The whole point of having a website as a business is because you want to generate leads. But if you’re not familiar with that term – lead generation – then allow us to explain.
What Are Website Leads?
Leads can mean slightly different things depending on what your business is, but it’s all about turning visitors to your website into a lead you can follow up for work. Someone who browses and leaves without taking an action might have been exposed to your brand, meaning they could return at some point, but we’ll save that for another day. Today we’re talking about cold, hard numbers.
Calls, purchases, forms, even downloads – whatever you define as a lead for your website, you want to make sure you’re getting the maximum amount so that you can grow your business and make sure you have a steady income.
There are so many things that can influence this, so we thought it would be a good idea to create a big old rundown of ways in which you can wrestle more leads from your website. Let’s get in the ring and learn how to generate leads.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation means pleasing the search engine overlords so that your website will appear for people searching for your services or products. So it should go without saying that by improving your SEO, you can bring in more traffic and more leads.
SEO is a gateway for getting customers to your website, but it can also help guide them towards services and actions, as well as prompting you to make things better in general. Here are four things you can focus on in your SEO to help with website leads:
- On-page and off-page – Your on-page SEO is something you have a lot more control over; making sure your house is in order in terms of targeting and structure to give you the best chance of ranking for the terms you want leads from. Off-page SEO, meanwhile, is all about generating links from other sources to not only boost your rankings, but to also provide another route to you – this can be social media, directories or even relationships you have with other businesses.
- Local SEO – If you’re offering a service within a certain region, make sure your site is optimised for the local area using those keywords. Not only does this save you from pulling in traffic from locations you don’t actually serve, but it should also help increase even more interest from those who are local, since they’ll be more likely to see your site and realise you’re close to them.
- SEO tools – Make use of the SEO tools available like Screaming Frog (to see how well your site is structured) and SEMrush (where you can check who is linking back to you) as these will help you to hone your overall SEO and make you more accessible to customers who want to convert.
- Analytics – Google Analytics allows you to see a whole host of data about your website. Most importantly, you can see which pages are converting the most and which ones aren’t. You can then implement different strategies to increase leads from pages with lots of traffic, giving you a new source you didn’t have before.
These practices are ongoing because the world of SEO never sleeps. Well, the people doing the work sleep, but it’s always moving forward as an industry and you don’t want to get left behind. Keep looking ahead to stay on top of updates and to maximise the advantages they give you for generating leads from your website.
Website Design
Good SEO and website design go hand in hand, working together to give you a powerful tool in business. While making your website look beautiful is, of course, very important, it has to work for the thing you need as well: generating income.
There are plenty of things you can focus on when it comes to the design of your website for lead generation, but here are just a few things to hone to get the results you want:
- Navigation – The navigation of your website is something you absolutely cannot overlook. It has to be easy for a user to find their way around and then find your details. Messy, complicated and cluttered websites turn people off, so they’re likely to leave without converting. If your goal is for a user to call you in relation to your service, make sure they can find a page on the topic and then find your phone number. It sounds simple but you’d be surprised to learn how many people get this wrong.
- Forms – One way to increase your leads is to create specific forms for specific services. If you have one catch-all form, that’s great for general enquiries, but if you have a variety of services, each with a page bringing in traffic, you can create a tailored form on that page that encourages people to contact you and saves them additional clicks.
- CTAs – A CTA – or call to action – should always be clear for the user. They need to know what they’re getting into if they’re clicking a button and what they’re going to get from it. “Contact us” is fine in the right places but you can be far more engaging based on your services and your audience with “Get a free quote” or “Start your journey” depending on your services.
- User experience – User experience is really a set of overall design principles, and can contain everything in this list. However, you can get more granular by putting yourself in the user’s shoes and thinking about how they’ll interact with your site. Pages should have clear purposes and the journey should make sense as a whole. Anything that frustrates a user is going to break the experience and can lose you a lead if they click away.
- Responsive – Another thing that is easy to overlook is the range of devices people will be using to view your website. If your site looks great on a desktop, but your audience generally searches for your services on a mobile (think emergency car breakdown services) then you need to make sure your site also works seamlessly on a smartphone screen. Responsive design means your site will resize and reorder according to the device and increases the likelihood that someone goes from browsing to contacting.
Test Your Site – Again and Again!
Building a website is no good if you don’t know how well it performs. That’s why testing different elements helps you to maximise the number of leads you get.
A/B testing is particularly good at helping you tweak small areas for a big impact. For example, you could test two different home page designs for your plumbing website – one with your phone number more prominent at the top and one with an enquiry form higher up – to see which one results in more people eventually getting in touch. This is something you can do throughout the site, but just be careful to only test one thing at a time so that you can accurately attribute increases in performance to specific changes.
There’s also no harm in applying the things you learn across the rest of your site either if you’ve proven that it works.
Use Social Proof
Social proof is a powerful technique you can use to help nudge people towards conversion. The idea is that, if you can prove other people have had a successful experience, other people are far more likely to follow. Whether that comes in the shape of a reviews banner highlighting hundreds of positive scores from an aggregator or a case studies page where you can showcase the problems you’ve solved for others with your work, it all gives the current user of your site a lot more confidence.
You can also get more specific in your content, with phrases such as “9/10 customers say they would use our services again”, but just make sure these quotes and figures are accurate to avoid falling foul of advertising regulations.
Try Using A Live Chat Function
We’re all short on time these days and want immediate results. Plus, for more and more people, picking up the phone to ask a question is also not something they do naturally. That’s why live chat functionality for your website can make a high difference.
You can convert people by answering their queries quickly online, signing them up for a free site visit or generating a rough quote, all without them being put off by the prospect of having to call – especially when most people work during the core hours of the day but have a device handy to type with!
Become A Fountain of Knowledge
We’ve already touched on the written content for your website and how, in multiple ways, it can contribute to generating leads, but your overall, content marketing is also a great way to foster trust and bring in more traffic.
A blog or news section on your website can showcase your industry knowledge and any niche tips you have for people. This keeps fresh content going on your site without overwhelming people in the main menu, and it also encourages anyone researching you as they’ll see you’re an active source of knowledge on the very topic they’re looking for help with. For example, if you design and fit kitchens for homeowners, posts about the latest design trends for small kitchens can demonstrate why you’re the perfect company to contact.
Check out more about lead-generation web design in our recent article on the topic (see what we did there?). Or, if you’re ready to start generating website leads for your business but need a little boost, contact our team at Leblek today. We offer the whole range – SEO, web design, content writing and a lot more – to get you the best results.
