Every business owner wants more inbound leads through their website. But many of them don’t know how to make this happen.
Websites are pretty technical and, to be honest, a lot of the agencies that build them focus most of their attention on look and feel and very little on the task at hand: generating new business.
Thankfully, there are plenty of simple things you can do to create a better website experience and drive more conversions. Here are ten good places to start.
1. Set a monthly target and track it in your analytics
If you don’t set a hard-and-fast target, inbound enquiries will be a nice-to-have rather than something your team is expected to deliver. Goals drive behaviour.
Set a target and make sure you’re tracking it in whatever analytics platform you use. Don’t forget to add the target to any dashboards you use to review marketing team performance.
2. Get the right traffic to your website
A great website with no traffic is useless. You need to find ways of getting the right people to your website - and that means people looking for a solution to a problem that you can fix.
Search traffic is a tried-and-tested way to do this. Targeting keywords that align with your value proposition is a great start. You can use keyword research tools to find the top keywords for the service you deliver and create detailed landing pages showing how you can help and proving that you’ve done it for others.
3. Create valuable content
One of the best ways to get people to your website and keep them there is to create valuable, in-depth content (like this!). We’ve been regularly creating content for almost eight years now. The vast majority of our site traffic and activity comes from our content marketing efforts.
There are two ways to approach content on your site. One is to give the content away for free (as we do on our blog). The other is to ask for people’s email addresses in return for long-form, in-depth guides and reports (sometimes called ‘gated content’). Blogs get more reach, ‘gated content’ usually gets more contact data.
You can find loads of great advice, from coming up with content ideas to content distribution, here on our website.
4. Keep things simple
Your website doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Most websites are trying to solve the same problem (getting people to buy or get in touch) with the same tools at their disposal. And the best way to do this is to keep things simple and follow established web design norms.
Looking like other websites is good thing. It means people don’t have to think too hard about how to find what they’re looking for. Out-of-the-ordinary layouts, flashy animated elements and auto-playing audio don’t improve the user experience or help you stand out. They just frustrate the user, create complexity and often make your pages load much slower.
5. Keep your sitemap small and focused
A lot of small businesses make the mistake of thinking that a big website will make them look like a bigger or more credible company. Actually, sprawling websites tend to have an adverse effect on conversions because there are more dead ends and forgotten pages.
A small, focused sitemap targeting a few key pages with clear calls to action is easier for your team to manage and your customers to navigate. It’s also much cheaper to build and easier to make sure that every page you have is well-executed.
6. Review and improve the high-traffic and high-intent pages on your website
Your homepage is the best place to start as it’s where the majority of your traffic will go. And it’s where most people will head to find out what you do and whether you can help. Other high-intent (ie. pages that people are likely to visit when making a buying decision) and high-traffic pages are pricing pages (if you have one) and key service or product pages. If in doubt, look for your most visited pages in Google Analytics.
Review these pages and make sure that you’re answering the main questions that people want to know:
- What’s the benefit for me? (This is typically either solving a problem they have or helping them achieve a specific goal)
- How does it work?
- What proof do I have that it works?
- What should I do next?
Once you’ve tackled the important pages, you can look at others if you want. But always focus the majority of your efforts on the pages that get the majority of the traffic. The best thing to do with a low-traffic page can be to remove it rather than spend your time making updates that no one will see.
7. Improve page load speed
Slow pages are frustrating and undermine the user experience. Make sure that your page speed hits benchmarks for desktop and mobile. Here’s a useful tool from Google you can use to test this.
8. Don’t overlook mobile
Mobile matters for B2B just as much as B2C. A terrible mobile experience can drive away visitors and undermine your credibility. It’s also really important for SEO (search engine optimisation). Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a site’s content for indexing and ranking. A good mobile experience and mobile load speed are essential if you want to appear in search results.
9. Build trust with reviews and testimonials
Customers want reassurance that you can deliver on your claims, and the best way to give this to them is through testimonials, stats and case studies. Make sure you have social proof on every key page.
Avoid generic testimonials like, ‘Great service, highly recommended!’. Your testimonials should be specific and back up the claims you’re making elsewhere on the page.
Also, avoid testimonial carousels if you can. People rarely scroll through them. It’s better to break your quotes up and sprinkle them throughout the page rather than group them all in one place with the majority being hidden.
10. Make it easy for people to convert
The more legwork and hassle your website creates for visitors, the less likely they are to convert. And if someone makes it to one of your forms, you don’t want to put anything in their way that might dissuade them from converting. If you’re asking people to fill out a form, try to limit the form fields to five fields max. You should be able to fill out the form in under thirty seconds.
If you’re asking them to book a meeting, let them use a meeting scheduler rather than having to fill out a form to get a reply and then send emails back and forth to find a good time.
The easier and more compelling you make the final CTA, the more likely people are to do it.
Looking for a second opinion?
It’s hard to be objective with a website you’ve looked at a thousand times. An experienced Marketing Director could help you see your site with fresh eyes, find the issues and fix them. Use the button below to get in touch and learn more.
