What is the difference between an organic and a paid lead – and which ones should you focus on? Most financial services businesses rely on platforms like Unbiased to increase lead generation, but this shouldn’t be your only lead generation strategy.

What are organic leads?

Organic leads are potential clients that search for a product or service on a search engine – i.e., Google – and then decide to click on your website over competitors, possibly because your website ranked higher on the search engine results page (SERP). Another example of an organic lead would be providing a fantastic service to one of your clients, and that client telling their friend about your services who then makes an enquiry.

What are paid leads?

Paid leads are prospective clients that are considering your services because you paid for your services to be promoted to them. The most obvious example is using a Google Ads campaign where the business pays Google every time their website is promoted and clicked on by a potential lead.

One of the biggest sources of paid-for leads within the financial services industry is from a platform called Unbiased.

What is Unbiased, and is it worth it?

Unbiased is a platform where anybody can search for finance professionals, such as mortgage brokers, accountants, advisers and more. Users leave their contact details for a call back from a relevant professional. And finance businesses pay Unbiased to receive the contact information of these leads.

Because we work with so many financial services businesses, we hear a lot about the Unbiased platform from real advisers who use it. Overall, we hear mixed reviews. Some clients believe they get good value for money, while others tell us they have to filter out a lot of duds and spam that don’t really want the service they think they need, which can waste a lot of business time and resources.

Consider investing in SEO instead

Paying for leads through Unbiased and marketing services such as Google Ads can be smart, especially when first starting out. But exclusively focusing on paid leads is a costly strategy in the long term. It is much better to complement your paid-for leads with services that can help create sustainable long-term organic lead generation, such as search engine optimisation (SEO).

By redirecting some funds towards SEO services, you can help your website appear higher up relevant SERPs and attract more leads organically. Over time, this may offer a better ROI than just paying for leads each month. Speak with WEBPRO Adviser to learn more about how we can help you increase your organic leads.