Getting More Leads From Your Website

The Great Resignation still haunts employers and makes recruitment difficult. Under those conditions, it’s no wonder businesses focus on employee-focused activities like improving office staff room design and polishing up benefits packages. Yet, this inward focus can detract from crucial activities like lead generation. If your staffing woes have distracted you from lead generation, keep reading for some key tips on how to get more leads from your website.

User Experience

Only sometimes, businesses build their websites or get others to build them without giving a lot of thought to the end user. To this day, you can still find homegrown websites with black backgrounds and white text, even though high-contrast text like that is often difficult to read. These kinds of choices are true failures in considering the user experience.

Feeling a little hazy about what user experience actually means in practice? In essence, it’s all about how the website visitor will interact with your website. Good user experience design aims at creating a seamless experience for the visitor. You want a website that lets the visitor find exactly what they’re looking for at the moment they’re looking for it.

Navigation‍

One of the most important elements of user experience is the navigation options on the site. This goes beyond just having a navigation bar or drop-down menu on the site. The options on the navigation bar or the menu must feel intuitive to the visitor. This is a place where businesses often try to get creative, and it routinely backfires. For example, if your average user wants to know more about the business, they’ll look for an “About Us” page.

Yes, they will probably draw the connection if you use a page name like “Company Profile.” The problem is that it makes the visitor stop and think. Every time the visitor stops and thinks, it’s also a moment when they may choose to leave. Seamless navigation eliminates the number of those moments your visitors will experience. The longer they stay, the better the odds that they will sign up for your email list, contact your company or place an order‍

Contact Information‍

Nowadays, your average website visitor is much more cynical than they were five or ten years ago. A lack of contact information is one of the first things people look for as a sign that a website is a scam. Your website should include a physical address and email address. Ideally, you’ll also include a valid phone number. This information should also be easy to find. You should minimally have a page dedicated to it and consider including your contact details on every page.‍

Mobile-Friendly‍

Visitors who can’t access your site from their preferred device will never become leads. In those terms, the landscape has shifted. Yes, you still need a website that displays well on desktop devices, but that’s not enough anymore. Close to 60 percent of all internet traffic now runs through mobile devices.

You need a website built so people can easily access it on their phones or tablets. That means you need a responsive website. If you’re building from the ground up, that means responsive design. If you’re building your site around a content management system like WordPress, that means a responsive theme.‍

Content‍

A lot of technical design goes into building a site that generates leads, but that’s not the only consideration. Good visual and technical design can get people onto your page, but it won’t keep them there. Keeping people on your site and turning them into leads almost always starts and stops with your content.

Generating quality content requires a content strategy that incorporates some keyword research and some thought about the kind of content you want. If you’re working on a strict budget, you’ll probably want to focus on written content like blog posts and articles. Even there, you should consider creating pillar pages and content clusters.

If your budget is flexible, you should strongly consider video content. Videos generate traffic, and you don’t need to get particularly creative about them. You can create videos from webinars, do explainer videos, or even highlight some fun features about your business.‍

Social Proof‍

Social proof is one of those things that businesses often forego because they seem pointless. Nobody actually buys into those testimonials, right? Many people are skeptical about testimonials because no one will post negative content about their own business on their website. Of course, the testimonials are glowing.

Yet, those same suspect testimonials are also social proof. Even if they’re cherry-picked, they’re proof that other people used your business, and some of them are happy with the results. They can encourage visitors to jump onto the bandwagon, at least enough to fork over an email address. If you can get an email address, you’ve got a lead.‍

Landing Pages‍

Landing pages are a trickier but highly effective method for lead generation. Yet, many businesses eschew them because they don’t feel like a good fit for a business model. After all, landing pages are usually focused on selling a particular product or service. If you run an accounting agency, you’re selling a suite of services.

This mentality overlooks the fact that most people looking for a product or service aren’t looking for a general set of products or services. Their web searches are for specific things. A well-designed landing page is aimed at converting people looking for something specific. An accounting agency can take advantage of that by setting up landing pages for specific services, such as small business accounting or corporate accounting.‍

Calls to Action‍

One of the great failings you see in many marketing and advertising efforts is that, in the end, they never make the ask. The ask is the moment in the marketing content or the advertisement that the business asks you to do something. As tacky as they often are, infomercials excel at making the ask. Every infomercial exhorts the viewer to “Call Now” or “Order Now.”

Your content doesn’t need to be so blatant about it, but you still need to make the ask. That means incorporating calls to action into your content and on your website. Again, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. Something as simple as a button or even a hyperlink that says “Contact” or “call now” can get the job done and bring in leads.‍

Use Forms Appropriately‍

Forms are another area where a lot of businesses get gun-shy. People who spend a significant amount of time online eventually run across a form with 20 or 30 fields requiring in-depth information. That’s a great way to scare off potential customers. The more information you ask for, the more visitors will navigate away from your site or abandon the form.

That being said, forms aren’t evil. You need to balance your desire for information against visitor comfort. If the visitor wants to place an order, you need a lot of information. If the visitor wants access to a white paper or a report, they probably won’t give up much more than a name and an email address. If you get that email address, you can draw them in over time with a carefully designed email campaign.‍

Get More Leads from Your Website‍

You can get more leads from your website. In fact, some businesses build their revenue streams around it. The catch is that you need the right things in place on your website. Much of it stems from good website design, but you should also pay attention to areas like content, social proof, wise form deployment, landing pages, and calls to action. If your website isn’t performing, consider upgrading your business homepage design to help keep visitors on your site and converting.

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