You’re likely here because you’re responsible for generating B2B leads and sales pipelines, and you’re likely trying to decide which marketing channels to focus on.
Read on, and we’ll explain why search engine marketing (SEM), both paid (PPC) and organic (SEO), are the top drivers of the fastest moving leads, and why they should be a major part of your marketing mix— even if you’re struggling to get results right now.
Key Takeaways
- The data is overwhelmingly clear: Search drives the vast majority of traffic to the open Internet, it tends to convert at a higher rate than other channels and, therefore, drives the majority of conversions.
- If SEM is already a core part of your marketing strategy and isn’t performing, it could be a problem with strategy, execution, or attribution. All these issues are all correctable.
- Search leads are different from leads from other channels. Search leads are actively seeking a solution and tend to be much closer to buying. Sales conversions happen faster and cheaper.
- Other channels may help you pique someone’s interest with a display ad, email, or social post, but they are less likely to buy now, because they may not have the burning problem today.
- Make no mistake: Search is highly competitive, so it’s hard. But with the right backing in place, you can succeed and likely drive 50+% of your sales pipeline from the paid and organic search channels.
The Abundance of Inbound Marketing Options
You’re in charge of running marketing campaigns to generate more leads, sales pipeline, and revenue.
And that means you’re stuck choosing between the abundance of inbound marketing options, trying to determine which will be fastest, most cost-effective, and most profitable for you.
Email. Social media. Display advertising. Webinars. Sponsorships, partnerships, and influencer marketing.
This is often extremely overwhelming for marketers trying to stay up-to-date on trends and potentially even engage in every existing platform.
Unfortunately, when that happens, many businesses fail to execute on all of these platforms, or they may focus their attention on the wrong ones— especially since many put disproportionate efforts towards the latest and “hottest” channels.”
My recommendation is to follow the money and work backward, using competitive audits, to consider what will drive the most revenue over time.
That’s most likely search engine marketing, including paid-per-click search ads (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO).
This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend time on other channels; when you have the resources to do so, you should invest time in channels with positive ROI.
Let’s look at why.
Why Search Still Reigns Supreme for Inbound Lead Generation
Search engines still drive most online activity, with over 70% of internet traffic still coming from search engines like Google and Bing. Around 20% of the remaining traffic is divided up between social media platforms and online marketplaces like Amazon, with no site owning more than 3.57% share of traffic referrals.
There’s one thing we know about search-referred traffic, including both paid and organic search:
Prospects are using search engines to research solutions. This is true whether they’re Googling “Why is upstairs hotter than downstairs” or “how to choose the right virtual phone system for my business.”
For the record: Both present valuable selling opportunities, even for more top-funnel searches like the former example. (No one is more open to suggestions and products to resolve a problem than someone who can’t sleep because the bedrooms are too hot all summer.)
SEM allows businesses to capture demand that already exists. You have an engaged audience looking for your solutions, even if they don’t totally know it yet. This means they’ll be ready to buy faster, need less convincing, and may have higher purchase values.
This is inherently more valuable than other inbound marketing channels that work hard to ignite interest in users. Ads and social media posts, for example, may grab a potential customer’s attention. They might even think that your product is a great idea and bookmark it for a later date. But, because they don’t currently have a burning problem that drove them to search for a solution, the majority won’t purchase now.
A well-strategized and well-executed strategy is essential for SEM. With a strong strategy and implementation in place, businesses can see incredible results over time that tend to compund.
Most of our clients drive at least 50% or more of their sales pipeline from paid and organic search channels alone.
Studies show paid and organic search are the highest drivers of leads
While our clients have received exceptional results with search engine marketing, there’s plenty of data that shows that paid and organic search are consistently the highest drivers of lead compared to other inbound marketing channels.
One databox study, for example, that marketers said organic and paid search consistently generated new leads at higher volumes compared to other platforms. Over 50% of respondents credited search engine marketing with generating “a lot of new leads” for their business.
Source: https://databox.com/b2b-channels-lead-generation
According to the survey, the top two ranking channels for driving inbound leads were organic and paid search. The third channel, content marketing, is arguably part of organic search. Combining content marketing and SEO makes organic search a far-and-away winner.
It’s worth noting that the fourth channel for inbound marketing lead generation in this survey is email.
This always makes me laugh.
Unless you’re doing email prospecting, email is not a first-touch channel.
The emails are in your email system, and we’re captured on your website, meaning email isn’t the true first-touch channel. The true channel is how they got to your site in the first place.
And in most cases, the answer to that will be other inbound channels, such as, you guessed it–search.
What if SEO Hasn’t Worked for Me?
We know that some people reading this are having trouble believing that search engine marketing is an effective channel, at least for them. They’ve maybe “tried SEO” or search campaigns in the past that didn’t work, and now they don’t trust that it could ever actually work.
They may have these reasons:
- We tried for two months and it didn’t work.
- Ad costs were too expensive and/or didn’t work.
- We didn’t really know where to focus our energy.
- We never ranked well for any of our target keywords.
- We got a lot of clicks but no conversions.
- We can’t compete against big-name established sites; it’s too late to get started.
And we do want to acknowledge that yes, SEM is highly technical, and the competition is fierce. But with the right strategies, consistent implementation, and testing, any business can see results with search engine marketing— even if you’re a brand new site with no backlink profile.
SEO campaigns, for example, may take up to six months to gain momentum and show true impact. And the longer you carry out SEM, the more topical authority you gain, and the easier it is to rank. Choosing the right keywords early on can help you rank for niche topics that will actually get clicks, and strategic selection and optimization can help nurture those clicks into customers.
Both SEO and SEM also typically require ongoing testing to find the winning combination of campaign types and keywords for your business. This can help brands focus their energy on the right strategy and platforms.
Even if you’re “behind the curve” now compared to big-box names, it doesn’t mean you can’t catch up. Conductor’s 2024 State of SEO Report proves this, finding that 98% of organizations with high SEO maturity reported that SEO positively impacted performance and goals.
A great example of this can be seen in the work we did for Content Camel. Content Camel was new to the market when we started our work together. Despite that, we started an SEO-focused inbound strategy in 2023. Since then, we’ve achieved a 300% increase in organic traffic, with hundreds of keywords on page one of Google search results and 307 search features like featured snippets and site links.
There are a lot of moving pieces with SEM, which is why we can help our clients by developing a comprehensive strategy that accounts for keywords, content creation, backlink building, and coding.
Search is Hard: But It’s Still Worth It
The data is clear: Despite so many people proclaiming that SEO is dead, it’s only true that bad SEO is dead. The time of mass-producing low-quality, low-effort content and web pages, and then stuffing them with keywords, is long over.
Good SEM, however, will never be dead, even in light of AI-flooded search engines and Google’s SGE. Both paid search campaigns and organic search will always be able to capture engaged users who are looking for information throughout the entire buyer’s journey.
Good SEM, combining both organic and paid campaigns, can pay significant dividends over time and remains the best way to attract high-intent leads.
The people who work at PureSEM have been helping brands generate inbound leads that drive real revenue for over two decades.
Written by Keith Holloway
Keith Holloway is the CEO and founder of PureSEM. He's been active in SEM for over 20 years, advising on the marketing strategies for dozens of fast-growing businesses, scaled profitable SEM campaigns into millions of dollars, and is currently focused on perfecting software and services focused on digital lead generation for B2B SaaS companies.
