Your website needs to be an experience! Provide a memorable interaction with the visitor with compelling messages that prompts them to take action such as calling your office or emailing you directly.

Your website should encourage the user to stay around, and allow them to develop a sense of trust that compels them to reach out to you. Unfortunately, business owners lack the tools or knowledge to create this experience. Below are the ways we ensure our clients the best bang for their buck.

Ten Ways To Turn Your Website Into A Killer Lead Machine

1. Website design

To ensure that your website creates the best conversion environment, it much include everything from your colour scheme, fonts, graphics and images into a cohesive theme that appeals to the customer and makes ‘sense’. The general layout and design structure should be simple and encourage contact within less than 2 clicks.

Don’t be boring, stale or corporate. Put some of your personality into it, to stand out from the crowd.  Ideally, you should be using images of yourself or your actual staff, instead of stock photos.

2. Navigation and Layout

Don’t fall into the trap of getting to fancy, flashy and complex. It will only confuse the visitors and make it more difficult to find the information they are after. Don’t overwhelm them! A confused and overwhelmed perspective buyer, does not buy!

Have one primary focus and goal for each page. Keep your links and menu options to a minimum.

3. Content focus

All the visitor is looking for is a solution for their needs. They don’t care about your history, what you had for breakfast or how the machine works. They want to know: can you fix their problem? What’s in it for them!

When I’m writing copy I like to imagine that the customer is starting right there in front of me at the store. I wouldn’t say to them “Hi, I’m Alicia and have been in marketing for over 12 years.” I would be more likely to say “Hi! If you’re searching for a guaranteed solution to get more clients and increase your ROI you’ve come to the right place!

4. Too Much Text

It’s simple…. Too much text is boring! It’s not attractive and I can guarantee you 99.9% of visitors to a website won’t even read it. But, if you give them some beautiful images that promote what you do, that’s a much better way to convey information. And they do say “1 picture paints 1000 words!”

And what’s even better than a photo… video! And these days it’s simple to whip your phone out and record a little introduction or product demonstration. So get to it!

5. Content Quality and Frequency

Most know that a blog is an important part of your website to please the Google Gods. But you still need to focus on the quality of your content, rather than just publishing content for the sake of it. The frequency of publishing content to your website is also key. Make sure you are consistent. At least four pieces of fresh and original content each month is a minimum. If you can’t commit to that, let us help you out! A commitment to good content on your website is something that you will really be rewarded for by increasing your search engine rankings and organic traffic flow.

6. Call to action

Despite this being the most important element of any website, it’s something that most websites fail at miserably. You’ve worked so hard to get that visitor to your site, so without capturing their information, getting them to join your Facebook or calling you directly, all that work would have been for nothing.

Does your homepage have a sense of urgency? Do you encourage people to act now?  Most visitors will never come back to your website again. So it’s imperative that you not only give people a reason to contact you, but to make sure they contact you now!

This can be done very simply by offering a ‘Freebie’. Which means a free report, article, video, PDF file that your customers perceive as valuable and relevant content. You may have heard this call a ‘Lead Magnet’. They usually provide their name and email address to be able to instantly download or receive their ‘Freebie’. By providing free and valuable content, you establish yourself as an authority in your field. It also builds trust and a connection with your brand. Placing an expiration date or limiting the number of offers available is also a great way to increase opt-ins.

7. Lead capture mechanism

As I mentioned above by implementing a lead magnet (i.e. e-book, offer etc.) to capture a visitors contact details, you will have the ability to then follow up with a potential customer and nurture them until they become a client. So it’s important to ensure that you have a strategy to actually capture their information and nurture this relationship once they take up your initial offer.

A simple contact form is a must! Try keep details to only name and email. If the visitors has to work too hard for the download, most won’t even bother. Next, having a series of follow up emails that get sent to your new subscriber is vital. We like to offer ‘value, value, value, discount offer, value, high ticket purchase’ via an automated system.

8. SEO

While you’re building your traffic through paid advertising, it’s important to make sure you are working on making your way to the first page of organic Google search pages. Most small businesses fail to follow SEO best practices, by making poor use of keywords on their website.

Here are a few ways to ensure the SEO on your website is meeting some of the targets:

• Page Titles. Make the title of your website, is the core service of your business. We call these your ‘money keywords’. What problems do your customers have? They should be addressed in your Page Titles. If you have a mechanical business don’t title your page ‘Homepage Bob’s Mechanical’. It should be more like “Mobile Car Repairs Brisbane – Affordable Servicing”.
• Ensure each page of your website contains the physical address and local phone number of your business AND make sure the citation is identical on each page. It’s good to check your business listing on other websites match as well. If you have moved location, make sure you update the address anywhere and everywhere your business is listed. This will help search engines and local business directories find and validate your site much more easily.
• XML site map. Be sure you page has a XML site map. This allows Google to easily index your website and determine how often content is updated. By knowing your website is updated regularly it demonstrates to the search engines your site is highly valuable and worthy of a good organic listing.
• Back links from good quality, reputable sources. Find relevant sites in the online community as well as major and local online directories to list your site. This very time consuming but the hard work pays off for the long term.

9. Social Media & Testimonials

Using social media and testimonials to instill a level of trust and authority is vital that the customer can feel confident in your business before calling. Statistics show that 77% of people will buy based on recommendations and reviews, so it’s critical you collect as many testimonials (especially video!) as you can. It’s a good idea to also display security icons and associations your business is affiliated with.

 

10. Website metrics

You MUST measure your online success. If you don’t know how many visitors you get to your site each month or how many visitors you are converting into customers, then you need to start tracking this asap because you can’t improve what you can’t measure! We use and recommend Google analytics for traffic analysis. You can use a basic spreadsheet that will help you keep track of your marketing ROI for other marketing endeavours such as redemption of special advertised promotions.

 

By following and implement these tips, incredible growth for your business is just around the corner. And don’t be afraid to contact us if you need assistance with of these tasks. Good Luck!