How to Use SEO for Customer Acquisition

SEO focuses on the top of the customer acquisition funnel—lead generation—but has important impacts on branding and lead nurturing as well. The role of SEO in lead generation is clear—prospects discover your business or product through Google, visit your website, and eventually convert into a lead. Just as important, however, is how SEO impacts branding: capturing the top search results for many keywords within a particular topic signals that your business is an industry leader—an implication that is then backed up by the thought leadership content that secured those results in the first place.

In this article, I’ll discuss how to optimize your SEO campaign for both lead generation and branding, thereby ensuring your company has a reliable, low CAC source of new customers.

SEO and Lead Generation

The foundation of SEO is a concept called search intent. Search intent refers to the implicit reason users type in a particular keyword. When viewed through a customer acquisition lens, search intent can be placed on a spectrum, with one end representing intent to learn and explore, and the other representing intent to buy:

At the?lead generation?stage, your SEO campaign will focus on keywords on the transactional end of the spectrum. Examples of these keywords are:

Grasping search intent improves your visitor engagement since readers are more likely to stick with content that effectively meets their needs. By that same extent, other experts in the field are likely to take notice of your expertise, resulting in more backlinks that also improve your?domain authority. Both lead to improved search rankings.

These transactional keywords should be selected according to the?Hub & Spoke model, which focuses your website’s content on 3-5 core hub keywords, with each longer-tail transactional keyword containing the hub keyword in its entirety. By doing so, you will signal to Google that your website is a niche expert, thereby achieving higher rankings than otherwise possible.

Next, you must create and publish content targeting each of those keywords.?Our research?has found that the minimum publishing schedule for SEO is 2 pages per week. This is for three reasons. First, each piece of content represents a new opportunity for a prospective customer to reach your website. The second is that?Google’s algorithm?highly values consistent publishing of high quality content. Third, SEO provides highly stratified rewards, with only a single page achieving the #1 position—and with it,?39.6% of the total clickthroughs?available.

Targeting these transactional keywords will bring in visitors that are ready to buy, and will convert quickly into leads. Most prospects, however, aren’t yet at this stage. This is where the branding side of SEO comes in.

SEO and Branding

Whereas lead generation SEO focuses on the most highly transactional keywords, branding SEO will target the more research-oriented keywords, providing searchers with helpful information that both:?

1. Give an authoritative answer to their search intent, establishing your company as a valuable resource and establishing your brand as an industry leader, and
2. Encourage them to move further down the funnel through CTAs and links to more content that will help nurture their interest.

As with lead generation, this is best understood through search intent.The table below shows examples of keywords on the more research oriented side of the spectrum:

While still important for lead generation, a?thought leadership approach?is crucial for branding. Prospects interested in the more general, research-oriented content have less interest in making a purchase. As a result, sales pitches encouraging them to buy your product will lose their trust, and cause them to leave in search of less obviously partial sources. Instead, meeting their needs directly with highly informational material builds trust and establishes your website as a valuable resource, leading to later sales when they’re ready to buy.

Using SEO for branding has another benefit when it comes to customer acquisition. Because the lead nurturing stage of the customer acquisition funnel relies on?supplemental marketing channels, you can increase the budget efficiency of your customer acquisition program by repurposing this SEO content across email campaigns, organic social media, and any other channels your company uses. This allows your team to quickly create new material to reach a wide range of prospects.