How to Capture Leads and Increase Conversions on Your Websites

February 05 2019

By Chadwick Meyer

You invested in a beautiful and powerful website, which you were really excited about. But after a few months you realized it's not generating many leads.

This is the unicorn that everyone is chasing. In a saturated market, how do you get people to notice your business? Once they notice you (visit your website), how do you convince them that you are better than everyone else? And then, once they trust you, how do you motivate them to contact you right now. That is the challenge. And it isn't worth paying for ads/marketing to drive traffic to your website until you have a high enough conversion rate to justify the Cost of Acquisition (CA) for each conversion versus the Lifetime Value of a Customer (LVC).

If you are convinced you need help, but this article already looks too long, you probably need to hire a professional. Contact us to see how we can help.

WEBSITE CHECKUP

The first thing you need to do is a basic website checkup.

1. Is your website Professional? Is it beautiful and well organized so that when your prospects visit your site (from a business card, word of mouth, or organic search engine traffic) they see you are a trustworthy business. A high quality website builds confidence and improves conversions in both online and offline sales pipelines.

2. Is your website Search Engine Optimized ("SEO Friendly")? Do you have a Content Strategy to create fresh and useful keyword rich content that is customized for your target audience's interests throughout the buyer's journey? Is your website following SEO best practices with friendly URLs, descriptive Titles, Headers, Internal Linking, search engine Sitemap, etc. Are you promoting your content on Social Media? Are other high ranking sites linking back to your website?

3. Is your website Human Optimized? When visitors arrive, are they confronted with a "Value Proposition" that is relevant to their motivations and a compelling "Call to Action" that gives a simple way to act right away (e.g. phone number to call or form to fill out). Have you hidden all links from your menu/navitation that distract people away from your primary conversion goals? Does every page on your website funnel visitors to the conversion goals with some compelling call to action to drive them back to your conversion funnel?(e.g. blogs or other resources that are good for attracting organic search traffic need to push people to your conversion pages.)

Take time to think about these things. If you want help, we can help you improve your site's design to make it more professional and compelling. You can spend time writing strategic keyword rich articles or we can help you find an SEO company to improve organic search rankings. And we can help you make a few design and structural changes to your website to make it more optimized for human conversions.

BEST PRACTICES FOR Optimizing Websites for Humans

There are a lot of best practices and theories for optimizing your website, but there is no silver bullet. Figuring out how to implement all these recommendations in a way that works for you in the real world, is the challenge. And that's where a good professional consultant is very valuable. But here are some generic ideas to stimulate your thinking:

Figure Out Your Value Proposition. This is a basic business consulting question. Why are you different than everyone else? Why should customers engage your business instead of a thousand different competitors? Where is your niche? Why do your customers choose you?
Figure Out Your Call to Action. Why should people contact you right NOW? What motivates people? What can you give them for free to encourage calling or filling out the form in the next minute?
Optimize Your Landing Pages. Make sure your home page (and any other landing pages) includes a proven Value Proposition and Call to Action. Test several value propositions and calls to action, see which works best.
Funnel Visitors to Conversion Goals. Eliminate all opportunities for visitors to get distracted. Every page on your website needs to funnel visitors to your conversion goals. EVERY. SINGLE. PAGE. Look at your analytics to see what the average time on site is, maybe it's 30-120 seconds. Ask yourself how you want people to spend those precious seconds? Do you really want them reading your blog and then get distracted by something? Or would you rather they filled out a contact form right away? Look at your analytics to discover what are the most popular links within your menu (what visitors are looking for). Make sure each of these pages is optimized as a landing page, and then simplifiy your menu to only send people to these pages. Look at your most popular pages from external searches, make sure these pages are landing pages optimized for conversions. Everything else should be hidden. Bog or resources are good for attracting organic traffic and sending them to the conversion page, but you don't want visitors wandering away from a conversion page to some other random page.
Make Your Phone Number BIG. Put your phone number in the header and make sure it has a clear call to action, e.g. "Get a Quote: 415-606-2625" (or whatever you want to say). If you want to track conversions, this should be a number that you ONLY use on your website.
Create Targeted Landing Pages with Contact Forms. If you are driving traffic to your website from Ads, or Social Media, you probably need to make very targeted landing pages for each particular audience, if not each specific ad (the more targeted the landing page content is to the promise of the ad, the better the conversions).

Best Practices for Increasing Traffic through SEO

More visitors means more opportunity to convert leads or customers. This is highly competitive, but there are some basic best practices to consider. You can get more visitors through organic search results, promotion of content, or paid ads.

Write Useful, Keyword Rich Content. Google wants to provide their customers the most relevant content from trustworthy websites. So your best way to get ranked highly, is to write great content that your target audience loves. Look up "Content Strategy" to learn more about this multi-layered world, or ask us for recommendations for a trustworthy SEO company to help you.
Promote Your Content. Once you've written great content, you need to promote it on all your social media channels (in a way that encourages sharing), and try to get your content syndicated on other websites (e.g. as an article on Forbes, Quora, or other websites).
Increase Page Rank. Google prioritizes results from sites that are considered more popuplar and trustworthy based on "votes" (trustworthy sites linking back to your site). Slowly cultivate high quality, real back links based on actual good content.
Paid Ads. This is a costly shortcut, but sometimes it's worth paying for strategic ad campaigns that target your audience in different parts of their buyer's journey and drive them to landing pages on your site.

