How to Increase Organic Leads (+ Why Increasing Traffic Isn’t the Same Thing)

Organic leads are potential customers who find your business through unpaid channels, primarily through search engine results, and they’re often the highest quality leads because they come from people actively searching for a solution to a problem they already have. But the internet is full of slightly different variations of the same advice for how to increase organic leads: identify your target audience, choose high-volume keywords, build an email list, create a lead magnet, include video, etc.

These are all fine tactics, but we’ve found that all of this advice is based on a fundamental strategic flaw: it’s focused on increasing traffic, with the assumption that more organic traffic equals more organic leads. 

But in our experience over the past 10+ years of helping dozens of companies increase organic leads (with data we share below), we’ve found that the number one way to increase organic leads is to identify and rank for relevant keywords with high buying-intent, even if they don’t get a ton of traffic. Our data across 60+ articles shows that bottom of the funnel content converts at 4.78% compared to just 0.19% for top of the funnel content, a roughly 25x difference that matters far more than any increase in traffic volume.

As we’ll share below, the difference in buying intent between different SEO search terms affects organic leads way more than traffic differences. We also cover several other common approaches, their flaws, and what we’ve found works better for maximizing organic lead generation. 

If you want help increasing organic leads with SEO content, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

Generic Advice #1: Prioritize traffic when doing keyword research

One of the main reasons many marketers prioritize traffic when choosing keywords to target is because they believe that if tons of people are visiting their blog, some of those people must inevitably convert (either now or in the future). The logic seems sound: more website content ranking for high-volume keywords means more visitors, which means more leads. But it rarely plays out that way.

In our experience, the conversion rate for organic traffic from low-intent keywords can be extremely low (<0.01%, or often 0%). As a result, even if those pieces get tons of traffic, they often don’t generate many (or any) qualified leads at all.

Let’s look at an example to see why.

A project management software company might target ‘project management’, which according to Ahrefs has a monthly search volume of 65,000 — a very high search volume for the B2B software space. 

On the surface, this looks like a great keyword — there’s tons of searches per month and it’s literally the topic that the company’s product is based on. But, anyone could be Googling this… 

• A stay-at-home mom whose kid wants to major in project management

• A college student writing a paper

• An unhappy worker who’s halfheartedly considering switching careers

• A grandparent who’s trying to figure out what their grandkid even does for a living

• An employee who was just offered the title of project manager because of recent company shifts

…the list goes on. 

Indeed, Google’s results (often called the SERP, or “search engine results page”) show that it knows people searching for ‘project management’ just want basic definitions. The first result (featured snippet) is literally the Wikipedia page for ‘project management’.  

So while it’s true that the unhappy worker Googling ‘project management’ could eventually switch careers, get a job in project management, be put in charge of buying new project management software, and remember that that product exists, the chances of that happening require a bunch of low probability events happening one after another. Plus, it likely won’t be happening any time soon. 

As a result, the organic conversion rate from the keyword “project management” to trials or demos of project management software will be extremely low because tons of people searching that phrase are not in the market for project management software. 

If your content marketing or SEO resources are infinite, you could go after that keyword — it certainly couldn’t hurt. But no one has infinite resources, so that’s why we think going after higher converting keywords is a much more efficient and cost-effective strategy for increasing leads, as we’ll explain next.

Grow and Convert Advice: Prioritize buying-intent when choosing keywords

In our experience, if you want to increase qualified leads, nothing matters more than identifying and ranking for keywords with high buying-intent. You could take this piece of advice and ignore the rest of this post and you’d be able to increase leads. 

To illustrate this, consider the slightly different keyword, ‘project management software’. Google’s results for this query are totally different that just ‘project management’ and are exactly what logic would tell you the intent for this keyword is: people looking to research or buy project management software:

In other words, this query has “high buying intent”.  It doesn’t take much leap of faith to realize that the conversion rate for this keyword is way higher than for just “project management”. 

