Does your website generate inquiries? or does it feel like a deserted wasteland. Hopefully you worked with a web or marketing professional to help you develop goals and objectives for your website in the first place. Oh you got a kid from down the street to do one for free? oops, well that’s a topic for another entirely different article. Back to the issue at hand.
In many cases your website is your ‘face’ or ‘front door’ to your business, and as one of your most important marketing tools it should be providing a return on investment -ROI.
So how can you get more leads?
1. Does your site load quickly?
People are very very busy today and it only takes a few seconds for a potential customer to get frustrated with your slow loading website and jump on over to your competitors website. The speed at which your website loads is also a factor in search engine rankings. So if you improve your website load time you actually get two benefits. Happier customers and higher ranking on Google.
2. Too many choices
Buy now!, Sign up for our newsletter!, Join our Facebook Fanpage!, Call us! Conventional thinking use to be offering more choices was better for customers.
However according to this study that proves not to be the case. When faced with too many choices it can actually hurt sales. You need to ask yourself ‘what is THE most important action I want potential customers to take’.
3. Keep your most important stuff above the fold.
I wrote an article about How to Create A Great Homepage and one of the points spoke about positioning of content. You want to keep your most important info closer to the top of the page. Just like reading a newspaper you tend to read top to bottom and you want your most important message(s) to get read first.
4. Stop asking for their life story in your Contact Form.
First Name, Last Name, Email address, Address, Country, Postal(zip) Code, Phone Number, Mothers maiden name, the exact location of the money you have buried in your back yard, etc etc. If you have read this far please re-read points # 1 & 2. (i.e. busy and too many choices).
You want to make it as quick and easy as possible to have potential customers contact you. There are other times and places that you can collect your marketing data but for now first things first. Give people a simple option to contact you so you can start a dialogue and find out what opportunities there are to assist this customer. Perhaps a contact form is not the appropriate place to SELL SELL SELL. So keep your contact form with as few fields as possible. Can you tell this is a pet peeve of mine?
5. Does your website look and feel professional?
What do you think of a company when their website has broken links, pixelated images, colours that clash or blind? Doesn’t instill a whole lot of trust does it? However on the flip side if you visit a website that looks professional is easy to navigate and nice images and has a pleasing colour scheme you say to yourself ‘hey, these folks look professional’. Then they will be more apt to do business with you.
6. Blog – yes, blog.
I know.. I know. You are sick of hearing about ‘you should blog’. You are thinking to yourself ‘but I am busy trying to run my business and I am a crappy writer and to top it off I have no idea what to write about’. Ok take a deep breath and relax. Yes you are running a business but part of running that business is marketing- right ? It may not be glamorous or fun but blogging will result in a few things.
#1. You will be perceived as an expert in your field.
#2. Your website will be getting more content and thus higher ranking in search engines
#3. You can attract hundreds or thousands of new eyes to your website.
As for not knowing what to blog about. Just start thinking about what questions your customers ask over and over again. Industry trends, Top 3 tips to.., How to maintain.. When to replace the product ..etc etc.
With a bit of time and investment in your website you can increase the amount of leads that are generated from your primary marketing tool.
Thanks for the comments/questions Lori.
Yes blogging has many benefits. To answer your question yes blogging helps any website in terms of search engine rankings – either a corporate one or personal one. Just a few suggestions:
1. know who you are writing for – target market
2. write on subjects they would want to read about
3. know your keywords
4. include links to the destination website.
Feel free to shoot me an email if you would like more suggestions/advice or to chat about more.
Always happy to help.
Happy Blogging !
Eric,
I actually took the time to read an article. It was to the point. I didn’t realize the importance of having a blog that would help with higher rankings. Does this apply to all webpages that are generated by a company or only personal designed sights. My site is one from Jockey P2P and all consultants will have the same search address. The difference being their name added after the slash. If a blog will help for my website address http://www.myjockeyp2p.ca/loritipler then I will certainly try and have fun with it.
Thanks Eric,
Lori