Your website is your home base for lead generation.
No matter where you find your prospective leads, you'll almost always send them to your website to read some content or sign up for a lead magnet offer.
To convert as many website visitors into leads as possible, you need to optimize your site for lead generation.
This article will walk you through exactly how to do that.
Most businesses define a lead as someone who has expressed their interest by giving the business their contact information.
Most people won't give you their contact information for the fun of it. Unless you have something to offer them in exchange for their email address or phone number, the majority of consumers will pass on giving you their contact info.
This is where a lead magnet can be helpful. Offering something your target market finds useful will make it much easier to get the contact info of interested consumers.
Typical lead magnets include educational content, product discounts, and free demos or trials. These are typically implemented alongside a signup form that asks website visitors for their information.
Unless your business is one of the few still operating on an entirely outbound lead generation model, your website needs a lot of high-quality content.
Without a hefty catalog of useful blog posts, videos, infographics, or other forms of content, you won't be able to leverage popular lead generation channels like organic search results or social media.
Not only will a lack of content make it difficult to bring in qualified traffic from these lucrative sources, but you'll also have to pay more for the leads you do get.
If you create your content and set your website up correctly, the leads you generate from the search results and social media will be virtually free. By neglecting to make content that your target market finds interesting and helpful, you'll have to pay for more costly lead generation methods like PPC or social media ads.
An in-depth walkthrough of content creation is beyond the scope of this article. I can provide a few essential tips, though. I'll also link to some more thorough guides at the end of the section.
If you want a more comprehensive guide to generating leads with content, you can use the following resources:
The abundance of cheap, easily-installed website themes has raised the bar on acceptable web design.
A clunky, pixelated site that looks like it came straight from the '90s won't cut it anymore.
To give a good first impression and keep potential leads from clicking out of your website, you need a fast, professional design.
If your website is on the shoddier, slower side ‒ or you don't have a website at all ‒ upgrading your design should be one of your top priorities.
I recommend using WordPress as your website framework. It's fast, free, and has tens of thousands of themes and plug-ins to optimize your site.
If you already have WordPress or you want to stick with the website solution you're currently using, you can use the following tips to make a site that is fast, pretty, and retains visitors.
No matter whether your site has content or not, you need to optimize it to rank high in the organic search results.
Specifically, you need to optimize your site for Google. As Google holds over 90% of the global search engine market share, their opinion of your website matters far more than that of any other search engine.
Search engine optimization is a lengthy topic that goes beyond the scope of this article. If you want some in-depth help in optimizing your website for SEO, use the following resources:
Some consumers want to talk to you before becoming a lead or making a purchase.
Make it as easy as possible for them to contact you by placing your phone number and email address in prominent locations. I recommend having your number on the top bar of your website, as well as a dedicated contact page containing your email address and an embedded contact form.
If your business has a physical location, you should also place your address in an easy-to-find spot on your site. I also recommend embedding a Google Map with a marker on your address. This will make it easy for visitors to navigate to your business.
If you want to generate as many leads as possible, you need to give your website visitors the option to become a lead on every page of your website.
This means placing a signup form for at least one of your lead magnets on every page of your site. I'm talking about the home page, every post on your blog, your about page ‒ if people are viewing the page, there should be a form there.
The exceptions to this are your legal pages: privacy policy, terms and conditions, etc. Don't place forms on these. No one really reads those pages anyway, so it won't hurt your conversion rate.
People love photos. To humanize your business and improve your overall web design, add relevant photos in prominent locations. Here are a few suggestions on what to place and where:
Most people trust the claims of other consumers more than they trust you. To generate more leads, you can place positive testimonials on your website that show how useful your product is and how helpful your business is.
How you ask people to sign up for your lead magnet will have a significant impact on your lead conversion rates. Split-test with different CTAs to determine which brings in the most leads.
