Key Takeaways
- Organic search is still a pipeline workhorse: SEO drives 53% of inbound leads for B2B marketers and accounts for up to 44.6% of B2B revenue in some studies, so any lead generation agency that ignores SEO is leaving money on the table.
- Sales teams should demand that lead generation agencies use SEO data (keywords, intent, landing-page performance) to inform targeting, messaging, and outbound plays-not run SEO as a disconnected marketing project.
- SEO leads close at around 14.6% versus roughly 1.7% for traditional outbound-only leads, meaning SEO-informed lead gen can produce 8-9x better close rates when done right.
- A practical way to start today: map your top 20 closed-won deals to the search queries and pages they touched, then have your agency build campaigns and SDR talk tracks around those exact topics.
- In 2025, 93% of B2B companies report having a dedicated SEO strategy and 72% have increased SEO budgets year over year-your lead gen partners need comparable capabilities or they'll fall behind.
- Content remains the bottleneck: 84% of B2B marketers now outsource content creation, and the best lead gen agencies pair SEO content production with outbound promotion to squeeze maximum pipeline from every asset.
- With AI overviews and zero-click results shrinking organic clicks, the winning agencies are the ones optimizing for both search engines and sales outcomes-measuring success in SQLs and revenue, not just rankings.
SEO Expertise Is a Lead Gen Requirement Now
B2B buyers don’t start with your SDRs—they start with search, and they show up to the first call already educated. When 66% of B2B buyers use internet search results to find information before purchasing, your visibility in Google is a direct lever on how many deals even enter your universe in the first place.
That’s why “lead generation agency” can’t just mean a cold calling agency or a cold email agency anymore. If your b2b sales agency runs outbound in a vacuum, you’ll still book meetings, but you’ll lose a meaningful percentage of late-stage conversations to competitors who are shaping buyer preference earlier through SEO.
In this article, we’ll lay out what real SEO expertise looks like inside a sales development agency, how to connect SEO data to targeting and messaging, and what to measure so you can hold an outsourced sales team accountable for pipeline—not just activity.
Why SEO Drives Disproportionate Pipeline
Organic search is still the heavyweight channel for B2B demand capture. Across multiple studies, SEO is credited with 53% of inbound leads for B2B marketers and an estimated 44.6% of B2B revenue, which is exactly why ignoring SEO inside a lead gen motion is a revenue mistake—not a marketing preference.
The conversion efficiency gap is even more telling for sales leaders. SEO-generated leads are often cited at roughly 14.6% close rate versus about 1.7% for traditional outbound-only leads, an 8–9x advantage that comes from intent already being present before the first conversation.
None of this makes outbound obsolete—cold calling services, b2b cold calling, and sales outsourcing still create demand where it doesn’t exist yet. The point is that your outbound sales agency becomes dramatically more effective when it’s informed by what your buyers are already searching, reading, and comparing.
Turn Keywords Into Prospect Language (Not a Marketing Artifact)
Keyword research shouldn’t live in a marketing folder no one in sales opens. The phrases your buyers type into Google are your clearest “voice of customer” dataset, and they should show up in subject lines, call openers, and value props—especially for teams that hire SDRs at scale or work with sdr agencies to ramp quickly.
Practically, we recommend mapping your top closed-won deals to the search queries and pages prospects touched before booking. When your SDRs reference those same problems and comparisons, your outreach feels less like telemarketing and more like a continuation of the buyer’s self-guided research.
This is also how you avoid the common trap of vanity keywords. Ranking for broad terms can inflate traffic while delivering low-intent leads that waste rep time; a strong agency will justify targets based on expected business impact and the likelihood that an ICP account is in an active evaluation window.
What to Demand From an Agency’s SEO Execution
If an agency claims SEO expertise, it should start with fundamentals: technical health, crawlability, page speed, and conversion UX. Rankings are fragile if the site is hard to index or the forms and CTAs create friction, and “marketing’s problem” quickly becomes “sales’ pipeline problem” when high-intent pages don’t convert.
Visibility is also brutally top-heavy. The first organic result can capture around 39.8% of clicks, while only about 0.63% of users click beyond page one, which means marginal ranking improvements on the right queries can change lead volume far more than most outbound optimizations.
Content operations matter just as much as technical SEO. Since 84% of B2B marketers outsource content creation, your lead gen partner should be able to coordinate content that matches intent (pricing, alternatives, comparisons, use cases) and then put those assets to work inside sequences run by your cold calling team and email SDRs.
