Lead Finder helps digital agencies and marketers quickly find relevant business leads based on their location and the web technologies those leads use.
It allows you to identify and analyze the most viable prospects, increasing your chances of landing them as paid clients.
Lead Finder is available as part of the Agency Growth Kit (AGK).
How Can It Help My Agency?
The ability to generate relevant outbound leads sustainably is a huge challenge for many digital agencies.
Lead Finder addresses this problem in several ways. Chiefly, it enables you to:
- Build a healthy and substantive pipeline of potential leads based on accurate data
- Target only the most viable prospects, with no time wasted on dead ends
- Research and prepare tailored, compelling pitches, increasing your chances of converting
- Gather information more efficiently, allowing you to focus on prospecting
It’s an ideal solution for digital marketing agencies, freelancers, or any marketing team looking to generate new business and attract new clients.
How Does It Work?
Lead Finder acts as a starting point for your entire client management workflow and can be used with other AGK tools.
Here’s how it works:
1. Start Your Search
Go to Agency Solutions in the main Semrush tool menu and select “Lead Finder.” This will open the tool.
Lead Finder identifies leads based on their industry, location, and web technologies businesses use on their websites. So start by tailoring your search around one (or more) of these parameters to receive the most suitable suggestions. For instance, if you’re trying to identify potential clients in the online sportswear niche, you might search for technologies such as “Shopify” or/and “Klaviyo” since these platforms are commonly used for product selling and client outreach. Note that you can enter up to two technologies at a time, so we suggest keeping separate lists for each technology you are interested in.
If you are not sure which category is most relevant to your search, hover over suggestions marked by the arrow icon to see additional options:
The next step is to select industries. This is optional; however, it will allow you to search for more specific leads. There is no limit on the number of industries you can choose for each list.
The number of leads returned will depend on the number of selected industries; with fewer chosen industries, the smaller and more specific the lead list will be. Please note that when you select industries the tool will show leads following the “or” logic. For example, if you choose 3 industries as in the screenshot above, the leads will be collected in Retail or Software Development, or IT Services.
You can see if your list is more specific and shorter or less specific and larger with the progress bar below the creation form.
You can then create lists to categorize your results in whichever way is most suitable for you, such as by location, niche, or size. A small icon next to “Find leads” allows you to adjust the number of leads you would like to collect with your current prompt:
2. Qualify Your Leads
The next step is to sort through your results and identify the most promising leads—a process known as qualifying.
To do this, consult the lead card for each result. There, you’ll discover a wealth of helpful information about the prospect’s website, such as its:
- Domain name
- Social media profiles
- Contact information
- Connected analytics and tracking, marketing, and web dev tools (including languages, frameworks, and libraries)
- Security details and protocols
Crucially, you’ll also find critical metrics from Domain Overview (including the site’s authority score, traffic, and backlinks) and Site Audit (including the site’s health score).
To check a Site Audit health score for a lead, click the “Run Site Audit” button. A new project for a lead's domain is automatically created, and 100 pages on a lead's website is checked. This uses the default configurations: Crawl source: Website, Crawler settings: SiteAuditBot-desktop.
Another metric that may highlight potential customers is the Lead Qualification Score or Lead Score that is displayed in each lead card, both in the detailed and list views.
Lead Score is a number from 10 to 100 that signifies the quantity and strength of indicators related to a business's potential to purchase and different elements of its online presence, assisting you in immediately concentrating on high-value prospects.
To overview generated leads faster, Lead Finder presents a list of opportunities based on the data Semrush found on leads’ websites. Click on “View details” for each discovered opportunity:
Note: Use “Copy opportunities” to copy and use the text in a pitch later.
All this information will help you evaluate how likely the lead is to need your agency’s services, allowing you to narrow your list and focus on the most worthwhile prospects.
At the top of each lead list, you can filter through all leads, new leads, viewed leads, and leads you have already added to CRM. This simplifies the navigation and search process.
Additionally, there’s a “Metrics” filter that allows to flexibly adjust the ranges of metrics that are of interest to the agency.
The “Opportunities” filter helps you target leads with opportunities you are currently interested in specifically.
