewhere on the web to win them back and increase conversions.

Optimize Your Lead Generation Funnel With the SEO Experts

With a solid strategy to build your SEO lead generation funnel, you’re ready to start moving TOFU leads all the way to the bottom of the funnel for cost-effective conversions with big returns.

Optimizing your website and creating effective landing pages for each stage of the funnel benefits from expertise in SEO and content creation, and we’re here to help. Further, optimize your marketing strategy for leads with CSP. Reach out and talk to an SEO expert to see how we can help you capture, nurture, and convert more leads into clients.