Rankings are only useful when they create sales conversations—SEO has to be measured in SQLs and revenue, not screenshots of position changes.
Make SEO Content Pull Its Weight in Outbound
High-performing teams treat SEO content as sales enablement, not “traffic bait.” Comparison pages, ROI explainers, and problem-solving guides give your reps something genuinely helpful to send in follow-ups, and they reduce the amount of custom rewriting SDRs do when they’re trying to explain your category in a first-touch email.
This is where coordination with an sdr agency or sales rep agency becomes a force multiplier. When outreach references the same topics prospects are researching, response quality improves, and your team can move from generic pitches to consultative conversations that feel timely and relevant.
To keep everyone aligned, set one shared backlog across SEO and outbound: the recurring prospect questions, objections, and competitor comparisons you hear on calls should become content topics, and the highest-performing pages should become standard links and talk tracks in your sequences.
Common Mistakes That Break SEO-Driven Lead Gen
The biggest mistake is running SEO as a separate marketing project. When SEO sits in a silo, content gets optimized for clicks instead of deals, sales never uses the insights, and you end up with a disconnect between what prospects research and what cold callers say on the phone.
The second mistake is ignoring technical SEO and on-site experience because it doesn’t look like “lead generation.” Slow pages, confusing navigation, and buried CTAs quietly suppress conversions, and your sales development agency can’t make up that gap with more dials or more sends.
The third mistake is measuring SEO only by last-click form fills. B2B journeys are multi-touch; if you don’t track influenced opportunities, you underinvest in content that shapes early preference and makes outbound warmer. Directional attribution is enough to start—what matters is building a consistent measurement habit.
The Metrics That Actually Matter to Sales Leadership
Sales leaders should care about the SEO metrics that correlate with pipeline: high-intent organic sessions from ICP accounts, demo and contact requests that originate from organic, and the number of SQLs and opportunities that were sourced or influenced by organic touches. It’s also worth benchmarking performance against other channels, since some datasets suggest organic contributes roughly 55% of inbound leads and 86% of B2B companies say SEO has improved sales and revenue.
Use a simple scorecard to keep reporting honest and comparable across an outsourced sales team, your in-house marketing team, and any external SEO resources. The goal is to prevent “pretty reports” from replacing outcomes, especially when you’re evaluating a sales agency or pay per meeting lead generation partner.
Here’s a practical way to frame the reporting so it stays pipeline-first and comparable month over month.
| What to report | Why it matters for pipeline |
|---|---|
| Organic-influenced SQLs and opportunities | Shows whether SEO is creating sales conversations, even when it isn’t last-click. |
| High-intent page performance (pricing, alternatives, comparisons) | Connects rankings to real buyer intent and meeting creation. |
| Win rate and ACV for SEO-touched deals vs. outbound-only | Validates whether intent-driven demand is improving efficiency and deal quality. |
| Time-to-first-response SLA for organic “warm” leads | Ensures your team treats high-intent inbound as a priority, not a backlog. |
How to Win in a Zero-Click, AI-Assisted Search World
SEO is still worth it, but the execution has changed. As AI overviews and richer SERP features reduce clicks, your content needs to deliver an immediate, clear answer while also giving prospects a reason to engage deeper—strong POV, templates, tools, and specifics that can’t be fully “consumed” on the results page.
This is also where the SEO-to-outbound loop becomes non-negotiable. Even if fewer people click, the topics they search still reveal intent; your outbound sales agency should use those insights to refine ICP targeting, personalize messaging, and prioritize accounts that look like the ones converting from organic.
Next steps are straightforward: audit the last six months of SEO-to-pipeline reporting, connect Search Console and your SEO platform to your CRM, and pilot a 90-day “SEO + outbound” program around one use case. If your current lead gen partner can’t support that—whether they’re a cold calling company, a b2b sales outsourcing provider, or a full-service sales outsourcing firm—it’s a clear signal you need deeper SEO expertise on the roster.
Sources
- Semrush – B2B Marketing Statistics (Statista via Semrush)
- Omniscient Digital – B2B SEO Statistics 2025
- Business2Marketing – SEO Leads vs Outbound Close Rate
- SEO Sandwitch – B2B SEO Statistics 2025–2030
- Rank.ai – CTR Statistics for Google Positions
- SQ Magazine – Google Search Statistics 2025
- Gitnux – B2B SEO Statistics 2025
📊 Key Statistics
Expert Insights
Treat SEO Keywords as Your Real Prospect Language
Instead of letting marketing hoard keyword research, pull SEO data into your sales playbooks. The phrases buyers type into Google are the same phrases that should show up in your cold email subject lines, call openers, and value props. Build talk tracks around your top non-branded, high-intent keywords and you'll see reply and connect rates climb.
