5 Tips for Growing B2B Lead Generation in 2022

Do you want more organic traffic and turn more visitors into leads? Here are five tips for using search to grow B2B lead generation in 2022.

You’re not going to get to the top of the rankings and generate leads through hard sales pitches. Instead, it’s about reaching the right people at the right time and guiding them through their sales journey.

To do this more efficiently, you’ve got to have a deep understanding of what your target audience looks like:

• What questions do they have?
• What pain points do they need to solve?
• How do they consume content?
• Where do they hang out?
• What terms do they use to search for solutions?

All of these guidelines are going to help you create content that gets people to take action, which is your most basic goal. The more people engage, the better it is for your rankings, and the more you will build relationships that lead to people providing contact information and filling out questionnaires.

It’s not about making the sale at this point - it’s about understanding what your audience wants and giving it to them in the best possible way.  Let the user come to the conclusion that they need your services by demonstrating how you understand them, the relationship you have established with them and how you have the knowledge and skills to solve their problems.

2. Perform a Content Audit

To get meaningful traffic from search, you’ve got to have a content strategy in place. This all starts with understanding what content you have on your site and how well it’s performing and what content you need in the future to improve your rankings.

A good way to start is to create a spreadsheet that shows exactly what kind of content you have on your site, how it performs in the rankings, and how many leads it generates. This will give you an idea of what works and what doesn’t, and highlight content gaps you might have on your site.

It’s also important to look further than your own website and see what the competition is doing. You can do this by running your competition’s URL through an SEO tool (Ahrefs, Moz, SemRush, etc.) which will show you what keywords they’re ranking for and which pages are bringing in their traffic.

When you’ve got all of this information in front of you, it will be much easier to create a content plan and fill it with articles that offer value for your targeted audience.

3. Utilize Content Clusters

SEO and lead generation both rely on engagement. If people come to your page, look at it for a few seconds, and then head back to Google, then it’s going to hurt your rankings and you’re not going to generate many leads.

You want your users to go on a journey where they explore every aspect of the topic they’re interested in and click through the different pages on your site. To get this to happen, your pages have to be connected in a logical way, and this is where content clusters can be a huge advantage.

Content clusters start with what’s known as a pillar page that provides a more general overview of a large topic. You then have subpages that go into more detail about specific aspects of the larger topic. The pillar page links out to all the subpages, which in turn link back to the pillar page.

This allows visitors to explore topics and effortlessly navigate through your website. It means you can answer questions as they arise, positioning your business as a credible, authoritative source of information and domain expert.

Diagram courtesy of https://www.esminbound.com

With every page someone explores, you make the relationship a little stronger until eventually, they decide it’s time to fill out a contact form and engage to find out more about the product or service you are offering.

4. Understand How Content Fits into Your Sales Funnel

You can offer a much more personalized experience if you understand how a piece of content fits into your sales funnel.

Certain keywords show different levels of buyer intent and this will influence the information you give people and the actions you expect them to take. For example, if someone comes to your website from the search “what is Cybersecurity,” then they’re going to behave very differently to someone who searched for “cloud container security solutions.”

If you can pinpoint where each piece of content fits into the customer journey, then you’ll have a better understanding of what action they’re likely to take next. The person asking “what is Cybersecurity” might be more likely to sign up for a free guide to PC Security for Beginners, whereas the person who searched for “cloud container security solutions” may be more likely to sign up for a demonstration.

It is really important to match your prospective customer’s expectations by understanding where they are in the sales journey.

5. Use Social Proof to Reinforce Your Authority

Ranking well for your target keywords is a great way to showcase your authority. It makes a major impact on your Google rankings that points to the fact that you are knowledgeable and your information is credible and helpful.

That might be enough to get people engaging with your content, but often it takes a little bit more for people to part with their precious contact details. People are much more likely to do something if they see others have done the same thing and had a good experience, and this goes for becoming a lead too.

Social proof in the form of testimonials and reviews adds an extra level of authority that can make the difference when someone contemplates becoming a lead. It quickly showcases the value of what you offer and boosts your lead generation.

When your content shows people you’re an expert and people’s experiences back this up, then it’s a powerful lead-generating combination.

Conclusion: Search and B2B Lead Generation

Organic traffic is perfect for lead generation. When someone comes to your page from an organic listing in Google, you start out with a good amount of authority that naturally boosts your chances of creating leads.

However, getting traffic to your website is just the first step, and you’ve got to do more to consistently progress people to the next stage. These five tips will help make sure your content is more focused, helping your SEO, and making it more effective at collecting leads.

For more tips on boosting your lead generation, start a conversation with KeyScouts and see if you qualify for a free consultation today!