To quantify this, consider the case of Geekbot, one of our self-service SaaS clients. We analyzed over 60 posts we wrote for them and saw significantly higher conversion rates for high buying-intent (i.e., bottom of the funnel) keywords than TOF keywords. 

In the graph below, you can see that bottom of the funnel (BOTF) keywords had an average conversion rate of 4.78% whereas TOF keywords had an average conversion rate of 0.19%.

Now, you may be thinking that despite the higher conversion rate of BOTF content, you’d be able to get more conversions overall with TOF content simply because of the higher volume of traffic. So, let’s look at that next. 

In the first screenshot below, you can see that TOF content brought in significantly more traffic than high buying-intent or bottom of the funnel (BOTF) content — nearly 200k pageviews for TOF versus <50k for BOTF. 

However, despite that massive advantage in traffic for TOF content, the BOTF content we produced brought in over 3x the number of conversions. 

Of course, ranking for high-intent keywords is only step one. Your landing pages and content also need to be optimized to convert that traffic into actual leads. We cover how to structure content that does this later in the post.

This gap between bottom of the funnel and top of the funnel content is also getting wider as AI search evolves. Google’s AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT are increasingly answering informational queries directly in the search results, which means that top of the funnel content is losing clicks even when it ranks well.

A searcher who Googles “what is project management” can now get their answer without ever visiting your site. But commercial, high-intent queries still require the reader to evaluate options, compare products, and make a decision. AI can’t do that for them. If you’re curious to read more, Benji wrote a full article about how AI search is killing top of funnel content here. 

So the case for prioritizing buying-intent keywords isn’t just about conversion rates anymore.  Buying-intent keywords are becoming one of the few areas where organic traffic is protected from being replaced by AI-generated answers.

And this isn’t just true for Geekbot — prioritizing buying-intent is at the core of the strategy we use for all of our clients.

You can read more case studies here.

Generic Advice #2: Identify your target audience

The typical advice here is to create one or more fictional characters that represent your buyers and fill in details such as demographics, like where they work, what role they’re in, how much money they have to spend, how old they are, likes/dislikes, etc.

The general idea is that if you can identify who these people are, what topics they’re interested in, where they hang out online, etc., you can then write about relevant topics and post it in their social circles and some of them will convert.  

However, none of this information indicates that they’re ready to buy your product now or even in the future. You might know your ideal buyer is a 35-45 year-old VP of Engineering at a mid-size SaaS company, but that tells you nothing about whether they’re actively looking for a solution right now.

Grow and Convert Advice: Identify the keywords your audience would Google when they’re ready to buy

In order to identify what people are Googling when they’re in the market for a product/service like yours (i.e., high buying-intent keywords), you need to understand what pain points they have that your product/service solves. We call this Pain Point SEO. 

The best way to identify these pain points is to talk to your sales and customer success teams. They know best what problems are brought up on sales calls, which parts of your solution clients get excited about, which solutions close the sale, etc. 

Once you have a good understanding of what your target audience’s pain points are, you can use keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to find keywords that indicate the searcher has those pain points and is ready to invest in a solution to solve them. These keywords, as we explained above, have buying intent and therefore will convert at a decent rate.

As a result, we’ve found that the pain points and thus buying intent of the searcher are more important than whether they fall into one of your buyer personas. This is what actually separates an SEO strategy that generates quality leads from one that just focuses on traffic.

In other words, for organic lead generation — since pretty much everything starts from a Google search — what the person is looking for is a better way to segment your audience than who the person is. Who cares if they have a certain job title? If they’re not in the market for your product, it doesn’t matter.   

Having written thousands of BOTF pieces for clients over the years, we’ve identified that most high buying-intent keywords fall into three buckets: 

• Category keywords: These are just different ways to describe the service/product that you offer. For example, “project management software,”, “CRM fo small business”, or “HVAC repair services [city].”
• Competitor comparison and alternatives keywords: This reader is looking for options to compare potential solutions. For example, “HubSpot alternatives,” “Asana vs Monday,” or “[Competitor] reviews.”
• Jobs-to-be-done keywords (JTBD): This reader is typing in the exact problem they’re trying to solve in hopes of finding a solution. For example, “how to track employee time off,” “how to stop losing leads in my pipeline,” or “how to reduce customer churn.”