MEASURING CONVERSIONS

Google Analytics is a hot mess. It's exciting to see how many visitors came to your website, but very quickly you get overwhelmed with the interface. And once you figure out what all the data means, you don't know how to act on this information. What's more, most people's website aren't setup to track what is a successful "conversion" (most businesses haven't even defined what their conversion goals are). This is really where you need professional help, but there are a few high level things to consider.

One of the important metrics is Unique Visitors (by source) so you know what marketing efforts are working best (invest more in what works, learn, modify, and pivot from what doesn't work). Knowing Unique Visitors allows you to calculate conversion rate (assuming you have defined and are tracking conversions). For example, maybe you get 500 unique visitors per month, and your website generates 2 contacts per month from you contact form and 8 phone calls (from your unique website phone number you can track). That would be a 2% conversion rate. That's not great, but depending on your industry it might be good enough. And with a few tiny changes you might even change that from 2% to 4%, which would be a 100% growth and improvement of ROI.

But you have to know your industry, your business, your cost of acquisition, the lifetime value of your customer and also be realistic about what a website is capable of doing. If you are selling homes or some other high value service, it's not like downloading a free app, conversions require a high level of commitment. But one conversion could net you tens of thousands of dollars in profit, so if you spend $100/mo for a website, and you make $10,000/mo for one conversion, that's great ROI. The key is to figure out all these metrics so you know what your numbers mean and you can accurately determine what's happening and how to increase your rates.

CONVERSIONS CHECKUP

How do you currently track conversions? Are you making different landing pages for different advertisements, so they are optimized for the audience and fulfill the intention of the visitor? How do you know if people are calling your phone number after visiting your website or watching your video? Are you using a separate phone for different landing pages so you can track which landing page is converting? Do you use Google Analytics effectively to track your audience demographics, which pages are most popular, which pages people are abandoning, which pages lead to conversions, which keywords people find you for, etc? Do you then use this data strategically to modify your site, influence what you blog about, tweak your advertising?

In short, you need good data in order to understand what's happening on your website, and then you need someone really smart to help you turn that data into actionable steps that deliver ROI. Following some best practices can get you started, but to really optimize your website, you absolutely need professional help. Talk to us if you need recommendations of partners that specialize in these services.

GETTING PROFESSIONAL HELP

Big companies make it look easy, but they are spending big money on optimizing their landing pages with A/B testing and analytics about how specific types of traffic convert from different inbound/outbound marketing sources (e.g. targeted ads, social media, organic SEO rich articles, etc). And then they are optimizing very specifically for each type of traffic. If you are able to pay someone to do this granular analysis and testing, you will likely see significant improvements. But if your competitors are paying people to do the same thing, you'll find that you are competing for the same keywords and it's a constant game of learning and pivoting.

Needless to say, this type of analysis and optimization is not cheap. The ROI is better for larger companies with high volume sales, e.g. the analysis work is pretty much the same for a small website, but a 1% conversion improvement on one million visitors pays a lot more than 1% of 1000 visitors. Most Digital Marketing companies are going to charge a minimum of $1000-$5000+/mo for a basic mix of SEO, Ad, and Social Media digital marketing services, plus costs of ad spend and any design customizations required. They should be able deliver results for most clients, but there are no guarantees that there will be enough ROI, and so that's a big risk that most small businesses aren't prepared to take. So if you aren't ready for that investment, do the basic best practices for now and start saving for a 3 month trial in the future.

A good Digital Marketing Strategy will coordinates all your marketing efforts to accomplish your goals based on what is proven to work for you in the past and what is expected to be a better use of your marketing dollars in the future, e.g. if you are spending money on Yellow Pages ads, you probably should channel that money to online ads where you can measure ROI more definitively and probably get better conversions. Your Digital Marketing Strategy should optimize your site for conversions through modifications, testing, analysis, and pivoting. Then once you get your conversion rate higher, you can ramp up your SEO and advertising to drive more traffic (which will improve your ROI for every dollar spent). If you increase conversions from 1% to 2%, you just doubled your marketing budget, e.g. you can now capture a lead for every $50 versus $100 spent. Think about how doubling your marketing budget would impact your business.

Next Steps

Consider Some basic Design and Structure Changes. Think about the things mentioned above, prioritize what you want to change, and then talk to us so we can help you implement those changes.
Find a Digital Marketing Specialist. What was mentioned above is just a high level overview. To make it personal, you need to hire a digital marketing specialist to help strategize, recommend actions, and test. We work with a few Digital Marketing partners with reasonable rates that will fit any budget (depending on your goals). Let us know if you would like an introductory call to see if they are a good fit.

Tags : seo, digital marketing, conversions, optimization, ad, content strategy

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