Your business needs more leads, so should you invest in SEO, launch LinkedIn Ads, or get a completely redesigned website?
The answer depends on what’s holding back your marketing today. A company that’s getting 200 website visitors a month is up against a much different problem than the company that’s bringing in thousands of monthly visitors but seeing little to no inquiries. Similarly, an older website isn’t necessarily a bad website if qualified visitors are finding it and filling out contact forms.
Rather than looking at SEO, LinkedIn Ads, and web design as competing investments, we like to think about the specific problem each one solves. In many cases, the best place to start is figuring out whether you need more traffic, better conversions, or both.
If you barely have traffic, start with LinkedIn Ads
Pretend you run a B2B company in Raleigh, a professional services firm in Cary, or a manufacturing business near Apex, and your website’s getting relatively low traffic while leads are barely trickling in each month.
It might be tempting to just think you need a new website, but the problem is that you might not have enough information to know whether the website is hurting your results. If hardly anyone visits, there aren’t enough opportunities to see how prospective customers interact with your site once they arrive.
This is one situation where LinkedIn Ads might make sense, at least as an initial investment. For B2B companies, LinkedIn Ads can be an effective way to reach audiences based on professional characteristics such as job titles, industries, and companies. Instead of waiting for your organic traffic to grow, you can put your message in front of people who match your target customers and encourage them to visit your website.
If you haven’t advertised on the platform before, our quick-start guide to LinkedIn Ads covers some of the basics.
The goal isn’t to increase website traffic for the sake of watching Sessions go up in GA4. You need enough qualified traffic to see what happens when the right people visit your website. If those visitors consistently become leads, you’ve learned something important: your website might already be doing a good job once people arrive. The deeper problem might be getting enough prospective customers there in the first place.
If visitors are converting, SEO might be the next move
Let’s say your LinkedIn campaign starts generating traffic. People click through to your website, explore your services, and submit forms or contact your business.
At that point, investing more heavily in SEO could make sense. Search engine optimization helps diversify your traffic instead of relying heavily on paid campaigns. More importantly, it helps your business appear when prospective customers actively search for products, services, or information related to what you offer.
For a Raleigh commercial contractor, that might mean reaching a facilities manager searching for a particular service. A Cary accounting or consulting firm might want to appear when a local business owner searches for help with a specific problem. An Apex-area manufacturer might want engineers or purchasing teams to discover its products while researching components or suppliers.
There’s also an important difference between traffic from search engines and traffic from social media: intent. When someone types a query into Google, they’re actively looking for something. They might be researching a problem, comparing providers, looking for a product, or trying to answer a question. Whatever the specific motivation, their search behavior tells you that some degree of interest already exists.
LinkedIn works differently. Someone might match your ideal customer profile perfectly, but they weren’t necessarily searching for your service when your ad appeared in their feed. Your ad has to interrupt what they were doing, earn their attention, and give them a reason to become interested. That’s why LinkedIn advertising often fits into demand generation. You’re helping create or develop interest. SEO often helps you capture demand that already exists.
This difference also means organic search visitors might convert at a higher rate in some situations. A person searching for a Raleigh-area provider to solve an immediate problem might be further along in the buying process than someone encountering the same company for the first time through a LinkedIn ad.
The two channels serve different purposes. LinkedIn can help you create awareness among a specific audience, while SEO helps you get discovered when members of that audience start actively looking for answers. Over time, using both channels can give your business a healthier mix of demand generation and demand capture.
What if your LinkedIn traffic isn’t converting?
Now imagine the opposite happens: You launch LinkedIn Ads with solid targeting, people click your ads, and website traffic increases. But hardly anyone contacts you.
Before spending more money on traffic, it makes sense to investigate what happens after people arrive. When you look at your calls-to-action, is it clear what you want visitors to do next? When you look at your forms, are you asking someone to fill out 12 fields when four fields would give your sales team enough information to start a conversation?
Then look at your content. Does the website clearly explain what you do and who you help? Does it answer the questions prospective customers tend to ask during the buying process? Does it address the problems that led them to your business in the first place?
