Hopefully your website is doing more than just looking pretty (it does look good, right?). Ideally business websites are lead generation machines. Your website should be like a beautiful shop window luring potential customers to enter and take a look around. Then your delicious wares entice people to take the next step and either buy from you or let you know they’re interested. Many business websites miss the mark when it comes to lead generation. Here are some ways to improve the lead generation on your website…
1. Contact Info
One of the easiest improvements is to make sure that your contact information is readily available throughout your website — not just on your Contact Us page. If you have a phone number, put it on every page, somewhere at the top where it’s easily seen. You want customers to be able to contact you when they want to, without having to go searching for your information. The more time they spend trying to contact you, the less likely they will be to actually do it. Try to provide as many ways as possible to contact you — have your phone, email, address, and also provide a contact form. If you do have a contact form, drop the captcha — yes, you may get more spam, but that’s a small price to pay for not losing potential customers.
2. Fulfill Need or Solve Problem
So much of the copy that’s on business websites is about the features of a particular product or service. Instead, put yourself in your customer’s shoes, and think about what problem your service solves or what need your product fulfills. Talk in these terms instead of a feature list. This can go a long way to convincing potential customers that you have what they need.
3. Calls to Action
Calls to Action are very important on business websites. If someone gets to your site, reads all your stuff, what do you want them to do next? Make sure that you tell them exactly what the next step is. For example, at the bottom of the product or services page, ask visitors to contact you for a free quote — put the contact form right on that page to make it as easy as possible. Remember that people don’t just look at your homepage, so these calls to action should be throughout your website.
4. Enticing Content
Content is why people come to your site. Either via a search result, or a link from another website or a social network. Providing content that is enticing to your audience can build up your return traffic, as well as increase your reputation as a valuable resource. One of the ways to do this is through blogging, but you could also build the content on your website with things like videos, how-to articles, product specifications, answering frequently asked questions, that sort of thing. The questions your customers ask you are a good source of this content, but you can also look at the keywords that people are using to enter your site to see what topics you might want to expand.
5. Lead Collection
One mistake that many businesses make is to have zero ways of collecting leads on their websites. If someone is interested in what you’re selling, you want to know about it. The easiest way is just to add a contact form or two to your website. But you can also collect leads by offering something of value in return for names and email addresses. Something like a free ebook or document that offers some valuable information that your potential customers would be interested in. You can also use advertising like Google Adwords or social media to drive traffic to this resource to increase the leads your website generates.
6. Landing Pages
Many businesses spend tons of time working on their homepage, but the truth is that with search engines driving much of the traffic to your site, only a percentage of people who come to your site enter on your home page. Many more will enter on pages that fulfill a particular need that they are searching for. This means that these entrance pages, or landing pages, can be a valuable place to spend some time making sure they’re working as hard as they can for you.
7. Measure & Improve
Without some sort of measurement, it’s hard to determine how well you are doing. Should you continue to write about the topics you’ve covered previously? What parts of the website are working really well? Are there pages that people are entering your site that you should convert to lead generating landing pages? All these questions can be answered by measuring. Free tools like Google Analytics are a great start. Measuring will increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your efforts, making your site a lead generation machine!
