Is Your Website Generating Leads? If Not, We Have the Fixes

It’s the top issue facing businesses today and the most common challenge we hear during our sales process with prospects: “Our website looks good, but it doesn’t generate any leads.” People are asking us about this every day.

Just so we are clear, your website shouldn’t be an online brochure. Whatever business you’re in and whoever your prospects are, your website should attract new visitors, encourage return visitors and turn those visitors into leads.

If that’s not happening, you’re not alone. But more importantly, here’s what you should be doing about it.

Don’t kid yourself. You should know how many people are coming to your site, how many people are turning into leads and how many sales opportunities the site is generating every month. These numbers should be top of mind for you or, at the very least, your marketing lead.

Ask me and I can tell you about these numbers for Square 2’s site. I look at them multiple times a day, and I’m constantly working with the team to improve these numbers. It’s a daily ritual, and it should be for you too.

Here’s how you start fixing this.

Fix 1 – Deploy Early, Middle and Late-Stage Buyer Journey Offers; Move Content out of Your Resources Section

Think about how people visit your website. Better yet, think about how you visit websites. You land on the homepage, or maybe a landing page, and if the site looks good, speaks to you and has something interesting, you might stick around and click on a couple of other pages.

That’s how people experience your website. You have 10 seconds to get their attention and keep them on the page.

One of the best ways to keep them clicking and engaged is to use educational content early and often. Use it on your homepage, because most visitors won’t make it to other pages.

If the bounce rate for your homepage is 80%, only 20% of your visitors are clicking on a second page.

Give them something of value to keep them on the page and on the site. These educational offers include videos, tip guides, whitepapers, e-books, cartoons, research, checklists, webinars and tools. The better aligned the offers, the more leads you’ll generate and the more pages people will view on your site.

The real secret here is NOT just dumping offers and CTAs on the homepage but rather aligning these offers with the stages of the buyer journey your prospects are in.  

The earlier the stage, the less information people are willing to share. If you have a video offer for people in the Awareness Stage, consider ungating it or just gating it with an email address.

If you have an offer like a webinar for the middle of the buyer journey, such as the Consideration Stage, you can ask for their name, company name, job title, company website and a few more pieces of information.

This ensures you’ll be delivering a positive experience for all your visitors regardless of where they are in their buyer journey.

Fix 2 – Map Your Website Pages to Your Prospects’ Buyer Journey Stages

Since we agree there are people on the site at all stages of the buyer journey, you’re going to need more than offers – you’re also going to need pages. Then you should be clear about how you direct people from your homepage or a landing page to the right page for the stage of their buyer journey.

This starts to create a guided experience that provides visitors with a much more positive perception of your company. This is critical to lead generation, time on site, pages viewed and even your Google rankings.

Here’s an example from the Square 2 site:

• Early Buyer Journey Page – Awareness Stage 
• Middle Buyer Journey Page – Consideration Stage 
• Late Buyer Journey Page – Decision Stage

Keep in mind that a lot of people stop by, look around and intend to come back. Make sure you have a way of getting their email address (at a minimum) so you can remind them to return as part of your email and lead nurture strategy.

Fix 3 – Optimize Your Top-Viewed Landing Pages

A landing page is a single web page specifically designed with a focused and clear purpose. Its primary goal is to guide visitors to take a specific action. Unlike a website page, nothing should distract the visitor from taking that designed action.

Typically, websites have a lot of landing pages, simply because you’ll create a new landing page for all your new offers.

What you should be doing is continually reviewing all your landing pages and optimizing those that are getting the most visitors.

Consider the impact this approach could have on your site. You have 25 landing pages and the top five pages produce 80% of the visitors (using the 80/20 rule), and those top five pages are converting at 20% on average. If those pages were generating 300 visitors a month and 60 new leads, by improving the average conversion rate across all five pages to 30%, you’d have generated an extra 30 leads a month, or an improvement of 50% in leads generated, simply by optimizing the top five landing pages.

This is a quick fix that can usually be done in a couple of days and dramatically impacts leads generated from your website.

Fix 4 – Expand Your Use of Social Proof and Testimonials on the Site

It might not come as a surprise to you, but your prospects don’t believe you. They know your marketing is just that and anything you say is going to be positively oriented to your business.

However, they do believe your customers. They know that when they read a testimonial or see the logos of your customers that those are usually real people who work with you and had positive experiences.

You need these on your website, but you need to use them correctly to get full value and to deliver the right message.

First, they should be fully attributed and, if possible, they should be video testimonials. This means you record someone talking authentically about what it’s like to work with your company and the comments are attributed to them in their current role at their current company.

Use these videos on the homepage, on the website’s secondary pages and on landing pages. Use them as much as you can. People prefer to watch rather than read.

However, keep in mind that there is a flow to how people process information. Using social proof or testimonials too early on the page could ruin the experience.

Typically, people need to know they are in the right place first. Do you do what I think I need done? Do you understand the pain I’m in? Can you solve it? Those are usually the first questions they ask upon arriving at your website.

If in 10 seconds you’ve made it clear you understand them and can solve their pain, then they might be interested in how you do it and how you do it differently. They’re hoping you have something to say they haven’t heard before. They want you to be remarkable.

Now that you have their attention, remember they don’t really believe you, so this is where the testimonials and social proof come in. Now they are ready to see who else like them you’ve already helped. 

Roll out your page in this order and you’ll have more people visit the page, more people stay on the page longer and more people click through to learn more via other pages on the site.

