You've got your new website up and running and it looks great, but it doesn't seem to be doing much for you. Getting a website and how to get clients using your business website are two different questions.
In this guide, we'll look how you can improve the way you gather business leads through your website.
Optimise your landing pages and your calls to action
You probably have a pretty clear idea of what you want people to do when they arrive on your website, but does your website actually help and encourage them to take that action?
As a general rule, your website should have one landing page per each service you provide.
This page should feature details about the service, the benefit(s) that people will receive by opting for your service, and a clear indication of what they should do next (this is a call to action).
Here's an example from the GoDaddy Website Builder page. Below the fold (and not shown in this screenshot) are product details, while there are prominent calls to action which tell people who are interested in Website Builder exactly what the next step they should take is.
Take the time to ensure your landing pages are understandable, and your calls to action really do encourage people to take action.
You can learn more about creating good landing pages in this guide, and creating better calls to action in this article.
Optimise your lead generation process
A good call to action is one thing, but what happens when someone takes that action? If you're generating leads, the chances are there'll be a contact form for them to fill out, and a bad contact form could be costing you leads (and therefore sales).
Here are a few common contact form mistakes that are easy to fix:
- Your form has too many fields
Do you really need to know a lead's full address at this stage? Or their age? Or whatever. Your contact form should be as short as possible as the more fields someone has to fill in, the less likely they are to finish filling in your form. Often, the only information you need is someone's name, the nature of their query and an email address and/or a phone number. Obviously more information can help you qualify leads, but you need to balance that need with the need to keep your form simple.
- Making your form hard to find
Do visitors to your site have to click several links to find your form? Or is there only one contact form hidden away on your about us page? Make sure your contact form is prominent on every page where you're selling a service. It should be tightly linked that page's call to action. Don't make people hunt for a contact form, because they won't.
- Making your contact forms all the same
Your services aren't all the same, so why would you use the same contact form to sell them? By adapting your contact form for each service, you increase the chances of getting that lead.
You should also look at other ways you can optimise your lead generation process.
For example, if you're running an appointment-based business GoDaddy's Website builder has a feature that allows people to book appointments through your website, making the whole process quick and easy.
You should also make sure that people don't have to jump through hoops in order to give you their details under any circumstances. So (where possible) don't make people click through multiple pages in order to get to your lead generation pages - the page people land on should be the page where they can take action.
Offer something for nothing
You can encourage people to get in touch by offering them a freebie. Depending on what kind of service you offer, this might be a free trial. Or it could be an ebook that covers your area of expertise.
People love free stuff and this also gives you a chance to show that your services are a good match for their needs.
Just make sure that any leads you gather comply with GDPR.
Measure every and test everything
How can you tell which is the best call for action? Or if removing a field from your contact form has caused an increase in leads?
The answer is, you can't unless you're measuring and testing everything.
At the very least, you should have Google Analytics set up with conversion goals. That will help you understand where on your site your leads are coming from.
But if you're really serious about understanding how to improve lead generation on your website, you need to start A/B testing. You can learn how to get started with testing in this guide.
You can check out this article if you haven't got to grips with Google Analytics yet.
Boost your traffic (in the right way)
You can't get leads without website visitors, so as well as improving your landing pages you also need to ensure you're attracting traffic.
A great long-term way to do this is by working on your search engine optimisation. You can follow this guide to improve your search rankings.
But SEO takes time, and so to get an immediate increase in visitors you should strongly consider paid advertising.
The two main platforms you're likely to look at are Google's pay-per-click ads, and Facebook's ad platform. (Though depending on your business, you may wish to consider LinkedIn and Twitter as well.)
Paid advertising can be highly effective, but it can also be costly if you don't know what you're doing.
You need to make sure you're targeting the right audience and/or keywords, so you only attract visitors who are potentially interested in your services. You also need to ensure you're directing people to the right landing page, as discussed above.
It is possible to do all this yourself, but you may want to hire an experienced agency to work on it for you if you're worried about wasting money.
Summing up
Having a great website that doesn't create any leads for your business can be dispiriting. But if you start taking the right steps you'll be able to attract people who are interested in what you do and from there you can increase the number of leads your site generates.
