Do you want to increase sales and conversion rates as much as 15% just by having an easy-to-use website? The odds are that you’re looking for smart ways to generate leads, considering that 63% of companies say that generating leads is their biggest challenge. For small businesses, lead generation can be robust, but having a well-optimized website will help you create conversions and increase sales.

Start with a simple conversion path, and make sure to keep the important information above the fold. To help your conversion rate, make sure to have clear call-to-action, negative space on your page, and have a thorough landing page strategy. Optimized landing pages can increase conversion, so don’t be afraid to add more. Also, remember that Search engine marketing and optimization is a huge part of driving traffic to your site, so make sure it’s optimized.

It’s essential to understand what type of website you need. If you’re a retailer wants to sell products online, for example, your website should be an e-commerce site and make it easy for customers to find and purchase your products. If you’re offering a business-to-business service, having a more content-oriented, static website will help you generate high-quality leads that are more likely to purchase your products or services. Once you’ve decided on your site, make sure to follow these tips to convert your website to a lead generating machine. Orange County Website Design

1. Optimize Your Website

One of the critical components of web design that small business owners miss is website optimization. 51% of all web traffic comes from organic search, making search engine marketing a powerful tool in lead generation. Search engine marketing relies on your ability to rank in popular searches.

Your website’s code should optimize for better search engine indexing, so consider having a professional SEO audit. Having the right meta descriptions, keyword use in your content and link infrastructure will help your website rank higher on searches. You’ll need to consider whether you have a static website or a dynamic website since the coding will be more complicated for a static site. Also, remember that the internet is mobile first, so make sure that your website design is responsive. That way you can be sure that your mobile visitors become viable leads.

Another non-invasive way to generate interest in your business is to create blog content that promotes an ebook or whitepaper, wherein your website visitors can learn more about the same topic they just read about on your blog. This is where lead generation meets search engine optimization (SEO). Organic visitors who come from Google are often more intent on finding solutions to a problem you can solve – making this form of lead generation quite valuable.

2. Have a Simple Conversion Path

A conversion path is the steps a customer has to take to make a conversion. Of course, conversion paths will be different from business to business. An e-tailer will want to make checking out an item as easy as possible, while a construction company will want to provide as much information to their site visitors as possible. If your website has pop-up offers on every page, requires visitors to make an account to check out, or makes accessing important information difficult, you’ll want to redesign your website to simplify the conversion path.

One of the easiest ways to hamper your lead generation is to have a complicated conversion path. If your website makes it easy for your leads to get sidetracked, or has too many steps to purchase the product, you’ll have a tough time increasing sales with your site. Having a simple, elegant web design with a smooth process for conversion will massively increase your success rate with generating sales and leads.

The fewer form fields you require, the higher your conversion rates will be. If you don’t plan to do direct mail marketing, don’t bother asking for full addresses. Don’t ask for a phone number if you don’t have a dedicated sales rep our outsourced call center willing and able to place follow-up calls. Short forms always do better and lead to higher submission rates.

Always preview your forms on a smartphone, as completing complex forms is much more difficult for mobile users. This is especially important today!

3. Keep Things Above the Fold

The golden rule with web design and inbound marketing is to keep your message and other valuable information above the fold, where users won’t have to scroll down. The content above the fold gets 57% of all viewing time, making this the most critical area for generating leads. A visitor will want to see the information they want without having to scroll down. This is where you entice them with relevant information, calls-to-action, and the beginning of the conversion path.

Many businesses neglect this part of their website; instead, they put images, animations, or simple site menus in the top third of their site. This area is precious screen real estate, so minimize the clutter and make sure your call-to-action is front and center. Restaurants should have customer reviews. Legal consultants should have testimonials. This space is your attention-getter, so use it wisely.

4. Make Your Message Clear

Many businesses make the mistake of burying their value proposition deep on their website. Potential leads will bounce if it takes them more than a few seconds to understand what your business does. Your message should be front and center on every landing page with large, simple text explaining your mission statement.

