Combining SEO and CRM to Build a Smarter Lead Pipeline

A smart SEO strategy should clearly provide a path for prospective customers to find the solutions your business offers. By creating valuable content that resonates with your audience, your website will establish your brand as a trustworthy resource and build the necessary rapport to convert those individuals into customers.

The knowledge you collect about these new or potential customers as they make their way through the sales funnel can help your business development team drastically reduce the time it takes to convert prospects and close deals. It’s also important to ensure the SEO team continues to see how users engage with the brand up to and beyond the sale. The SEO team’s visibility into CRM tools makes the process of awareness to conversion much more efficient.

While a good sales team is always looking for ways to better connect with potential customers, a great team is finding ways to get in front of their needs. A lot of that information can be pulled from how visitors to a website interact with content, which is all SEO.

Creating an effective SEO strategy involves researching the behaviors of audiences that are identical (or very similar) to those you are targeting to become your customers. That translates into keywords, content topics, and how you stitch those items together to create an experience on your website. When this is done well, those keywords and topics become the indicators of what visitors are most interested in and how sales and business development can best help them.

Attracting Potential Customers

The keywords you choose and the questions you answer through your content online will dictate the value you provide to new customers. That's all part of the SEO strategy, and by closely tracking which pieces of content visitors to the site find most compelling, you both build smarter SEO strategies and populate your CRM with compelling information about your new leads. Every engagement tells you more about what type of content will be most valuable to leads in your nurture campaigns (emails and newsletters) to help inspire them to take the next steps to become a customer and an advocate.

Meeting Customers Where They Are in the Sales Funnel

In some instances, you know that content that brought visitors to your website indicates they are at a certain point in the decision-making process, and you can help them by serving up content that will guide them as they take the next known steps. Employing this type of predictive marketing helps keep content relevant and shows those in your CRM that you understand their needs and can be a trusted source for guidance.

Finding Out What Customers Are Looking For

Engagement with certain content tells you what other relevant services and products these audiences will also need to ensure they are getting the best possible outcomes. Sometimes it’s a result of direct actions visitors to the website take, like additional articles or service pages they view. In other cases, you may offer services that you know supplement or complement services that leads are already considering, creating opportunities to be even more of a valuable partner to these new prospects.

Nurture sequence content that inspires the most engagements or conversions can tell SEOs the best types of content to populate the website. This allows you to continue to provide value to your target audiences, building deeper relationships.

SEOs can look at what stage of the funnel visitors are in to determine what kind of content can help them get to the next step. For example, people interested in a piece of top-of-funnel content may be more interested in content covering next steps than a case study that talks about bottom-of-funnel concepts or solutions.

CRM can also inform SEO in a variety of other ways:

Job Titles of Leads

Who is interested in your services/products? Who has the decision-making power at this company? Is it the person you thought it was or another job title? You can then use that information to leverage audience research tools like Sparktoro.

This can also help with your content strategy and whether or not you are targeting the right audience. If your leads are mainly C-Suite executives, your content should be catered to that group. If leads tend not to be the main decision-makers, it’s important to create content that shows why your product is the right choice and how to portray that to their leadership team.

Acquisition Channels

What brought people to your lead form in the first place? Attribution may vary, but it gives you information that can be used directionally. For example, if you see an increase in activity from LinkedIn posts, that might point to needing to post more on that platform to improve lead count.

Content Ideas

What types of questions are your leads asking? CRMs keep track of conversations you have with customers, like what kinds of topics they are asking about. No better way to get content ideas than to see pain points straight from prospects!

CRM Informs CRO & SEO

How are people interacting with the site? Are forms hard to fill out? Are you asking too many questions from the get-go? What kinds of responses are you getting from our questions? All these pieces of information add up to make SEO strategies more relevant to your target audience.

Workshop Digital can show you how we help clients integrate SEO and CRM to better target and convert audiences and how you can use this practice to make your digital marketing program more efficient and productive. Contact us today to start the conversation.

This blog post was originally published on May 8, 2023, and was updated and republished by Reilly Phelps on April 14, 2025.