Fix 5 – Upgrade Your CTAs to Graphics From Buttons or Links

Calls-to-action (CTAs) are those buttons you use to help people take the desired action on the page. Download this, schedule that, request this – you get the idea.

A lot of people use buttons or links for CTAs, but stats show that graphics often work best.

After analyzing and comparing more than 330,000 CTAs over six months, HubSpot discovered that personalized CTAs convert 202% better than basic CTAs. Of course, you’ll need HubSpot to run personalized CTAs, but conversion is the game here, and this data shows exactly how to drive improvement.

Kissmetrics reports that you can receive 380% more clicks if you embed your CTA into a video and make the video your CTA button.

The big takeaway here is that you should be running a ton of experiments that move your CTAs from links to personalized graphic buttons. By using video on your pages, those buttons can have an even higher click-through rate. 

All these upgrades are going to drive you to a higher level of lead gen and more sales opportunities for your reps.

Fix 6 – Check Your Site Speed

With the introduction of mobile browsing, the speed at which your site loads is critical to your site ranking on Google and to you providing a positive experience for your visitors. A slow-loading site is the kiss of death for your digital lead generation efforts.

In July 2018, Google made page speed a ranking factor for mobile search results. They announced speed as a factor for desktops in April 2010. But this time Google stated, “Users want to find answers to their questions quickly, and data shows that people really care about how quickly their pages load.”

Google continues to take page speed into account when serving search results, though the company confirms that the original signal was replaced by the page experience signal.

Currently, Google is looking for pages to load in under two seconds. If you want to see how your pages are doing, visit the Google Page Speed Insights page.

To improve your site page speed, try these adjustments.

1. Choose a performance-optimized hosting solution. The hosting provider you use plays a major role in your website’s management and performance. That includes its page speeds. Cheap hosting often translates to poor performance.
2. Compress and optimize your images. Images help enhance the appearance of your web pages and increase the quality of your content. However, large images can also delay loading times. One of the easiest ways to increase page loading speeds is to compress and optimize your images.
3. Reduce your redirects. Too many redirects on your website can really hurt loading times. Every time a page redirects somewhere else, it prolongs the HTTP request and response process.
4. Cache your web pages. Caching is one of the most effective ways to speed up your web pages. Caching stores copies of your site’s files, minimizing the work needed for the server to generate and serve a web page to a visitor’s browser. Caching your web pages can help with lowering Time to First Byte (TTFB) by requiring the server to use fewer resources to load a page.
5. Minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML. Optimizing the way your files load can help improve page loading speed. Similarly, so can minifying your CSS, JavaScript and HTML code. This means removing unnecessary spaces, characters, comments and other elements to reduce the size of the files. Decreasing your files’ sizes also makes it easier to combine them. The result is cleaner code and leaner web pages that load faster.

The faster your pages load, the higher you rank and the more visitors you’ll get. The faster your pages load, the less likely you are to lose visitors and the more likely you are to convert them from a visitor into a new lead.

Fix 7 – Upgrade the Personalization on Your Site

Giving people a more personalized experience on your website is a very popular talking point these days. In case you missed it.

• 89% of digital businesses are investing in personalization. (Forrester)
• 80% of companies report an uplift since implementing personalization. (Econsultancy)
• 76% of consumers get frustrated when companies don’t use personalization. (McKinsey)
• Personalization can increase the efficiency of marketing spend by 10% to 30%. (McKinsey)
• 94% of companies experienced a rise in conversion rates after personalizing their websites. (Econsultancy)

There are several ways to deliver a more personalized website experience. The first is to have pages and content based on your buyer personas. If the CFO of a biotechnology company is your persona, then you need a page with relevant content for her.

Another way to personalize the website experience is to focus on the specific issues or pains your prospects are having that might drive them to visit a website like yours. If many of your prospects are dealing with delivery speed, create a page on your site that focuses messaging, page copy and educational content around your ability to deliver lightning fast.

Other more technical examples include using a visitor’s first name when they are visiting the site and prepping CTAs and pages with their names This is delivered by progressively profiling your visitors and storing cookies on their browsers, so when they return, you know who they are and proactively deliver pages and content based on their previous form fills or page views.

This does take some advanced CMS features, but they’re more common today than ever. The advantages of delivering an experience like this are more leads, more sales opportunities and more new customer revenue. After all, who would you buy from – someone who delivers a personalized experience like this, or someone with a generic online brochure website?

Fix 8 – Improve the Quality of Your Content and Offers

Finally, when it comes down to it, if you’re not getting leads from your website, it’s likely that the content on the site isn’t interesting enough for your visitors to exchange their email addresses for your material.

If you think this is the case, try to create more disruptive content that is thought-provoking and challenging. Safe is the enemy of content that converts. Take a stand, make a point, be controversial and say something that no one else is saying.

Offer tools, templates or frameworks. This is content people can use. Don’t be afraid to share everything. Don’t hold back. If you think you’re giving away your secret sauce, you’re probably on the right track. Don’t worry, no one is going to steal your ideas or use them against you. There is a reason you do what you do, and no one else is going to be able to replicate it from a template they downloaded on your website.

Push the envelope here and you’ll see a nice improvement in leads generated.

Install these eight fixes over the next few weeks and you’ll see your website lead generation moving up and to the right. In addition, you might also see increased website traffic, which will fuel your lead generation and conversion efforts. Before you know it, you’ll be hitting your goals and the company will be growing.