130: Why SEO Beats Social Media for Getting a Steady Stream of Clients

In this episode, Jules White makes the case for SEO as one of the most powerful and sustainable lead generation tools available to service-based business owners - and explains why it beats social media for building a consistent pipeline of warm, ready-to-buy clients.

Jules explores why so many small business owners find themselves stuck in feast or famine mode, constantly pouring time and energy into social media without seeing reliable results. She shares why SEO offers a fundamentally different approach: one that works independently of you, compounds over time, and keeps bringing leads into your business whether you feel like posting that day or not.

Key Takeaways:

• Why SEO beats social media for lead generation: Understand the core difference between interrupting people mid-scroll and showing up exactly when they're already searching for a business like yours.
• How SEO compounds over time: Discover why the work you do today can keep paying dividends months and years down the line - without daily feeding.
• Where to start with keywords: Jules walks through a practical approach to finding the right search terms for your pages, using Google Search and Google Search Console.
• Which pages to prioritise first: Learn why your core service pages - not your homepage - are often the closest to the sale and where to focus your energy first.
• What your hero section must do: Find out why the top of your page is your most valuable real estate and what needs to be crystal clear within three seconds of someone landing there.
• How much content you actually need: Jules busts the myth that SEO requires constant content creation, and explains why one well-crafted blog post a month (or even no blog at all) can be enough for many businesses.

If you're exhausted from actively marketing your business and want a more sustainable way to bring in consistent leads, this episode is a must-listen.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Episode 104: You've been sold a lie — smarter ways to be visible without social media
• Join the Website Growth Club to build your sustainable lead generation system step by step

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast for more practical tips on SEO, AI search, and get

