Generating Leads 101
In order to succeed in today’s competitive digital market, businesses need to use all the tools at their disposal. One powerful tool is Google organic traffic, which can used to drive visitors to a website and increase sales (through deliberate conversion funnels).
In this article, we’ll show you how to use Google organic traffic for lead generation in order to increase sales of digital animation products. The tools that we’ve used to not only craft but also execute this marketing strategy are:
- Content Marketing
- SEO Strategy
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- A Product (in this case a animated lightbulb icon as a digital product)
- A Website (built on WordPress)
- Gravity Forms (to automate repetitive tasks)
Now, this lead generation example won’t be a complete tutorial on any one of the aforementioned tools. The focus here is going to be on how they all come together to create a successful digital marketing strategy with the end goal being selling more of your product.
For those of you new to lead generation, it’s worth noting that there are two types of leads: inbound and outbound. In order to generate inbound leads, businesses need to create content that will attract visitors without picking up the phone to make cold calls (outbound).
This example focuses on the inbound lead generation method using content marketing and a data-driven approach to crafting a marketing funnel.
The Foundations To Any Online Lead Generation
Let’s start with the two foundational pieces of this inbound lead generation strategy. A product and a website are the building blocks that everything else rests on. In other cases a service can be swapped out for a physical, or digital, product. The strategy remains the same.
The product that I am ‘promoting’ in this case study are past digital animations that I’ve created and intend to resell over and over again in order to earn more profits on the original design. The digital products here are animated icons that can be installed to a company’s website to help boost it’s interactivity and direct users to where they need to be.
The Product
The next step in this sequential marketing strategy is to develop or create a product. In this case I have some already created in the form of customizable digital downloads. As mentioned above, the digital products here are icon animations that can be embedded to websites, PPT presentations and more. I intentionally built out each product on their own pages in order to have more control over what A/B tests I ran and where the low hanging fruit is.
The product for this case study is an animated light bulb icon.
Now that we’ve got our products and website in place, we need to start promoting it. This is where content marketing comes in.
(this is the exact product used in this case study)
Content Marketing For Lead Generation
Content marketing is typically though to attract visitors, convert that traffic into leads and then turn those leads into customers. I don’t agree. Content marketing’s purpose is to do one thing and only one thing, be found.
If you aren’t found, on whatever platform you may be investing in, then you won’t have any traffic to convert into leads or customers. Therefore, the first step in this content marketing strategy is to make sure that you are, indeed, being found by your target audience. It is all an investment, whether you’re investing in paid ads for your content or leveraging your own time to create content to be found by Google’s algorithms.
In this case study we will be using SEO to make sure that our website and content is being found in the search engines by our target market.
The Traffic
While this isn’t a deep-dive into SEO, I do want to touch on a few key components that are important for ranking in the search engines and, as a result, generating traffic.
The first thing you’ll need is keyword rich content. This can be done by writing blog posts around certain topics (which we will get into later), optimizing your website’s titles, metatags, and on-page structure. The kicker is that the keywords can’t just be guessed, they have to be researched and found to have a significant amount of search volume in your desired target industry.
The overall goal is to be found in Google’s search results for a specific query (I use query and keyword interchangeably here).
The Keyword Strategy
Now, without giving away all my secrets I do think it’s necessary to provide a specific example here to showcase the power of SEO. Here’s an exact product that I’ve created and showcased in my ‘digital shop.’ This is a lightbulb icon animation that can be resized and recolored as needed.
Whether you like the design or not, the strategy behind this icon page is to provide some context and provide some content-rich landscape on the page. After doing a bit of keyword research, I determined that the best route to go was for Lightbulb Animation as the page’s main keyword phrase, based on search volume and alignment with the core product. That’s the foundation of any specific product page here. But how will I be able to measure the results and whether the direction is towards sales or not?
Measuring Lead Generation Efforts
There are tons of reporting tools on the market but two of my favorites for measuring Google SEO results are Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Here’ s a brief description of each:
Google Analytics will show you things like how many people visited your site, how long they stayed, what pages they visited, and where they came from. All of this data is important when understanding whether or not your content marketing strategy is working but we’ll focus on a few key metrics.
Google Search Console is a tool provided by Google that gives you insights into how your site is performing in the search results. You can see things like what keywords your site is ranking for, how many impressions and clicks those keywords are getting, and what position your site is in. This data is important to understand which content marketing efforts are working and which ones aren’t.
Since SEO, as a traffic generation strategy, isn’t instant , it can take some time to show results. For that reason, I recommend setting up Google Analytics and Google Search Console and monitoring your progress over a period of at least 3 months to get an accurate idea of whether or not your content marketing strategy is working.
The Results
After 3 months you should start to see some results in the form of increased traffic to your website. This however will vary by industry and competition for search keywords. The important thing to remember is that this traffic is not just any traffic, it’s targeted traffic that is interested in what you have to offer.
Here’s a screenshot of my Google Search Console account (that connects directly with my website and Google). This screenshot showcases some of the alternative queries that I’ve found were driving traffic to this specific product’s page. By finding out what queries are the most searched, I can start optimizing the page for a better structure and landing page experience.

Some of the metrics that I use when determining what changes and when to make them are measured inside Google Analytics. The points that I’m looking for include;
- Average Time On Page (we don't want people bouncing away after only a few seconds)
- Page Views (to determine whether there is a significant enough sample size of data)
- Conversion reporting with 'goal configuration' inside Google Analytics that are triggered when a user reaches the checkout and thank you page.
All of these metrics can be measured by filtering out the pages in Google Analytics that include ‘lightbulb’ and also combing the visitors journey through the traffic flow reports.

Lead Generation To Conversion
Now that we have our measuring and data pooling in, it’s time to take a look at optimizing our product page. Some of the variables here are going to include whether or not you have a high ticket item and what psychological variables your target audience are considering (more on the psychology of sales in another article).
Here’s a screenshot of an exact digital product setup. The features of this product page are:
- Price Overview
- Short Product Features
- Dynamic Form Automation

Features, price and keywords can easily be swapped out for your industry and target market but where we start to leave the lead generation portion of things and start converting to sales is with a ‘choose-your-own journey’ intake forms.
This is an example of what I mean…
You can see that this product page above has two options underneath the ‘start here’ headline. This allows for a user to input their specific interests and as they do so, the content on the page changes to offer them more personalized options. Whereas after multiple iterations and learning about your product (product development strategy), help you to anticipate what your target market will ask and serving up the answer on a golden platter.
In this case I’m saving myself time by not having to ask the same questions over and over again. Common questions in this case are what format and colors the final product should be delivered in. The result looks exactly like this in my inbox:

A Final Note
SEO and content marketing are both long-term strategies that take time to pay off. However, if you’re patient and track your results using Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you’ll be able to see which keywords are driving traffic to your website and which pages are converting leads into customers. Keep in mind that SEO and content marketing are evergreen techniques that should be continually tweaked and improved in order to stay ahead of the competition.
If you want to receive help with learning about lead generation or a content marketing campaign for your business, don’t hesitate to reach out.
Cheers,
Jon