The first two buckets encompass readers who know that a product/service like yours is the solution to their problem. Readers in the last bucket don’t yet know what the solution to their problem is, but they’re ready to invest in solving it.

So, even though the third bucket moves up the sales funnel (as shown in the graph), JTBD keywords still tend to have high buying intent because the searcher is actively looking to solve a problem and not just browsing for information.

Generic Advice #3: Publish good content (blog posts, whitepapers, infographics, etc.)

One of the most common pieces of advice for getting results from SEO is to create “high-quality content”, but very few guides actually define what good content is. Even if they do attempt to give you some tips for creating good content, those tips are usually along the lines of “use descriptive headers”, “include interesting statistics”, or “write at least 2000 words”. 

While some of these tips might be helpful, they don’t really get to the heart of what good content is or truly offer anything helpful or actionable. They’re generic content-creation advice dressed up as lead-generation advice, and there’s a big difference.

Grow and Convert Advice: Write blog posts at the readers level and fulfill search intent

SEO content should fulfill search intent and convert. So, “good quality content” isn’t one thing — it’s dependent on the search term you’re writing for and is defined by how well you accomplish both of those goals.

That means you need to:

Understand what knowledge the reader already has and where they need to be educated. For example, with B2B audiences, if they search for a BOTF term like “enterprise accounting software,” you automatically know that the reader is trying to buy software for their job, presumably a job they’ve held for years.

This means you won’t be able to impress them with beginner level content that introduces the basics of why accounting software is important, what it does, etc. Explaining those basics may be “good content” for a keyword like “accounting best practices” but it doesn’t make sense for “enterprise accounting software”. You’ll need to show that you know more about the topic than they do.  

In other words, you need to optimize your content for the specific intent behind each keyword, not follow a one-size-fits-all content checklist.

Sell and position your product in a way that solves their most urgent needs. Keywords with high buying-intent automatically require that you give a good sales pitch for your product because that’s what the reader is looking for. This is also how you build trust with high-intent searchers by demonstrating deep product knowledge and showing exactly how your solution addresses their specific pain point, not by publishing generic thought leadership and hoping it nurtures them over time. 

In order to do this, the writer has to be intimately familiar with your product or they have to interview someone who is. You won’t be able to produce a post that smartly sells your product by simply handing a writer a content brief and expecting them to research the arguments on their own.

We get into each of these points more thoroughly and share our process for creating high quality blog posts in the following articles:

• SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow
• The Detail Principle for Writing Good Blog Posts
• How to Write Great Blog Introductions (+ Why Most Are Bad)
• “Mirage Content” Is the Reason Your Company Blog Isn’t Generating Leads
• The Specificity Strategy: How to Turn Generic Posts Into Stand Out Content
• Why Your Content Needs “Originality Nuggets” to Be Effective

Generic Advice #4: Use Social media for brand awareness

“Organic lead generation” typically means SEO, however, some marketers also include leads gained from social media that you didn’t pay for as organic leads. This can include anything from LinkedIn posts and social media marketing to word-of-mouth referrals from online communities. So, we’ll cover that here.

Many marketers suggest that you figure out where your target audience hangs out and build a presence there as a way to drive organic leads. We used this process ourselves to grow our blog to 32,977 unique visitors in 5 months using only content promotion via communities. However, as you’ll notice, we increased traffic — not leads. 

While social media can help drive some initial traffic to your blog posts, it’s not an efficient long-term solution for increasing organic leads because the traffic is temporary (“spikey”). If something gets traction or virality on social media, then you may get a spike of traffic, but it dies quickly, often within a day or two. We’ve seen this pattern across dozens of clients — the marketing efforts that go into maintaining a constant social media presence rarely translate into consistent lead generation efforts.