Transcript

SEO for Lead Generation
[00:00:00] Introduction: SEO for Lead Generation
Jules White: Hi, welcome back to the Website Success Show. It is Jules here, and today I wanted to talk about using SEO as a great lead generation tool for your business. I was on a call at the beginning of this week with a business strategist. It was a group call and she works with business owners across all sorts of different industries, and she was saying that the number one thing they struggle with is lead generation.
So not just getting clients, but having that reliable, consistent flow of the right people coming into your business.
We hear lots about visibility and how you've got to be visible and you've, you know, we kind of focus on that part. But actually all of this, what we're trying to do is bring more clients and customers into our business and generate leads for our business as well.
And that's what SEO can do for your business. So especially for service-based businesses or local businesses, or even online businesses as well, to be honest with you, businesses who don't get maxed out quickly with one-to-one clients.
Maybe if you've got a scalable offer or you just need a steady stream of clients and customers coming into your business.
So if you rely on footfall, if you've got scalable things like online courses or group programmes to sell, if you need to get bookings coming in all the time, those kinds of things where you need people coming into your business all of the time.
Generally, most businesses need that, to be honest with you.
[00:01:37] The Problem: Feast or Famine & Social Media Overwhelm
Jules White: Even businesses who do get maxed out very quickly, unfortunately, can then get into a bit of a feast or famine mode where things feel a bit inconsistent. I talk to lots of business owners who do have that issue of things feeling like, yeah, I'm either really busy or, oh, it feels a bit quiet now.
But actually having your business show up on Google and in AI searches, being recommended in AI search, having those leads coming into your business regularly as a steady stream just makes everything so much easier.
I think sometimes when we're in that feast or famine mode, the solution to that often feels like we just need to post more on social media.
And this is a conversation I have time and time again with people. I broke up with social media at the end of January and went on to have my busiest month ever in February, which was amazing.
It was incredible. And when I talk to people about the possibility of not using social media for your business, or the possibility of — and this tends to be how I approach it more — that possibility that social media is optional and that we don't have to be posting, we don't have to be spending all of these hours and hours actually using social media for our business.
There are other ways, and quite often when I talk to people about this, it kind of blows their mind a little bit, really, because we are sold this lie, really.
I talked about this back in Episode 104, You've Been Sold a Lie — Smarter Ways to Be Visible Without Social Media, where I talked about why we have been kind of sold this.
This myth, really, that if you are not doing everything that you have to do to be visible on social media, that you can't have a successful business.
And I honestly believe it is just not true. Yes, if you are relying on social media for your business right now and it's actually bringing new clients, then you might not want to just cut that off cold turkey.
You would need to have a strategy for replacing that social media content or that social media traffic with other more sustainable ways to market your business. But for the majority of small business owners that I talk to, that's not the case.
They're spending all of this time and all this energy on social media, and then it's not actually bringing them any clients.
Or even if it is bringing them some clients, it's just not worth the amount of effort and energy that they're having to put in to do that.
So if you feel like that, whether you are in that feast or famine mode or you are just sick of having to actively market your business all the time, it doesn't have to be social media. That's not the only way to market your business. We don't want to just add to your workload forevermore, really.
[00:04:35] Why SEO Beats Social Media
Jules White: One of the big downsides of using social media or paying for ads is that once you stop doing the thing — you stop posting, you stop interacting with other people's posts, you stop paying for ads, you stop doing that work — then the traffic and the leads dry up. Whereas with SEO, it's not something that you do once and forget, but it's also not something that needs daily feeding, like social media.
So you build it, you maintain it, and it works independently of you.
So it means that it can bring clients into your business whilst you are sleeping, whilst you're off doing the thing that you actually enjoy doing in your business, whilst you're off walking the dog or cold swimming or sitting on the beach. You can still have those leads coming into your business, which is really important.
[00:05:26] How SEO Works as a Passive Lead System
Jules White: If you want something that's more sustainable, it is kind of the closest thing you can get to a passive lead generation system in your business, besides actually growing your network, which — as a side note — is the thing that I recommend on top of everything else. Growing your reputation, growing your network, getting to know people is something that absolutely no algorithm can take away.
But anyway, coming back to SEO, it is something that compounds. The work you do today pays dividends not just today, but three, six, nine, twelve months' time and beyond.
I think of it as like the antidote to that hustle culture, really.
It's not a quick fix. I definitely want to say that SEO does take time. It takes time to get your website working for you, but once you get that done, once you focus on the right things, once you know what to focus on as well, you're not just tinkering with your website and with your online presence.
You're actually focusing on things that do make a difference and make a difference right now, but will also make a difference as things change in the world of search and in the online world.
It's something that keeps paying off.
It's something that can keep bringing those clients into your business regardless of what you're doing.
And the great thing about this is, once you get through those initial core pages of your website and get those basics set up, unless your business massively changes, you don't need to go back and re-set up those core pages again, because they can keep working for you.
The SEO there can keep working for you.
Maybe you'd go in every now and again and add a new testimonial or a new review or something, just so that Google knows those pages have been refreshed a little bit.
Or if you've got new offers or those kinds of things, there are ways that you can make sure that your content stays fresh and up to date.
