Basic Tips to Optimize Your Website for Lead Generation

In our evolving consumer-driven world, a company’s digital presence is key to gain a wider reach and draw consumers to their product. Marketing teams have had to adapt and become digitally focused using videos, images, and campaigns directing users to landing pages on their website to drive leads. Therefore, having an optimized website to help generate these leads is crucial for any business.

Working with various financial industries, we know the importance of lead generation.  Working with our clients we always recommend these 5 basic tips as a starting point to help optimize your site and increase online lead generation:

Speed

Website speed plays a direct role in the user experience. If your site is slow, users will not stick around resulting in a high bounce rate and the loss of potential leads. To avoid this pitfall, there are some ways to improve speed:

• Optimize the size of the images on your site.
• Use website caching.
• Reduce the number of Plugins used. 
• Minimize the number of JavaScript and CSS files. 

If you’ve made the small changes noted above and are still experiencing slowness, it may be time to consider options for moving your website to a new hosting provider. One example of this is when we migrated our larger financial services clients from a co-located hosting provider to Amazon AWS. This made their site and content available on Amazon’s global infrastructure and allowed us to use services like CloudFront to improve their site speed by more than 30%.

Content Optimization 

Once you verify where your leads are coming from, you'll want to make sure the pages that they're arriving on are tailored to their interests and needs. Content should be optimized to keep your visitors engaging with your website. Utilizing the following tools will help achieve this goal.

• Analyze website data
• Keyword research
• On-page and off-page SEO

“Less is more” is sometimes the best recipe for success. Make sure the content you are producing actually provides value to your targeted users.

Calls to Action (CTA’s)

Having a strategic CTA on your homepage and throughout your site will keep user attention. Offering free trials, subscription features and a variety of these types of CTAs enables you to promote different services and products and attract buyers at all stages of the buying cycle. Remember, when using a CTA, you want to keep it clear and concise. Visitors often lose interest when driven to lengthy and complex content.  

Coupling your key CTAs with real-world testimonials or positive statistics about your ability to deliver, provides even more chance of a conversion. This is especially key in service-oriented offerings such as mortgage loans, identity protection services, and the like.

Forms 

Once you have established the pages on your site that generate the most traffic, adding forms to solicit contact information to those pages can successfully drive qualified leads. Conducting campaigns to drive users to a specific form on the site is also a successful tool and tells you more about the potential customer’s interest and intent. When creating a form to generate leads, these are a few items to be kept in mind: 

• Visually appealing
• Simple and clear 
• Minimal fields
• Attention-grabbing CTA
• Enticing “Thank You” page that gives the lead options to continue exploring your content.

Live Chat

Live chat sales allow businesses to communicate directly with potential customers in real-time and the use of chat features on websites has escalated in recent years. This feature essentially turns your website into a lead generation tool allowing you to capture more leads and drive sales.  In this generation people like instant gratification, so the faster and more efficient your customer service is, the more likely you will obtain repeat customers. If you connect live chat with your CRM and other tools, you can immediately improve your sales cycle and follow-up processes.

NOTE: Using bots to solicit initial information and routing users can be really effective. But, be careful not to leave them hanging at the end of the process if you do not have live agents to answer questions or quickly get in contact with the lead. 

In Summary... 

Every site is different and there are other ways that can greatly help with optimization, but these strategies are easy to implement, don’t take much time, and are a good starting point. If you are still not satisfied or seeing any improvements, it may be time to give us a call to see how we can help!