In contrast to organic search (aka SEO), traffic is far more evergreen — once you rank, you typically stay in that spot for months or even years (with some basic SEO maintenance activities like content updating or link building). That’s what makes SEO the more cost-effective channel for organic lead generation — you invest once in a piece of content, and it compounds over time, rather than requiring constant output to maintain visibility.

Grow and Convert Advice: Promote content on social media and move on

Share your content on social media to encourage short term traffic, but focus most of your energy on ranking for high buying-intent keywords on Google. Social media has its place, but it’s a supplementary channel, not the foundation of a lead generation strategy.

Generic Advice #5: Include videos

Lots of marketers like to tout the importance of using video to get organic leads, however, it’s very rarely necessary in order to rank for high buying-intent keywords and get organic conversions.

It’s one of those tactics that sounds good in a digital marketing blog post but rarely moves the needle on actual lead generation. Plus, it can be very time-consuming and expensive to produce quality video content.

Grow and Convert Advice: Only use if it’s really necessary for intent

If the SERP includes a section for videos or all of the top ranking pieces include video, it shows that the reader may be interested in seeing a video in which case a video may be necessary in order to rank. 

For example, ‘how to set up GA4’ may be a good opportunity to include a video as the SERP for it includes a section of videos, meaning Google’s algorithm has determined that a decent fraction of searchers want a video for this query. 

However, you can also simply include lots of helpful visuals in lieu of video content like we do in this post.

But 9 times out of 10, the SERP won’t include video — especially if you’re targeting high buying-intent keywords such as ‘best legal assistant software’ or ‘CRM for small businesses’. 

None of the results for either of these keywords have video, so why would you spend the time and money on including a video? Instead, optimize your time and resources for what actually drives qualified leads — writing content that matches buying intent and positions your product effectively.

Note: If you already have videos on the topic, you can add that to your blog posts. However, we don’t recommend going out of your way to create it, and you’ll want to think carefully about where you place it. For example, if the reader just wants a quick list of options, making them wade past video content may not be the best idea. However, if you’re going to be using lots of screenshots and visuals throughout the post anyway, you could give the reader the option to view the video instead. 

Generic Advice #6: Build an email list with lead magnets

Another common organic lead generation strategy is to create lead magnets (ebooks, templates, checklists, free tools) gate them behind an email capture form, and then nurture leads through email marketing sequences until they’re ready to buy.

On the surface, this makes sense. You’re giving away something valuable in exchange for contact information, and then you’re using email to move people down the sales funnel over time. It’s probably the most recommended tactic in digital marketing after “create great content.”

But the problem is that if the traffic hitting your lead magnet comes from low-intent keywords, you’re building an email list full of people who were never close to buying in the first place. You end up with thousands of email subscribers who downloaded your “Ultimate Guide to Project Management” and will never open your nurture sequence, let alone book a demo.

We’ve seen this pattern repeatedly across companies that invest heavily in lead magnets and email marketing automation, report impressive “lead” numbers to their executives, and then wonder why none of those leads turn into revenue. The issue isn’t the email strategy; it’s that the traffic feeding into it has no buying intent.

Grow and Convert Advice: Let your content sell directly instead of gating it

If you’re ranking for high buying-intent keywords, your content should be doing the selling right on the page. A reader searching for “best CRM for small businesses” doesn’t want to download an ebook and wait for a drip campaign. They want to see their options, understand the trade-offs, and make a decision, and if you put a gate in front of that, it actually adds friction for a reader who’s ready to convert.

That said, there are cases where gated content makes sense as part of a Pain Point SEO strategy. Templates, tools, and downloadable resources that are themselves the answer to a high-intent search can work well as gated content. For example, a “project budget template” page targets someone with an immediate, practical need. That’s a JTBD keyword with genuine buying intent, and offering a downloadable template in exchange for an email is a natural, low-friction conversion. We regularly create these types of pages for clients.

The difference comes down to whether you’re gating content because readers actually want the downloadable resource, or because your blog traffic isn’t converting and you’re trying to salvage something from it. 

