How to make your website the best lead generating tool

If you’ve established that generating leads via your website is an important process, then you’re in the right place. Whether the key focus is top line success and the overall number of sales you bring in, or more so the number of enquiries in the pipeline at any given point of time, the fact remains that you'll need to be results driven in your lead generation mindset.

We'll take a look under the hood of some consistent elements you can work on to improve your small business site success.

As soon as someone lands on your webpage, the first thing they'll read is your headline. In a split second, someone will make a decision whether the headline is relevant, exciting and most importantly whether it's worth reading further on down the page.

Most successful headlines should be short and to the point. There should also be a balance of common and rare words, as well as words that are emotive and instil a response from readers.

One of the most productive ways of knowing which headlines are going to work best for you is to create a swipe file of all the great headlines and page titles you've seen both online and in printed documents like brochures and newspapers. You can always refer back to these when you're building new web pages and draw inspiration from what is working well for others.

There are a number of FREE tools online as well that you can use to check if your headline is a good one. You may want to try out the headline analyser from the Advanced Marketing Institute:

Try out the AM Institute Headline Analyzer here.

For those out of the loop, a CTA is a call to action. These are the familiar buttons and ad-style blocks on your website that encourage people to download something, book an appointment, get in touch etc.

The vast majority of people who read your web page headline will also read your call to action, so it's important that not only you have CTAs, but ones which will cause visitors to actually click the button or complete the action necessary.

Want to make your CTAs a success? Try out some of the following tips:

• Where are your CTAs appearing on your site?
• Is the CTA relevant to the content on the current page being viewed?
• Are the actual words and imagery in your CTA compelling enough to invoke an action?
• Does your CTA design feel consistent with the rest of your site and exciting enough for web viewers?

Depending on your industry and target market, the way you write, design and place CTAs on your website may differ to better reach your specific customer type.

Be ready to trial out various CTA formats to figure out what works best for you to generate the highest quality and quantity of enquiry and new business!

There's nothing more frustrating than a small business website where every button and link clicks through to the same standard form for a few reasons:

1. It frustrates you as a website owner who has to ask all the questions of the enquiry that your website should have captured
2. It frustrates your site visitors who do not feel like they've received a personalised or contextual experience, resulting in fewer forms being filled in, and fewer enquiries coming to you!

This is why integrating customised forms across your website is probably the best way of getting the right level of buy-in and response from users.

Depending on your web platform, you may have to invest a 3rd party tool to create your forms. Some options in the market, if you're getting started, are Wufoo, Cognito and Zoho. Over at Sites Done Right, our customers have the ability to create an unlimited number of forms as standard on our platform.

When considering what features are important in your form building process, make sure you're able to add custom fields to your forms and that you can choose what should happen when a form is filled in. Should an email be automatically sent to the user? Should they be taken through to a thank you page with further actions for follow up?

More advanced form management should allow you to do things like dynamically populate form fields for people revisiting your site and even customising what is sent based on what was filled in on the form (again these are features provided as standard with Sites Done Right).

Lastly when building your forms, think carefully about what data you'll need to capture to effectively follow up with and qualify an enquiry. You want to find that sweet spot where you collect the optimal amount of information without annoying users. Most companies will need a name and email, but depending on your business process, you may want to also take a phone number to do your follow up offline. A perfect example of this is when someone is requesting a callback (often the case for tradesmen like plumbers, builders and electricians).

If you're a window cleaner looking to close more work from restaurants, or even a life coach with expertise dealing with high net worth individuals, one thing is clear - if you don't get smarter with your targeting, you'll struggle to find the right number and calibre of customers.

Your website should exist to help meet this need, and landing pages are a perfect approach for achieving this. Building a dedicated page for a given niche or need will allow you to personalise the content in a way that speaks to the exact values of that market. They also work well for both organic and paid search campaigns meaning you'll play better with Google and other search engines.

The ideal landing page should be made of a combination of the elements mentioned above (headlines, CTAs, forms) plus ideally pull through relevant content like news articles, events and resources specific to the landing page type or target industry.

The small businesses who get this right really find a comfortable groove of work coming from the areas they target, leading to a more consistent path for ongoing growth.

What tips and tricks your applying for your own business's lead generation success and how are the above suggestions working for you?

You can reach out in the comments section below, we'd love to hear from you!