Why Attracting Organic Leads Should Be a Part of the Marketing Strategy for Landscapers and Pool Contractors
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The Content Team,
HALSTEAD.
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When you’re investing in a website for your landscape or pool building business, you may have questions about how you can receive high-quality leads that actually convert. Do you need to invest in ad campaigns? Should you be focusing on search engine optimization (SEO)? The answer to both of these questions is “yes.”
Before we get too far in-depth, there are a few marketing terms that you should be familiar with: organic leads, inbound marketing, and outbound marketing. If you’re not already familiar with these, we will quickly explain what they are and how they work.
What is an Organic Lead? It’s the result of SEO.
An organic lead simply means someone visits your website through means of a search engine, such as Google, rather than someone who visits your site after seeing a paid ad. For example, a prospect may perform a Google search for design/build services, commercial maintenance, or residential lawn care programs in your area. These simple searches have the power to guide qualified prospective clients to your website who are in the midst of the sales journey. Such clients would be referred to as an organic lead because they came upon your website organically vs. by clicking on a paid ad.
According to TechJury, 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine, so there is a huge incentive to increase SEO for landscapers—or else your business could be missing out on these organic leads.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Organic leads are a result of inbound marketing, which can also be considered attraction marketing. Inbound marketing naturally attracts visitors to your website through the use of a strong content strategy with SEO. Creating content that helps solve a customer’s problem is a subtle and targeted marketing method with measurable results. This content can be distributed on your website, through blog posts, and on social media through a multichannel approach.
What Is Outbound Marketing?
On the other hand, outbound marketing is more of the “spray and pray” method—meaning that ads are pushed out to potential customers using a widespread, untargeted approach. It’s a more aggressive method that may include cold calling, direct mail, magazine ads, billboards, or TV commercials. When you utilize outbound marketing, it’s essential that your messaging really stands out among all of the other advertising that consumers see on a regular basis. With this method, you have limited channels and the results are difficult to measure.
Is Inbound Marketing or Outbound Marketing Best?
High-quality leads have a better return on investment (ROI). Since inbound marketing places your business in front of customers when they need you, this targeted approach is best. In fact, FirstPageSage reports that they see a 748% increase in ROI within three years when SEO efforts are implemented. .
Organic Leads Are Quality Leads
The inbound marketing strategy serves as a method to prequalify your leads. These are leads who have already done their research online before they even contact your business. When you are producing high-quality content with SEO, you can expect to see high-quality traffic coming to your website that results in high-quality organic leads. Organic leads can then be encouraged along the customer journey with the use of retargeting using paid ads and a good content strategy.
Attracting more high-quality leads means more conversions. According to Impact, there is a 14.6% close rate on organic leads vs. a 1.7% close rate on outbound marketing leads. The numbers speak for themselves.
You want people flowing into your website who are interested in designing an outdoor living space or building the inground pool of their dreams. By utilizing keywords, high-quality traffic from organic leads will head your way. When you target what someone is searching for (custom builds, landscape design, etc.), the time it takes to complete a sale and continue to draw in organic leads will be greatly reduced.
Establishing Credibility and Trust
If your prospective clients see your content organically, trust begins to build. This is especially true when your website or blog features a vast amount of quality content covering various industry topics that may answer a question that they are searching answers for.
For example, a prospect may perform a Google search for “what services do lawn care companies offer?” and if you have a blog post titled “Services Lawn Care Companies Offer,” this answers the question and you become a credible authority in the industry. Such prospects may see your positive reviews, social proof that will also help establish you as a credible authority.
Enhancing Your Online Presence
A content-focused inbound marketing approach will help you organically build an online presence. With strategic SEO efforts, your website will be at the top of the page of search engine results for a variety of keyword searches. With a strong online presence, you reinforce your brand as the leading business in your industry.
It is important to note that building an online presence requires consistency, which means consistently creating content and not becoming complacent in your efforts. The truth is, if your competitors are consistent in their approach and you are not, they are likely to appear at the top of search engine results, and you will lose out on these high-quality organic leads.
According to Status Labs, over 90% of people will choose businesses on the first page of local search results. It’s important for your business to rank high on search engine result pages if you don’t want to lose out on these qualified leads.
Sustainability & Longevity
Another differentiator between organic and paid leads is that organic leads produce longer-term results. Paid leads may flow traffic to your site while the ads are running, but that traffic will slow down when the campaign is finished. A good content strategy with SEO efforts has serious staying power in that it keeps leads directed to your site for the long run, especially when efforts are made to re-target with paid ads.
Every piece of content created will be useful for the unforeseeable future and will continue to have value. As more and more content is produced, the more likely you will receive organic leads that convert. While you may need to periodically update articles, once they are written and published they will be useful indefinitely. It’s an evergreen approach.
This method allows you to spend more time working on design/build projects and lets your optimized website go to work in the digital world for you. It’s important to note that this method takes time to see results, but it builds upon itself and the efforts are worth it in the long run.