Also, you can add leads within one lead list to Favourites – you can save and delete favorite leads from the list page and lead page.
After saving a lead, you can view only saved leads in the lead list (Saved report) or export them separately from the rest.
To help automate communication with potential leads through email systems, AGK users also have the option to export lead lists to a CSV file.
Two export versions are available: "basic" and "full." The "basic" export includes the website address, e-mail, company name, location, authority score, backlinks count, organic traffic, visits count, and Site Audit metrics.
The "full" export includes all fields from the "Basic" version and a few additional fields: company industry, company description, number of employees, the year the company was founded, employees, phones, and LinkedIn.
3. Import Your Qualified Leads
Once you have qualified which leads you want to pursue, you can export them into the Semrush CRM tool and begin the outreach process.
For each lead, a new card will be automatically generated within the CRM, enabling you to compile and analyze custom reports, documents, and other key information in one place. This allows you to create a tailored pitch based on the prospect’s needs and website performance.
CRM also lets you track your outreach efforts and easily share any updates with your team members in real-time.
Pricing and Limits
All Semrush users can use the Lead Finder tool. However, the number of leads you can generate each month depends on your subscription plan:
- AGK Start users can check leads (and generate lead lists) up to 1000 leads per month
- AGK Scale users get up to 3000 leads per month
- AGK Advanced users can get up to 10000 leads per month
- Non-AGK users with a paid subscription (Pro, Guru, or Business) can check up to 10 leads per month
- Users with a free subscription can check one lead per month
Please note that you can generate a Lead List with up to 300 leads at once:
For more information on Semrush subscription plans, visit the pricing page.
What Is the Agency Growth Kit?
As mentioned, Lead Finder is part of the Agency Growth Kit, a dedicated set of tools created specifically for agencies. You can find other lead generation solutions in the AGK, including:
- The Agency Partners Platform, a valuable inbound lead gen platform that showcases your agency’s expertise and experience
- Bid Finder, a bid management solution that helps your agency find active contract opportunities on which to bid
The AGK also contains several other highly useful tools, such as:
- CRM, an all-in-one client management workflow solution designed with digital agency needs in mind
- Client Portal, a secure and accessible location where your clients can access their tasks and reports as well as approve tasks
- My Reports, an advanced reporting tool that allows you to create automated, branded, and white-label reports
Learn more about the AGK—and how it can help drive your agency’s growth—here.
Frequently Asked Questions
With proactive outreach to prospective clients, you can keep filling your sales pipeline in a consistent and predictable manner. Outbound sales work best when a target persona is clearly defined and your message is carefully crafted around their business needs and interests. Together with SEO, thought leadership, and referrals, outbound sales can be an integral part of the agency lead generation strategy.
We've partnered with Wappalyzer to generate lead lists based on technology, industry, and location. Data on various aspects of a business’s online presence comes from Semrush.
The tech data is pulled from Wappalyzer upon generating a lead list and is updated every 1-3 months. When a user initiates a lead search, we pull the latest Semrush data available at that time. We don’t charge users for these queries (i.e., their Domain, Traffic, and Backlink Analytics limits remain intact).
Usually it takes from a couple of minutes up to one hour to generate a lead list, depending on the search criteria. Once a lead list is generated, we notify you via the email associated with your Semrush account.
Semrush Lead Score aggregates the knowledge about the number and the power of signals (referred to as Opportunities in the tool’s interface) we have for a company’s buying potential, as well as various aspects of their online visibility (both positive and negative). Your lead list is automatically sorted by Lead Score, so you can focus on high-potential leads right away.
An Opportunity is an automatically generated insight that helps interpret complex data on a domain’s digital footprint. Semrush processes several data points and highlights the most interesting (business-wise) bits of information, explains their nature, and offers advice on possible next steps.
Use Opportunities alongside raw Semrush data to gain a deep understanding of potential clients’ needs. With this understanding, you’ll be able to start more meaningful conversations and eventually seal more deals.
If you have additional questions about Lead Finder or the Agency Growth Kit, reach out to us directly at agencies@semrush.com.