Trust matters, too. Testimonials, reviews, case studies, certifications, project examples, and other proof points might help a visitor feel more comfortable taking the next step.
Finally, look at the relationship between your ads and your landing pages. If an ad makes one promise and sends visitors to a generic homepage that barely mentions the subject, poor conversion rates shouldn’t come as a surprise. Our article on LinkedIn single image ad best practices covers several elements worth reviewing before concluding that your website needs to be replaced.
The important point is that low conversions don’t automatically mean you need a new website. Your offer, targeting, message, forms, content, or calls-to-action might need attention first.
Those improvements tend to require less time and money than a complete redesign. If they work, you might find that your current website has more life left in it than you thought.
When a website redesign might make sense
Eventually, incremental improvements might not be enough. Maybe your website no longer represents the company you’ve become. Your services have changed, your target customers have shifted, or your site has accumulated years of disconnected pages and content. Maybe visitors struggle to understand what you do or how to take the next step.
At that point, a website redesign might be the better investment. It should involve more than making an old website look newer. Start with what the business needs the website to accomplish. Maybe the goal is generating more consultation requests. A manufacturer might need to make technical product information easier for engineers to find. A Raleigh contractor might want more qualified commercial project inquiries. A Cary professional services firm might need its website to do a better job establishing expertise before a prospective customer schedules a conversation.
Then consider what your target audience needs from the site. What questions do prospective customers have? What problems are they trying to solve? What concerns might stop them from contacting you? What information would make them more comfortable taking the next step?
Your design preferences matter as well. Your website should feel consistent with your company and the way you want customers to perceive your brand. But those visual decisions should support the broader goals of the website rather than becoming the entire purpose of the project.
Conversion Fox Marketing’s website redesign for a Cary-area components supplier offers one example. The project involved more than updating the site’s appearance. It also focused on usability, clearer information, intuitive navigation, mobile layouts, lead generation, and foundational SEO.
A new website is also a good time to revisit your SEO
Another benefit of a website redesign is that it gives you a chance to rethink your SEO strategy.
Businesses rarely stay exactly the same between website redesigns. Perhaps you’ve added services, stopped offering others, entered new markets, or changed the type of customer you’re trying to attract. A company that once focused almost exclusively on Apex might now serve customers throughout Cary, Raleigh, Holly Springs, Durham, and the rest of the Triangle.
Your website and SEO strategy should reflect those changes. That means looking beyond inserting keywords into new pages. A redesign is a chance to reconsider the site’s overall structure and determine whether your most important products and services have appropriate pages. You might update page titles and meta descriptions, improve headings, strengthen internal linking, optimize images, and rethink how visitors and search engines move between related pages.
Local businesses should pay particular attention to how their websites communicate both what they do and where they do it. A contractor serving Raleigh, a professional services company working with Cary businesses, or a B2B supplier based in Apex shouldn’t force prospective customers to piece together that information.
Follow the bottleneck
So, should you invest in SEO, LinkedIn Ads, or a new website first? Look at where your marketing process is breaking down.
If your website barely gets any qualified traffic, you might start with LinkedIn Ads. A campaign gives you a way to put your business in front of a targeted audience and gather information about what those visitors do after they reach your site.
If those visitors convert into leads at a healthy rate, your website might already be doing its job. The next opportunity might be attracting more people, which makes SEO an appealing way to diversify your traffic and reach prospective customers who are actively searching.
If you’re getting qualified traffic but those visitors aren’t becoming leads, don’t immediately assume you need to rebuild everything. Start by improving your calls-to-action, forms, content, messaging, and other conversion elements.
If you’ve exhausted those opportunities and the website still isn’t supporting your business goals, then a redesign starts to make more sense. That’s also an ideal time to revisit SEO fundamentals and make sure the new website reflects what your business does today, who you want to reach, and how prospective customers search for your services.
There’s no universal order that says every company should do SEO first, run ads first, or replace its website first. The better question is: What’s stopping your business from generating more qualified leads today? Once you identify that bottleneck, it’s a lot easier to decide where your next marketing investment should go.