But ideally then at that point, you'd maybe have created some blogs — you might not have done. For many businesses, you don't actually even need to create a blog, especially if you've got a lot of pages, if you've got a lot of services that you offer. So I'm thinking like salons, those kinds of businesses that have got plenty of content already because they've got a lot of things that they offer in their business.
Getting those pages properly structured might mean that you actually don't need to create blogs, and you can just create some case study pages and actually grow your authority with your content that way.
But even if you decide, actually no, I need to create some blog content — I need to create some things that show my authority, show I know what I'm doing about my topic, about the thing that I want to be known for — so that I can show I actually do know about this and I have real lived experience, rather than just being somebody who knows how to get AI to write an article for them.
If you are doing that, you would only need to create a blog about once a month. And I was on a call yesterday, a training call, and I said about that — I said about the fact that, you know, this is great because you only need to create a blog once a month.
And somebody said, oh my God, once a month — wow. As in, that's a lot.
But if we think alternatively about what social media demands from us in terms of creating content, where we've got to be constantly creating new content every single day. And a lot of the time now we're told that has to be videos — it's got to be reels, it's got to be things where we get our face in front of the camera.
And for a lot of business owners, they just don't want to do that. They don't want to have to be a content creator, and actually just creating a blog once a month — I don't like writing blogs, to be honest with you, but I do love creating these podcast episodes.
So if I can take this episode where it's me talking and turn that into a blog — and this is where I would use AI to help with this — so it's not AI creating content for me, it's AI helping me to take the content I've already created and turn it into something more tangible that can keep bringing clients into my business, keep getting me showing up in front of the right people at the right time.
I very much focus on a pinpoint blogging strategy, so we only create content if we absolutely need to.
So once everything else is all sorted out, if we need to create something that will help to support our business, we create a very strong piece of content that's going to help show our authority in what we do.
And then if we need to expand on that, we can. But everything is done with a strategy, so we are not just churning out stuff for the sake of it.
It's one of the primary things that I believe in my business — we create content that we own first, and that it actually does pay off and does deliver something for our business, and we make the most of that content as well.
So when we are thinking about this, when we are thinking about how we can connect with the right people — people are out there searching for businesses like yours, they're already looking for a solution to their problem. And if you can show up at that point, then it's fundamentally much warmer leads that are then coming through onto your website and into your business.
Than somebody that you're trying to interrupt mid-scroll, if the algorithm even decides to show your content.
This is one of those fundamental things — between showing up in search and showing up when somebody needs you and needs your business, they're already looking. And it's like, yeah, hi, I'm here, I can help you.
Versus when you're posting and creating social media content, it's almost just like shouting out into the void and trying to scoop people up, trying to bring people into your world from there.
And it's so much harder trying to do that, and it often does feel like that — just standing there like you are shouting into a void, and nobody's listening. It's not getting any interaction. It's not actually bringing you any clients.
Whereas actually, if you can just show up when people are already looking, people are much, much more likely to convert than, as I say, if you're interrupting them mid-scroll.
[00:11:20] Keyword Strategy & Finding the Right Search Terms
Jules White: So let's talk about how to actually do that.
If somebody's out there and is searching for a business like yours, how can you find the right keywords to use on your pages for that particular search intent? So let's imagine that you own a luxury retreat in Burford, which is in the Cotswolds in the UK.
If you were thinking, how do I start with this? First and foremost, whenever anybody's thinking about how to optimise their website, optimise their content for SEO, for searchability, the first thing we want to be really clear on is what you do, how you make people's lives better.
What they need to do to get it and what you want to be known for, really. And sometimes that can trip people up a little bit, where we overthink it a little bit in terms of what we want to be known for. But if you were that luxury retreat in Burford, ideally you would want at least one page of your website to show up for "luxury retreat in Burford."
You probably also want to show up for "luxury retreat in the Cotswolds."
Whether that is the same page — you know, that may or may not be the same page. Maybe it would be that you think, actually, luxury retreat in Burford, the Cotswolds — maybe.
The way I would start approaching this is, if we take that example of luxury retreat in Burford, I would go to a Google search and type that in, type that keyword in and see what comes up.
If you're finding that there are lots of businesses coming up on that page that are similar to yours, that shows that the search intent aligns with what Google is thinking, really.
Whereas if you see — and this probably wouldn't happen with that particular search term — but if you see a load of blog posts showing up there, or if you see a load of product results showing up there, or a load of YouTube videos showing up there.
Then it shows that Google is unlikely to be showing your services page or your booking page. If you are this luxury retreat, it's unlikely to be showing that up.
So it's a really simple way that you can just go in and start thinking about the keyword, start thinking about what you want your business to be showing up for, and whether the pages that you're trying to optimise for that are the right pages.
[00:13:36] Using Google Search Console
Jules White: And you can see this in your Google Search Console if you've got Google Search Console set up — go in, have a look and look at the individual pages and see what search terms are actually being associated with that particular page.
This is one of the things that I cover with power hours with clients.
So quite often people will come in and they've got Google Search Console — their web developer, or when they first built their website themselves, they set it up.
And they never really did anything with it.
They may have looked at Google Analytics. That quite often seems to be what people do — they'll have heard of Google Analytics and they'll set it up.
They'll go in and look at it. They'll look at how overwhelming the whole screen is and check out from it, and never look at Google tools again, unfortunately.
