Lead Generation SEO

What is lead generation?

 

Lead generation, or simply lead gen, is the process of generating sales and revenue through customer enquiries that are passed on to a sales team that is either in-house or part of a commission-based partnership.​

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Who needs lead gen SEO?

Any business or side hustle that offers any online service of any kind needs lead generation, and SEO is a channel through which to do this that has a high ROI since you are not paying for each an every lead. 

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• Sales-based businesses

• TPIs and brokers

• Customer service

• Agencies

• Call centres

• Contractors

• Installers and fitters

• Deliverers

• Freelancers and consultants

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How will lead gen SEO help me?

If your business relies on regular enquiries, then you already know how important a high-performance SEO strategy is. You'll know how essential it is to work with an SEO partner with experience in generating leads and optimising websites to encourage customers to fill a form, or make a call, or complete that engine to get those prices.

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We know that there's a handful of keywords your customers are searching, and we know there's an endless list of competitors fighting for that #1 spot. Our aim is to help you stand out and make the improvements so search engines choose your website first, going you visibility to your customers.

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We also know how congested the search results are with single companies owning multiple sites, making the SERPs more competitive as a result.

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Is  there a specific lead generation SEO strategy?

 

SEO for lead generation is SEO work done with the aim of getting a customer to provide you with their contact details for the service you provide. From there the seller (you or a third party) will contact the customer to discuss the service required and the price.

 

Sales teams also contact customers directly, products aren’t added to baskets and purchased. This means many businesses offer a single specialist service (or a handful), as opposed to tens of thousands of products in an e-commerce business.

 

Examples include:

• Energy comparison

• Phone contracts

• Boiler installation

• Fuel suppliers

• Legal claims

 

With this business model, in terms of SEO there will be a small number of very important keywords where the majority of transactions will come from. This means websites relying on generating SEO leads for its sales team will have a handful of pages where leads and sales will come from, typically 80% of sales for a single service could come from just one or two pages.

 

While long-tail and informational pages can increase the range where customers can find you, the reality is for service keywords, customers will search variations of the same thing. The result is a hyper-competitive SERP where one company may set up many sites to hoard organic search results (as well as the paid results too). Customers looking for a range of deals end up hopping from one result to the next, thinking they are comparing one set of deals, but in reality they are comparing one store from the same service provider from another.

 

How to succeed in a competitive lead generation space

The method to finding success in a saturated service space is constantly proving your expertise through in-depth content that answers as many questions customers have as possible, as succinctly as possible. Additionally, understanding how keywords are really just topic clusters and knowing how google clusters your target keyword and creating your content with that in mind.

 

Once you’ve established your organic visibility for your core keywords, you can focus on informational content and niche products. These keyword clusters will be lower competition, but at the same time lower volume, although as a group, over time they drive enough sales to make it worth the investment of time and effort.

 

Keywords and topic clusters

An example of a niche reliant on lead generation is that of business energy TPIs (third party intermediaries) or more simply the business energy comparison market. There are only two keywords that any SEO would be interested in: ‘business energy comparison’ and ‘business electricity rates’. There are also thousands of variants of the two, but SEOs will want to optimise content to these two high volume KWs.

 

The simple thing to do is create two pages: ‘business energy comparison’ and business electricity rates’ and reap the rewards.

 

Now, we mentioned there or thousands of variants of the two core keywords, so lets list a few and decide how to group them:

 

• Compare business electricity

• Business electricity prices

• Business electricity comparison

• Business energy rates

• Business energy prices

• Compare business energy

• Compare business energy prices

• Compare business electricity prices

 

It’s only through experience and studying the SERPs that you will learn how Google understands the intent behind each keyword. 

 

At time of writing in August 2025, Google understands that ‘energy’ is a synonym for ‘electricity’ (due to the higher price, more people search for ‘energy comparison’ with the intention of switching to a cheaper electricity supplier), and we will see ‘energy’ page will rank for ‘electricity’ terms. The thing is, we want to be in control of the energy content that ranks for electricity queries.

 

What studying the SERPs shows is that any time a ‘price’ synonym was present in the search term (‘rates’, ‘tariffs’, ‘p per kwh’, ‘unit rate’ and ‘quote’), then Google will pick the electricity content. Therefore finding ranking success for the energy page required stripping the energy content of anything price related. The energy page was useful as a guide and informational. The electricity content could have all forms of price tables, and for added measure prices that were mentioned in text were often pulled for AI Overviews.

 

The fun thing is, that in any given update, Google’s understanding of topics changes, and so its understanding of your content strategy may change, so SEO work will always be an ongoing pursuit.

 

My lead gen site has been hurt by the most recent algorithm update - what can I do?

Google’s algorithm updates tend to focus on specific elements, and if you’ve lost rankings, traffic and revenue from an update you need to familiarise yourself with what the update was looking for. How has Google’s understanding changed? You need to be objective with your website and ask yourself what you were doing that doesn’t align with that understanding.

 

This doesn’t mean your strategy was incorrect. An SEO strategy works until it doesn’t, that's the nature of the channel. Frequently the bar that content must meet simply gets raised. Yes, this puts pressure on businesses owners to produce content at a higher and higher standard and not everyone has the resources, however if the industry experts are in close communication with the SEO team, then the knowledge from the sales experts can be translated into converting website copy by the SEO/content expert.

 

Look at the winners, and the other losers. Try to understand what they have in common. Look at the resources you have at your disposal and try to find how you can improve on what other competitors are doing. No update is as simple as ‘the sites with the most backlinks got the benefit, so I must acquire 10,000 backlinks’. And very often clear, concise content can outrank a huge domain.

 

In past experience, recovery from an update required removal of almost every blog post, as after an audit it was apparent that content that had been ranking top 3 for niche target keywords had lost many rankings, due to the content not having been updated in 5 years. There was no resource to re-write dozens of blog posts, but there was recovery in the core business-driving keywords when the SEO team focused on having in-depth content on the core pages, and removing outdated pages now that Google’s own understanding had improved and the content that was ranking despite being out of date finally lost its rankings. It’s not always the case that Google is out to get an SEO.

 

In the case of this website, informational content can be re-written over time and the removed keywords can be targeted again if the page can be written to a sufficiently high standard.

 

How can North West SEO help me?

We are experienced in improving rankings for core keywords - the keywords customers are actually searching when they are interested in your services. We don't pretend to have the magic bullet, but we work to optimise content and technical SEO in order to make the site clear to understand to all the engines that crawl your site. So whether you're an established lead gen business, or a side hustle looking to grow, we can help you.

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Contact us today by filling in the form above and let us help you.