Optimize for SQLs, Not Just Rankings
Any agency can show you a pretty ranking report; a good one will show you organic-sourced opportunities and closed-won deals. Tie every SEO initiative to a measurable sales outcome-form fills from ICP accounts, demo requests, and opportunities created-then reallocate budget toward topics and pages that generate real pipeline.
Use SEO Content as Sales Enablement, Not Just Traffic Bait
Top-performing teams arm SDRs with SEO-driven assets: comparison pages, ROI calculators, and deep problem-explainer articles. Have your reps link these resources in their sequences and call follow-ups, and watch how quickly cold prospects warm up when they're sent genuinely useful content that answers the exact questions they're already Googling.
Let SEO Data Drive Your Ideal Customer Profile Refinement
Look at which industries, company sizes, and roles are actually converting from organic search-not just visiting. Feed that back into your ICP definition and outbound targeting rules. Over time, this closes the loop: SEO attracts the right people, and your SDRs go hunting in the same ponds where conversion data says you win.
Design Campaigns for a Zero-Click, AI-Assisted World
With AI overviews and zero-click searches rising, your agency needs to structure content that can be pulled into summaries and featured snippets while still driving compelling reasons to click through. That means ultra-clear answers at the top of the page, plus deeper POV, tools, and templates that can't be fully consumed in a SERP snippet.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Treating SEO as a separate 'marketing project' instead of part of the revenue engine.
When SEO lives in a silo, content gets optimized for traffic, not deals, and sales never sees or uses the insights. That creates a big gap between what prospects research and what SDRs talk about.
Instead: Make SEO a joint sales–marketing initiative where topics are prioritized by potential pipeline, and have your lead gen agency report in terms of MQLs, SQLs, and revenue influence-not just rankings and traffic.
Chasing vanity keywords that your buyers don't actually search at buying time.
Ranking for broad, top-of-funnel phrases can inflate traffic while producing low-intent, unqualified leads that waste SDR time and distort your CAC models.
Instead: Focus SEO around a mix of problem-aware and bottom-of-funnel queries-things like '[category] pricing,' '[tool] alternatives,' and '[problem] solution'-and let your agency justify each target keyword with expected business impact.
Ignoring technical SEO and site experience because 'that's marketing's problem.'
If your pages are slow, confusing, or hard to crawl, you'll never rank for the queries that start your buyers' journey, and all the content in the world won't convert if forms or CTAs are buried.
Instead: Ask your lead gen agency for a clear technical SEO and UX improvement roadmap tied to conversion metrics-things like page speed, mobile usability, and funnel drop-off-and track changes alongside lead quality.
Underutilizing SEO content in outbound campaigns.
You end up with SDRs manually rewriting explanations that already exist in polished SEO content, and prospects never see the thought leadership that could build trust before a call.
Instead: Have your agency and SDR manager co-build outreach sequences that link to top-performing SEO assets, and train reps on which article, guide, or case study to send at each stage of the sequence.
Measuring SEO success only by form fills, not by influenced opportunities.
B2B buying journeys are long and multi-touch; if you only give SEO credit for last-click demo forms, you'll underinvest in the content that actually shapes early-stage preference.
Instead: Use attribution (even if it's directional) to track how often opportunities and closed deals included organic visits or SEO content touches, and use those insights to prioritize future topics and landing pages.
Action Items
Audit your current agency's SEO-to-pipeline reporting
Ask for the last six months of data showing how many MQLs, SQLs, and opportunities originated from or were influenced by organic search, broken down by page and keyword. If they can't show it, that's your first red flag.
Create a shared SEO + sales topic backlog
Sit down with sales leadership and your lead gen agency to list the 20-30 most common prospect questions and objections, then map each one to a planned SEO asset (blog, pillar page, comparison page) and an outbound sequence angle.
Integrate SEO tools with your CRM and marketing automation
Connect Google Search Console and your SEO platform to your CRM so you can tag contacts and accounts with the pages and queries they touched, then build reports that correlate those signals with win rates and deal size.
Build an 'SEO warm leads' playbook for SDRs
Flag inbound leads who arrived via high-intent organic pages and route them to a specific SDR pod with tailored scripts and SLAs-these leads are hotter than the average MQL and deserve faster, more relevant follow-up.