But Google Search Console is a different tool.
So Google Analytics will tell you where people have come through onto your website — so if they've come from social media or email, or organic search or AI search, we're now starting to see that appear in Google Analytics as well.
But it will tell you where people have come from and how long they've spent on the particular pages of your website.
Whereas Google Search Console tells you about how Google actually understands your website. It tells you what search queries people are typing into Google that have brought up your website in the search results.
So I actually feel like that's a much more valuable tool to use from the free tools we have available from Google.
So what you can then do is look at your pages and work out what the search terms each page of your website is showing up for.
Quite often what you see in here is that our pages are competing with each other. So if you are seeing lots of search terms that are showing up on multiple pages of your website, with around the same number of impressions and maybe the same number of clicks between those pages, that sends a strong signal that Google is confused about which page of your website is the best one to show up for this particular search term.
So that's how you would start thinking about what you want to show up for.
[00:15:36] Which Pages to Optimise First
Jules White: Which pages to focus on first — I think, you know, we need to get our core pages of our website working for us, so we start with our homepage, our most profitable product or service, and then any other service pages that we've got there as well.
The about page is often one that gets a bit neglected, but people are nosy. And the about page is often the second most visited page of a website, so getting that page working for you.
Getting that page showing up for branded search — so if somebody types your name, your business name, or your name into Google, your about page should be a really strong page that will show up for that.
And then from there, you maybe would move on beyond those core pages once you've got those core pages set up. Moving on beyond those, into what other content you need to create that just supports those core pages. The core pages are the ones that are going to lead to people actually buying from you, booking with you, joining your programmes, joining your email list even.
But those are the pages to focus on first.
And just take it one page at a time.
If you decide, actually, I don't know whether to start with my homepage or start with my services page — start with that core services page first. Because that's the one that is closest to the sale and is much more likely to bring clients directly through to your business.
[00:16:54] Converting Visitors: Hero Sections & Calls to Action
Jules White: And then when we're thinking about our pages, we don't just want people to find our website.
We actually want them to take action — whether that is buying from us, booking with us, joining our email list, getting our freebie, whatever it is that you want the call to action to be for that particular page.
It's important to set your page up to have the best chance of that happening.
So starting with a hero section that's really clear — that's the thing immediately, as soon as you come into the page, the top of the site, before the scroll, before the fold, above the fold, whichever way you want to describe it.
That hero section is your most valuable real estate on your website. So making sure in there that we are really clear about what you do, how you help people, what the result is or the problems that you're solving, and how you help to make their life better — and what they need to do to get it as well.
So I always say within three seconds, people should understand what you do, ideally who it's for, how you make their life better, and what they need to do to get it. And quite often that's something that's missing — that call to action of this is what the next step is, this is how you get this thing, this is how you buy it.
And it's amazing what a difference it makes, actually, when you give people the option of this is how you buy it — how many more people will actually then go on to buy from you.
[00:18:09] Wrap-Up & Next Steps
Jules White: So all of this to say, just wrapping up this episode, it's really important as a business owner to think about how you can protect your time.
Many business owners are completely exhausted because they are their own marketing machine. Especially small business owners where, unfortunately, as a small business owner, you need to be doing your marketing yourself, realistically, unless you've got a big budget — even if you pay a VA or pay a copywriter or web developer to actually implement these things.
Realistically, as the business owner, you need to be the one who's in charge of that strategy and in charge of making these decisions about what needs to change on your website, what improvements you need to make, and what you actually want to be showing up for.
So that you can get those consistent leads coming into your business using SEO and using AI search, that allows you to step back from constantly and actively marketing your business without your pipeline drying up.
So you've still got leads coming into your business, regardless of whether you feel like posting that day or not.
And that's the freedom that SEO offers, and that's why I really love it. It's something that, as I say, it's not a quick fix — it's not something that will solve marketing problems overnight, but it can get results, and actually often quicker than social media, I think.
If you're going all in on social media and you're using social media to market your business, then you've got to put lots of effort into that as well, and you've got to be consistent and you've got to be doing it for some time before you can get those results.
Whereas if you're a local business, your Google Business Profile — you can make changes to that today and that can show up for clients in your area tomorrow.
It literally is that fast.
And it does compound. All of this stuff snowballs and it gets better over time.
But making changes to your website, planting your flag in the sand of what you want to be known for, making that clear on your website that you are an authority in this particular thing, showing up in AI search as well — can bring in fast results for businesses.
So it's, as I say, not designed to be thought of as a quick fix, but it's just about building a more sustainable, long-term way of marketing your business, really.
And bringing in those consistent leads without more effort from you every time you need some more leads in your business.
So if this sounds like something that appeals to you, come and join the Website Growth Club.
Where you'll learn how to build exactly this kind of system for your website step by step, without needing to be a tech expert or a social media content machine.
Because your time is precious.
It's the only thing that we can't make more of. So if you reduce the need for active marketing in your business, then social media becomes optional and you can focus on doing the things you love.