What to Do If Your Website Isn’t Generating Leads
Do you feel like your website is serving as a really expensive brochure? If so, you’re not alone. At Helium, some of our clients come to us with the same issue and the number one complaint is a lack of leads. Lead generation is a crucial part of remaining in business. Even though it may not seem like it right now, your website is important for generating leads. In this article, we’ll show you how to remedy the problem.
The thing is, you need two things covered to generate leads from any website. They are as follows:
- Enough qualified consumer traffic.
- A website that’s also optimized for conversion.
Also, there’s a difference between leads and prospects.
A prospect is someone who’s likely to be interested in your product or service. A lead is someone that has shown interest in your offerings. That means a prospect becomes a lead when they reach out to inquire about your offerings, sign up for a free trial, etc.
You can use the following tips to increase lead generation on your website.
1. Analyze Your Traffic
If you don’t presently have some kind of analytics software running on your server, we recommend getting one ASAP. You can use Google Analytics, Piwik, or something else as long as it provides good traffic data.
The following is what we look at when analyzing traffic data.
Average Time on Site or Avg. Session Duration
This is the average amount of time visitors spend on your website and a great place to start.
You certainly have a problem if your average session duration is too low (e.g. less than 30 seconds). Ideally, your avg. session duration should be more than one minute. That’s because it means the majority of visitors are paying attention to your message.
Bounce Rate
You can also look at the bounce rate, which is present on the screenshot above.
The bounce rate is the percentage of people that left your website after viewing just one page. The lower the bounce rate, the better because it can indicate a good user experience. Though not all the time. People can leave a site for many reasons. For example, a visitor that quickly finds what they want will leave.
Nevertheless, the bounce rate still provides a small hint as to how good a website is. A great site typically motivates users to visit more web pages such as the “about us” or “contact us” page.
Traffic Quality
You can check website engagement and geographic data to confirm quality traffic.
Engagement is pretty straight forward. Just look at the average time on site, which we discussed earlier and your pageviews per user. For example, your traffic quality is good if 278 unique visitors (sessions) generated 619 pageviews.
For Geography, look at where your visitors are originating from and their default language. For instance, a local hair salon in Ottawa, ON shouldn’t be receiving lots of visitors from Calgary, AB. Similarly, a German website shouldn’t be receiving plenty of English-speaking consumers.
2. Make Contact Details Easy to Access
Your contact information should be easily accessible and visible on all pages. Too often, websites hide their contact details on the “contact us” page, which requires the visitor to click-through to the page. This is not good.
You can significantly increase lead generation by making sure your contact information is above-the-fold, visible, and accessible from any page. Also, visible contact details are good trust indicators for consumers.
3. Keep Messaging Clear
One of the things that hinder lead generation is unclear or sub-par messaging. There are two things you can do in this regard.
First, start treating your website like the asset it is. Take the necessary time or invest accordingly to produce a well-written copy.
Second, keep your copy short and to the point. Use the principle of less is more. Consumers want to understand your offerings and why they should care. However, most of them don’t want to spend too much of their time reading. Keep web page copies short, concise, and persuasive.
Any information that doesn’t lend to increasing your leads or serve an important purpose should be removed. Also, your copy instantly becomes easier to read whenever you break the paragraphs into 1 – 5 sentences each.
4. Implement Live Chat
No matter the industry, live chat is a great way of generating leads. Most of us prefer to chat with someone right away whenever we’re interested in an offer. Some prospects won’t want to call or email you but will be happy to chat. Especially, if they’re in a situation that makes it inconvenient to call.
5. Put Up an Explainer Video
Today people want information fast. This is partly why videos are so popular. You can add explainer videos to your service and/or product pages to increase lead generation. Explainer videos are even more important if your product/service is on the complex side.
6. Get and Include Social Proof
Testimonials, reviews, work samples, etc. are all forms of social proof. People trust companies that can show others trust them too.
Social proof is like word-of-mouth and practically never fails to help businesses stand out, especially in very competitive markets. So add good social proof to your website pages.
Other types of social proof include but are not limited to the following.
- Expert approval
- Celebrity endorsements
- Professional credentials
- Press coverage
- Awards
- Friend or crowd recommendations
7. Analyze User Behavior in Real-time
You can use powerful tools like Crazy Egg or Hotjar to monitor traffic in real-time. These tools can help you improve what’s working on your site and eliminate what’s not. You’ll get the big picture of how to improve the user experience and performance of your site, which leads to higher conversions.
Here’s an example (made up scenario). XYZ company’s opt-in form has always been placed at the bottom of every web page. After installing real-time visitor tracking software, the organization discovered that most users never checked the page footer. So the company decided to place its opt-in form above-the-fold. The result was more subscribers.
Tracking software like the aforementioned can also generate heatmaps. This is a graphical representation of user behaviour on your website. It can show you what people care about and where their eyes move to the most.
So Much Potential Untapped
Many companies sadly never tap into the potential of their website to generate leads. Thankfully, your website doesn’t have to be a glorified business card. Practically any business can use the recommendations laid out here to generate more leads. And the best part is you don’t need a new website. All that’s needed is to optimize what you currently have.
Do you need further assistance? We can help you start generating more leads from your site! Reach out now.
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