Scaling Organic Traffic Without Sacrificing Lead Quality for Consultancies
There is a very common misconception amongst consultancies that more traffic means more leads, more revenue and more growth.
Where in reality, chasing traffic volume instead of optimising a site with a filtered, intent-led SEO strategy leads to more noise and low-quality leads.
The most common misconception has also led to the most common fear for consultancies who have tried SEO in the past, that being SEO fills their pipeline and CRM with bad leads. This is a cyclical pattern perpetuated by bad SEO companies and cowboy agencies.
We do things differently at ROAR, in some instances to start our collaboration we may drastically reduce your traffic volume. Cut out the noise and build a foundation that supports real, quality traffic at a smaller volume but leads to more consistent, higher quality leads.
Take our work with Theodo for example, by deliberately reducing low-intent traffic and focusing only on high-intent searches across SEO and paid media, we transformed their visibility which did lead to fewer clicks but over 900% more conversions and dramatically higher-quality leads.
Why Lead Quality Drops When Organic Traffic Scales
The short and oversimplified answer is that it doesn’t. What is more commonly the case is an increase in number of users and a decrease in conversion rate, because an agency or in-house team has optimised the site for easy, cheap and irrelevant keywords.
SEO isn’t the problem here, it’s misaligned targeting and poor strategy. The most common causes of low-quality leads for consultancies through organic search happens when:
- Overly broad keywords are targeted.
- The strategy relies largely on keywords without commercial intent.
- The highest volume keywords only are targeted, not the most relevant.
- Time is wasted optimising the site for difficult keywords to appease stakeholders and not niche, intent-rich keywords.
It really is as simple as:
More Traffic ≠ Quality Leads
Unless you have a strategy that distinguishes between informational demand, evaluative needs, and commercial or problem-aware demand, an increase in traffic doesn’t mean anything.
How to Filter Demand, Not Traffic
This is the most important part about any SEO strategy, and it’s what sets us apart from your run of the mill ‘do-all’ agency.
We work with demand in mind throughout our collaborations, there’s no point in wasting our time and your time, money and resources. The core principle to all of our strategies is filtering by demand.
Your website needs to become a vehicle to help qualify readers before they convert. Either by removing content that doesn’t benefit you completely, or by reoptimising your website to put you in front of the keywords that move the needle, we essentially let the wrong leads self-disqualify in the interim and outline a roadmap for sustainable growth with a demand-led optimisation strategy.
This strategy works extremely well for consultancies that have a high consideration rate with complex buying cycles and lead times. We understand that if the leads are a wrong fit, it can be a costly and expensive mistake.
High-quality organic growth comes from making your content more specific, not more popular.
Target Problem-Aware Keywords
Knowing the difference between beginner, broad keywords and intent-led, problem-aware keywords is one of the most useful changes you can make to your SEO strategy.
Shift away from questions like ‘what is digital transformation’ and dig deeper, find the keywords that sound like “How can my financial team adapt to the latest legal regulations?”, or “What can I do to make sure my insurance firm stays compliant?”.
We’re filtering by intent here and immediately avoiding the awkward basic blog post that might get clicks, but won’t lead to any commercial value.
Self-Disqualify Users
The power of exclusion is a great way to ensure lead quality while you scale with SEO. You can start by using clear ICP statements, be explicit with boundaries, and give honest pricing and engagement signals.
For example, you could use language like “best suited for teams with X”, or “Not designed for early-stage startups” and “ We work with companies with Y complexity”. Broad examples, but an idea of where to start.
Treat this as an exercise to write content that defines who you are not for.
Build Topical Authority, Not Isolated Blog Posts
Stop thinking of your blog posts as just an avenue for thought leadership. Instead, use this as an intent ladder for your potential clients. You need to explore problems, provide solution comparisons and find the readers that are ready to engage with your consultancy.
One very effective way to ensure this performs well is through internal linking. This means creating topic clusters around a particular pain point or legislative change.
Align Your CTAs to Intent
Generic ‘get in touch’, ‘contact us’, ‘read more’ CTAs do have their place but are nowhere near as effective as CTAs that speak to the end user. If you have mapped each touch point on your website to intent it becomes much easier to use CTAs that encourage engagement.
An alternative approach to CTAs can often come in the form of downloadable content, if your blog post is aiming at someone unsure of how to carry something out, create a simple branded checklist and upload that as a downloadable PDF, then track this as an event in your analytics dashboard to monitor performance and changes based on the behaviour and results.
Conversion friction will always be a factor as long as people are involved in the conversion process. It’s not a bad thing, it helps protect lead quality, but making sure you’ve used the right CTA is a way to help ease the friction or fear.
The End Result
The consultancy that starts to filter their website traffic to demand and intent will see:
- Higher quality leads.
- Higher qualification rates.
- Shorter sales cycles.
- Better sales confidence.
This is not a theoretical approach, it’s a proven method that helps you scale your organic traffic without sacrificing lead quality.
If this sounds like something you are interested in exploring, book in a free discovery call so we can understand your unique needs and plan a scalable growth strategy to maximise your online presence.