Small businesses should check how frequently their hero statement appears in their site to ensure that visitors will know what your company does. You can also custom craft the message on different landing pages to improve the bounce rate.

5. Avoid Clutter

Many small business owners try to fit as many pieces of information on the page as possible. This is a rookie mistake in web design, leading to a noisy page that pushes visitors away. For effective lead generation, take advantage of negative space. By leaving plenty of room between elements on your site, you can increase the visibility of more important things, like your calls-to-action or vital pieces of information. Consider a redesign to improve your site’s optimization and customer experience.

6. Have a Call to Action on Every Page

One of the essential parts of lead generation is having the call-to-action (CTA) in the right place. This is especially useful for e-commerce websites, where you can continuously show relevant products to customers. Many small business owners overlook simple opportunities to add in calls-to-action instead of leaving it for the checkout screen. But there are plenty of opportunities to show your visitors calls-to-action, giving you more chances to make the conversion and increase your sales.

Call to action - CTA

Having an email newsletter opt-in section is a great way to maintain customer relationships, so always having a subscribe button visible in the corner of your site is a non-intrusive call-to-action. Blog posts or product listings can easily be shared via social media, while a shopping cart should always be visible for convenient checkout. Without overwhelming your visitor, find places to entice them to make that conversion. Consider looking through your current website to see how many opportunities you have for calls-to-action.

Personalize Your Calls-to-Action. Dynamic content lets you cater the experience of visiting your website to each, unique web visitor. People who land on your site will see images, buttons, and product options that are specifically tailored to their interests, the pages they’ve viewed, or items they’ve purchased before. Personalized calls-to-action convert 42% more visitors than basic calls-to-action. Visitors who see website pages that remember them from an earlier date a more inclined to stick around and start a conversation with you. To get dynamic content (or “smart content”) on your site, you’ll need to use a Content Management System.

Pay attention to tracking. Knowing which pages generate the most leads and which ones are underperforming can improve your strategy. Plenty of CRM systems have their own tools for tracking leads and visitor behavior, but Google Analytics can do this for free. All you need to do is set up a “goal” for each lead generation page you’re using. Once you’ll do this, it’ll be a little easier to work on improving your marketing efforts.

7. Create Multiple Landing Pages

The landing page is your point-of-contact with potential customers. Landing page design is an essential part of online marketing, but many small business owners don’t have enough of them. A website with 10-15 landing pages will see a 55% increase in leads over having less tha10 landing pages. By adding more landing pages, you increase the variety of potential leads you can market to, skyrocketing lead generation and leading to an increase in sales.

Having multiple landing pages lets you have more personalized marketing campaigns, enables you to show off more product or service marketing, and lets you test different landing page layouts. However, the landing page is only a single step in the acquisition process, so make sure to have an easy to navigate conversion path once your visitors land on your page. If your site doesn’t have the structure to handle 15 or 20 landing pages, consider a redesign.

Optimize your landing pages. Your landing pages should include a brief summary of the offer your visitors will be getting when they sign up. The page should also have a signup form. The exact information to collect at this point depends on your strategy, and is another item to optimize. Collecting too much information could be a deterrent to potential leads. On the other hand, those that provide you with more information might turn out to be better quality leads. You will need to test and experiment to figure out what information your target customers are comfortable giving.

One more piece that’s worth your attention is the “Thank you” page, the one visitors see when they sign up for your offer. You can use this page to thank visitors and provide a download link to an ebook, template, report or white paper. You can also serve links to relevant pages on your site for additional reading. SEO Orange County California

Conclusion

Websites are a vital part of the lead generation for any businesses. You can start by keeping your conversion path simple and making sure your important content is above the fold. Avoid clutter to emphasize your calls to action (CTA), and make sure to have specific landing pages that clearly state your message. Take advantage of search engine marketing by optimizing your website’s code and content to improve organic traffic. Tell us in the comment section which tips will help your business the most?

Marketing Revive has more than 20 years of experience in dynamic, static, and e-commerce web design for clients from small business to enterprise. We specialize in web design, lead generation, search engine marketing, and search engine optimization.