Add SEO expertise to your agency RFP or scorecard
When evaluating lead gen agencies, include questions about their SEO capabilities, toolstack, and case studies, and score them on things like technical depth, content operations, and ability to report on revenue impact from search.
Pilot a 90-day 'SEO + outbound' campaign around one key use case
Pick a single product or use case and have your agency build a mini SEO cluster plus a matching outbound program. Measure results in pipeline created versus your usual outbound-only motion to prove or disprove the model.
Partner with SalesHive
Where SalesHive shines is in connecting the dots between what’s happening in search and what’s happening in your sequences and on the phones. Our teams use SEO and intent data to inform list building and targeting, so SDRs focus on accounts already signaling the problems you solve. When your marketing team or SEO agency ships new high-intent content-comparison pages, problem explainers, industry guides-we bake those assets right into our email copy (powered by AI personalization tools like eMod) and call scripts to warm up conversations.
We’re not trying to be your standalone SEO agency-but we are the partner that makes sure your SEO investments actually translate into booked meetings. Whether you’re running US-based SDR pods, Philippines-based teams, or a hybrid, we plug into your existing SEO efforts, prioritize the right accounts, and orchestrate the outreach that turns anonymous searchers into live conversations on your calendar, all without locking you into annual contracts.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
Why does SEO expertise matter for a lead generation agency if we're mostly outbound?
Because your buyers are doing their homework before they ever respond to your SDRs. Around two-thirds of B2B buyers start with search and over half of inbound leads can come from organic traffic in many industries. When your lead gen agency understands SEO, they can align outbound messaging with what prospects are already researching, use search data to refine targeting, and turn organic visitors into high-intent leads your SDRs can close faster.
How should SEO and cold outreach actually work together in B2B?
Think of SEO as the engine that captures and nurtures intent, and outbound as the engine that creates and activates demand. Your agency should use SEO content to educate and warm prospects, then have SDRs reference that same content in cold emails and calls. They should also analyze which organic pages and keywords drive the best opportunities, then build outbound sequences aimed at companies showing those same problems or interests.
What SEO metrics should sales leaders care about—beyond traffic and rankings?
Sales leaders should focus on SEO metrics that tie directly to pipeline: high-intent organic sessions from ICP accounts, demo and contact requests from organic, SQLs and opportunities sourced or influenced by organic, and win rates and ACV for those deals versus other channels. Rankings only matter to the extent that they increase qualified visits on pages that actually convert to meetings and revenue.
How do I know if my lead generation agency is actually good at SEO?
Ask for case studies that show improvements in both organic visibility and sales outcomes-things like increased demo requests, opportunities, and booked meetings from organic search. Review their technical audits, content plans, and link-building strategy for specificity. A strong agency will be able to walk you through target keyword choices in terms of business impact, not just search volume, and will have a clear reporting cadence connecting SEO activity to pipeline.
Is SEO still worth the investment with AI overviews and zero-click results rising?
Yes, but the playbook is evolving. AI overviews and snippets may reduce raw clicks, but B2B buyers still use search heavily and SEO continues to drive a disproportionate share of leads and revenue. The key is working with an agency that adapts: structuring content to win snippets, answering questions clearly, differentiating with strong POV and tools, and then using that content in outbound and sales enablement so it drives value even when prospects don't click right away.
How long should it take for SEO from my lead gen agency to impact pipeline?
Most B2B SEO programs take 6-12 months to show meaningful ranking and traffic gains, and another few months for those gains to translate into predictable opportunities, especially in longer sales cycles. That said, a good agency can usually find some quick wins-optimizing existing high-intent pages, improving forms and CTAs, or building comparison pages-that start moving the needle on MQLs and meetings within the first 90 days.
Do I need a separate SEO agency if I already work with a lead generation firm?
Not necessarily. If your lead generation partner has deep SEO capabilities-technical audits, content strategy, on-page optimization, and analytics that tie to pipeline-you can often get more leverage from a single integrated team. If they're purely an outbound shop with no SEO track record, you may be better off either adding an SEO-specialized partner or switching to a lead gen agency that can execute across both inbound and outbound.
What should my SDRs actually do differently when SEO starts performing?
SDRs should prioritize leads who've engaged with high-intent SEO pages, reference that content in their outreach, and adjust their talk tracks based on the problems those pages address. They should also use SEO insights-top queries, common objections, competitor comparisons-to refine their call openers and objection handling. Over time, you can even build dedicated pods that specialize in converting SEO-sourced leads, with tighter SLAs and more consultative conversations.