When the gated asset itself has buying intent, the conversion feels natural because the reader came looking for that exact resource. But when you’re gating content because your blog traffic isn’t converting, you’re just trying to extract value from visitors who were never close to buying. 

That’s a sign you’re targeting the wrong keywords, not that you need a better lead magnet. When you rank for BOTF terms, readers convert directly from the content itself.

How to measure whether your organic content is actually generating leads

Everything we’ve outlined above only works if you can see which pages and keywords are generating leads. And in our experience working with dozens of companies, most aren’t measuring this at all. They’re tracking traffic, maybe overall conversion numbers, but they can’t tell you which specific blog post generated a demo request or which keyword drove a qualified lead.

This is a problem because without page-level conversion data, you can’t tell whether your BOTF content is actually outperforming your TOF content. You’re left guessing, and most teams default to producing more TOF content because the traffic numbers look better in reports. That creates a cycle where the content strategy keeps optimizing for the wrong metric.

At a minimum, you need conversion events set up in GA4 that track form submissions, demo requests, or whatever your primary lead action is. You also need reports that attribute those conversions back to specific landing pages and traffic sources. We’ve written a detailed guide on how to set up and track GA4 conversions, including which attribution models to use and how to set up reports that show you where your leads are coming from.

The other piece most companies miss is multi-touch attribution. Most blog readers don’t convert on their first visit. Someone might find your comparison article through Google, leave, come back a week later through a branded search, and then request a demo. If you’re only looking at last-click attribution, you’ll credit that conversion to branded search and never know that your BOTF content was the entry point. We’ve covered how to set up multi-touch attribution reporting in GA4 in our content marketing attribution guide.

Once you have this tracking in place, you can see the same patterns we showed with the Geekbot data above on your own site. That data makes the case for prioritizing buying-intent keywords far more convincing than any framework or blog post can.

FAQs

What Are the Benefits of Organic Lead Generation vs. Other Forms of Lead Generation? 

The number one benefit of organic lead generation is that it’s a one-time cost that continues to generate leads long-term. Because it’s largely a ‘one and done’ investment, you can increase the total number of leads over time without investing too much additional time and effort. (Note: Nothing of course is perfectly ‘one and done’. Whatever content you create will eventually need to be updated as the SERP and your product change over time.)

Other forms of lead generation — paid search, paid social, outbound sales, podcasts, webinars, etc. — require an ongoing budget. While you may get a large influx of leads from hosting a webinar, for example, you’ll have to host another webinar every time you want new leads. 

Is Organic Lead Generation Free?

Organic lead generation isn’t free initially — you have to pay someone to do keyword research, write the posts, etc. — however, if done right, the leads generated from SEO content should more than make up for all investments over time. 

You can learn more about what to expect in terms of ROI from SEO content in this post.

How Long Does It Take to See Results?

In this post, we go over how long it takes to rank on the first page of Google using real results from clients. Our findings show that while it takes about five months for new posts to rank on the first page of Google, most posts are on the first page within a year. 

How Important is Page Layout, Site Speed, etc.?

While it’s true that a bad UX and poor page performance will hurt your chances of ranking for any keywords, most modern websites will work just fine for SEO. So, it’s a good idea to check site speed and make sure you have any basic modern web design, but you don’t need any fancy UX or technical tricks beyond that. 

Frankly, we’ve had many clients tell us about endless investments they made in “technical SEO” and “SEO audit” work before working with us that didn’t do much. Be wary of spending budget on never-ending technical SEO projects. 

If you don’t have your target bottom of funnel keywords defined and don’t have dedicated articles published to go after them, then no amount of technical audits and site speed improvements are going to get you to rank for your most valuable, highest converting organic keywords. The absolute number one best way to increase organic leads is to identify and rank for high buying intent keywords. 

Learn More about Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a PPC service for paid search, which you can learn about here.
• Join Our Content Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.
• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s B2B content marketing strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.