Optimizing Your Site for Lead Generation: Here’s What It Takes

Published on April 1, 2021

Is your website primed for lead generation and conversions? Let’s dive in and talk about what this important question really means - and how you can take concrete steps towards generating more leads right now.

Conversions: A Major Part of the Digital Marketing Puzzle

When all parts of your digital marketing strategy are working in harmony, something amazing happens. Your website is well-designed and responsive. It hosts stunning, informative content, which you amplify over email and on social media to extend your brand reach. Your on-page and off-page SEO are on-point, generating consistent, quality traffic to your site. Everything operating like clockwork - that’s a beautiful thing. 

But even in cases like this, it’s still possible that you’re not seeing the conversion rate that you might be hoping for. And at this point, worry sets in. 

After all, you may be thinking, what use is all of this traffic and brand engagement if people aren’t actually signing up or buying anything? 

That’s a common worry - and the cause might not be as cut-and-dry as you (or your digital marketing team) would like it to be. 

The reality is that a lot of inbound and outbound marketing strategies are about drawing eyes to your brand - and that’s where they end. For some marketing companies, their reasoning is that their job is done. They got eyes to your site - now it’s up to you to make the sale. 

We take a different stance. Instead of adopting this walled-off approach, where your marketing efforts and the look, feel, and flow of your website are separate, we feel it’s important to think about content holistically - not just as a marketing mechanism, but also as a way to ease visitors down your conversion funnel, where they make the transition from being a curious lead to a hot prospect. 

With that said, it’s important to recognize that getting users to your site is one thing; generating conversion is something else. But a lot of the same tactics that you use in your SEO-focused writing, social media campaigns, and other digital marketing efforts can also be put to work on your website, helping get new leads from call-to-action, to landing page, to that all-important email or form-fill. 

Optimizing Your Website for Conversions

So, what can you do for your website to start generating more conversions and building your list of leads? Here are seven strategies to try: 

1.) Test, Test, Test

As you get started down the path to generating more conversions, always remember the power of testing and monitoring performance. 

A/B testing is a great way to compare two different versions of your site, a form, or even just a CTA, allowing you to quantify which version works better and make adjustments from there. 

Similarly, it’s crucial to always measure and evaluate your website’s performance, using tools like Google Analytics. The more data you have about how users are getting to your site, and what they’re doing once they get there, the better you can tweak, optimize, and test your site moving forward. 

For instance, armed with this information, you may be able to… 

2.) Target the Pages That Get the Most Attention

As you start generating results from A/B tests, and take steps to routinely measure and gauge your website’s performance, you can take actionable steps to optimize the pages that should generate the most results. 

In other words? Armed with traffic data from Google Analytics, you should be able to determine, to a high degree of certainty, your most-visited pages. Those visitors may be coming from search, social media, or email. In any case, once you are able to determine your high performers, you can focus on optimizing those pages with a fresh call-to-action, an embedded form, or another lead gen tool. 

In other other words? Take steps to make your most valuable and visited pages even more valuable. You know that people will be on those pages - so make it as easy as possible for them to convert while they are! 

At the same time, these highly-trafficked pages can tell you other important things about your site. For instance, looking at analytics results might show a high bounce rate, indicating that visitors come to your page and then immediately leave. Or it could provide you with a launching pad to monitor how users navigate your site - if they click from this piece of content to a new page, or if this content leads to a direct form fill or call. 

With these insights, you are now better equipped to: 

3.) Optimize Your Conversion Path

Think like your website’s users, and then act, making it as easy for them to convert as possible at every step of the way. Studies indicate that there are moments when buyers are primed to act - but then fail to do so, because taking action wasn’t intuitive enough, or else because they had to keep reading a post or watching a video before they could find the solution they were looking for. 

Consider when your users are going to want to make the transition from passive to active, and make it as easy as possible to convert when they reach this stage of their journey. With that in mind, rather than adding CTAs or actionable messages on certain pages, you might wish to make them accessible across your entire site. A form and contact number on every page may be just what it takes to propel a lead to act when the time is right. 

It’s all about ease of use here. This takes many forms. For instance, you always want to ensure that your content feeds users to relevant, applicable, easy-to-use landing pages. That is, your amazing blog post and infographic about rare books shouldn’t feed to information about the tax benefits of building a library. When are they going to want to make the transition?

4.) Use Testimonials and Social Proof

Your next customers will be inspired by your past customers - so why not leverage their positive words to help turn curious visitors into new leads? 

Including user-generated content and social proof can be an incredibly effective way to pique a visitor’s interest, and establish that your brand has experience, credibility, and is worthy of their trust. 

Again, this strategy can take many forms. A scrolling menu bar of testimonials, a banner with links to your brand’s review pages on social or an industry site, multimedia elements (such as videos or photo galleries)... You have many options about how to use testimonials and reviews for your benefit. 

5.) Include a Real Offer

We’ve noted before that offering incentives on social media is a great way to drive up key metrics, including engagements, shares, and follows. Having a prize available as part of a social media contest, or offering exclusive deals or discounts to followers, or, say, people who view your entire Instagram Story - these are great ways to activate a fan base that may otherwise be responding to your social media messaging passively. 

Well, the same principles hold true for your website! Think about all of the ways that you could incentivize visitors to fill out a form, sign up for your mailing list, or even make a purchase. The options are only as limited as your imagination! For instance, you could offer a free eBook or digital download to visitors who sign up for your email list. Or, you could offer a discount on service to people who reach out by filling out the contact form on your website. We’ve seen these (and similar strategies) really drive up form fills and conversions, especially in a limited span of time. 

6.) Use Powerful, Direct Language

Speak directly to your user, and use the sort of language that can help prime them to convert! There are all sorts of ways to implement this method - some direct, some less so. 

For instance, if you have a limited time offer, or are only selling a fixed amount of a certain product, a countdown clock or a counter of how many other people have taken the offer can be great ways to incentivize users to act quickly. 

Or, if you’re relying on video content, think about the ways you can optimize your videos to speak to the user. The same goes for written text - powerful, direct, actionable words like “get,” “learn,” or “become” are compelling, and may spur a user to act more effectively than weaker or more wishy-washy statements. 

7.) Follow-Up and Nurture the Leads You Have

Finally, remember that - though many of us wish it were otherwise - the internet isn’t magic. Just getting a visitor to check out your site once isn’t necessarily going to be effective at generating a conversion. 

In a lot of ways, it pays to remember the old-school way of selling, and translate those tactics into the digital space. Specifically? It’s vital that you follow up and nurture the leads you have!

For instance, you could create a workflow to automatically text or email users who fill out your form, to keep your business top of mind. Or you could look into personalized CTAs, which generate language more likely to get a certain prospect to convert. And, finally, think of all of the ways that you could use social media and email to retarget customers who’ve shown an interest in your site. This way, you continue to serve them relevant content and chances to convert, making it far more likely that they’ll become a lead in the future. 

Crafting the Website That Works For You

Have any more questions about using your site for lead generation? Want to talk strategy on all things digital marketing, including content creation, web design and development, social media marketing, SEO, and more? Drop us a line today to get the conversation started!