Websites are meant to work, not just sit there and look pretty. Your website should be generating leads for you. If it’s not, these four reasons might be to blame.
1. Your Website Doesn’t Offer Anything to Prospects.
How can you generate leads if you don’t have anything of value to offer your prospects?
Your website should be full of useful (not salesy) content, resources and offers that visitors are itching to get their hands on. Think e-books, white papers, guides, slide decks, demos, consultations and more.
You want to have a wide variety of content that will appeal to visitors depending on where they are in the sales process. For example, a “Getting Started” guide works for someone who’s still exploring all of their options, while a free demo or consultation is best for someone who’s ready to make a buying decision soon.
2. Your Website Doesn’t Use Conversion Pages (aka Landing Pages).
A conversion page (also called a landing page) is a page on your website that allows you to capture a visitor’s information with a form.
“My website has a form!” you say. “Just look at my ‘Contact Us’ page!”
OK, partial credit, but you can do better. If your only method of generating leads from your website is your “Contact Us” page, you’re missing out. The Contact page is just too generic. It can be used for job inquiries, price quotes, website malfunctions, vendor solicitations — it’s a catch-all.
Remember those offers we talked about in #1? To get to each of those offers, your visitors should have to go through a conversion page where they enter their contact information. After they do that, they are automatically directed to the offer they wanted.
3. Your Website Doesn’t Use Calls to Action.
How are your website visitors going to know how to get to your wonderful offers? Enter calls to action.
A call to action is text, a button or a banner on your website that asks visitors to do something. Download a guide, request a quote, view a demo, whatever. It calls them to action. Get it? Thought so.
Too often website visitors scan a page quickly and then fall off your site completely. Placing calls to action strategically throughout your website helps coax your visitors into taking the next desired step, generating a lead for your business.
4. Your Website Doesn’t Have a Blog.
You can’t generate leads with your website if you don’t have any traffic coming to your website.
A blog is the single best way to get traffic — and potential leads — to your website, and every company needs one.
Blogs are excellent at getting ranked in search engines for long-tail keywords, which means you’re more likely to get found by searchers who are actually looking for what you have to offer.
Frequently updated blogs also give you fresh content to promote through other channels, like email and social media, which can drive even more traffic to your site. Let’s see your boring ol’ website that never changes do THAT!
Finally, your blog can act as a hub for your offers and calls to action, creating a lead-generating machine. It goes something like this…
All Together Now
You write a blog post about a prominent topic in your industry. It ends with a call to action, telling readers to download your free guide [the offer] if they would like to learn more. To get that guide, they simply fill out a form on your conversion page. You get a lead, they get valuable information. Everyone’s happy.
