There are many ways to drive traffic to your blog or website. While both organic and paid search are effective ways to gain attention for your business, there are many key benefits of focusing on organic lead generation. By attracting consumers organically, you're warming them up to become customers in the future. This method can take patience, but in the long term, the results are well worth the wait. Here are four benefits of generating leads organically!

1) More Qualified Leads

If a person is interested in your company or service organically, they're likely more ready or willing to make a purchase than someone you buy from a list or someone who clicks a paid search ad. People generally trust that search engines are serving them the best content for their wants and needs so they believe organic search results to be more reliable. That is why we see higher organic clicks than paid clicks; people are more eager to click on trusted content than a paid ad. These organic leads have identified their problem and know from an organic search that you are a company that can fulfill their needs.

 2) You're Seen as Trustworthy

As we just touched on in benefit #1, leads who find you organically are more likely to trust your company's credibility, rather than if they had found you through a paid ad or if they had been cold called from a list of purchased leads. Potential leads see you matching their search inquiry based on their keyword phrases, rather than simply being part of a demographic or location that the paid ad is trying to reach. If they see you as trustworthy and credible, they'll feel more comfortable reaching out to your business for a service or product.

3) Higher Click Through Rates

Click through rates are far better for organic lead generation than they are for paid ads. Paid search ads (the listings at the top of the search results with the little "Ad" symbol) only receive somewhere between 0% to 15% of the clicks. Very rarely do the paid results receive more than 10% of the clicks. In comparison, the first three organic results collect around 70% of all clicks, and the first 10 organic results (1st page) collect around 90% of all clicks.

Now, it is obvious that we would much rather rank #1 than pay for search ads, but this isn't always easy. It takes a lot of time and attention to climb the ranks to the first page. In some cases, it is nearly impossible for some keywords without investing all of your time and energy. In these cases, we suggest looking at different keywords to target or paid search ads might be a good option; as long as you have quality educational content once visitors land on your site.
 

4) Conversions With an Inbound Marketing Strategy

When you bring in visitors from organic search, you are bringing in qualified leads that are ready to learn more. To best utilize organic lead generation, you need a strategy to consistently add fresh and exciting content to your site. Generating leads organically requires this, and the more content you have, the further it will propel potential leads down the purchasing funnel.

Paid search can be just as effective if visitors are led to good quality content, but it is common for businesses to land people right on their homepage. If the content on your homepage does not match the subject of the ad they clicked on, they will likely leave your site quickly. If you serve them the right content, whether they came in organically or through paid search, they will stay longer and interact with more of your content. The more interaction a potential lead has with your content, the more likely they are to become comfortable with your business and make a purchase in the future. 

Now before we let you go, here's a quick tip! 

Organic Lead Generation has a lot of perks over paid search, and should be your main focus, but your organic efforts won't provide immediate results. We often suggest you run some paid ads to bring in traffic for quicker results while focusing most of your efforts on creating quality content that is optimized for search engines.

While generating leads organically is a must for any business, paid advertising can still be a valuable tool. Say you have 100 people searching for your targeted keywords every week. Let's say 85 of those people will trust organic search results over paid ads, and they click on your link if you've correctly optimized and kept your content consistent. But there are still 15 people that may click on the first few paid results. If someone finds your company or business through a paid ad, and finds all of the great and high quality content that has increased your organic lead generation, they'll still get that feeling of trust and credibility from having a user-friendly, easy to navigate site. They will potentially become a customer if your site draws them in, or if they identify a problem your business can solve and they are already aware of your credible company that can solve it. 

SO, in conclusion, if you utilize them both correctly, with a heavy emphasis on organic search, you can see a steady increase in traffic and conversions. If this all seems confusing to you, don't worry! At 5j Design, we can help you come up with a strategy for organic search and lead nurturing. Give us a call or download our free e-book to learn how inbound marketing can help your business!