15 Best Practices for Lead Generation Websites

The goal of any website is to convert target visitors into leads and customers. A lead generation website must have a clear lead generation strategy to increase leads and sales.

Once a visitor converts to a lead, lead nurturing is used to generate interest in your products and services, provide additional information and convert them to a customer.

In this post, I cover some best practices that you can use to increase lead generation on your website.

What is Lead Generation?

A lead is someone who is interested in your product or service. Lead Generation is the process of attracting your target customers and increasing their interest in your products and services so that you can eventually convert them into a customer.

What is the Lead Generation Process?

The lead generation process generally follows the stages of the conversion funnel or the buyer journey that leads to a sale.

There are four stages of the conversion funnel: Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action.

Lead generation websites and the marketing conversion funnel

A target customer could start with a search query on the search engines, then click on a PPC ad or organic search listing in the search results to arrive at your website landing page or blog post. They may visit other pages on your website to check if you can solve their problem. If they are interested, they will fill out the contact form to contact you.

Which Marketing Methods are Used During the Buyer Journey?

Here are some of the digital marketing methods that you can use as the visitor moves through the buyer journey:

1. Awareness

In the awareness phase, you need to attract your target customers to your website with your marketing strategy.

You can make your target customers aware of your website with:

  • SEO – organic search listings for your important keywords
  • PPC ads – Google Ads or Bing Ads
  • Social Media posts or ads
  • Local SEO – optimized Google Business Profile and online directory listings
  • In-depth Blog posts
  • YouTube videos
  • podcasts
  • referrals

2. Interest

In the interest phase, the potential customer knows about your brand and wants to learn if you have a solution to his problem.

You can increase the customer’s interest with:

  • Compelling landing pages
  • Informative service pages
  • webinars
  • compelling CTAs
  • Testimonials
  • awards
  • trust seals
  • FAQ with answers to top questions

3. Desire

The customer is now considering your services and needs to build trust in your business. You need to convince the customer that you are the right choice.

At this stage, you should increase trust with:

  • Information about your business
  • Information about your team
  • Customer testimonials
  • Awards
  • Case studies

4. Action

The customer is ready to contact you for more information.

You should make it easy for the customer to contact you with:

  • Simple contact form
  • newsletter sign up form
  • Easy purchase process
  • Free trials or downloads
  • Promotions and discounts.

15 Effective Ways to Increase Lead Generation for Your Website

To increase leads, your website needs to be optimized for lead generation and customer conversion. Here are some strategies to increase leads.

1. Define your website conversion goals

Websites have different end goals. Your lead generation strategy should begin with a clear understanding of your website conversion goals. A website conversion occurs when a customer takes a conversion action towards your goals.

A website conversion action could be:

  • To buy a product
  • Fill out the contact form
  • Sign up for a newsletter
  • Request a quote
  • Request a demo
  • Download an e-book or trial

2. Target your ideal customer

To increase leads on your website, your marketing strategy should target your ideal customer. Your website should be designed around your target customer and it should provide them with the information that they are looking for.

Your ideal customer profile can be defined by:

  • Building buyer personas
  • Industry research
  • Competitive analysis
  • Customer surveys
  • Analytics data

3. Optimize your website for SEO

Your website must be optimized for SEO (search engine optimization) to attract your target customers from the search engines. SEO helps to improve your website rankings on the search engines for targeted keywords. It enables you to attract targeted visitors to your website.

Since these visitors are already interested in your products or services, they are more likely to convert to leads or customers. Proper SEO optimization of your website will help you attract the right customers and increase your website conversions.

If you are a local business, local SEO is essential to reach your local customers. A complete and optimized Google Business Profile (previously Google My Business) is a requirement to rank on the local pack for local SEO.

For more information, read our articles on 11 Reasons Why You Need SEO and What is Local SEO

4. Create Compelling PPC Ads

Promote your products and services with compelling PPC (pay per click) ads like Google Ads focused on your important keywords. Your ads should target your ideal customer and focus on specific geo-locations that you serve.

As of July 2022, responsive search ads have replaced expanded text ads in Google Ads. Use responsive search ads with unique headlines and descriptions. Use at least 10 headlines and 2 descriptions. Highlight unique benefits and services in the ads. Here are some best practices for responsive search ads.

High quality ads and landing pages can help to increase your Google Ads Quality Score and Ad position on the search results.

5. Build Compelling Landing Pages

When a customer clicks to your website from a PPC ad or organic search listing, your landing page must be optimized to increase conversions.

  • For PPC ads, design your landing page to be specific to the ad. Do not send visitors to a generic home page. They need to be directed to a specific landing page with specific information about the product or service being advertised.
  • All landing pages must have a compelling headline, sub-headings and related content.
  • Display relevant fast loading images.
  • Have a simple form on the landing page to collect information.
  • Have compelling, large call-to-action (CTA) buttons.

For more information on PPC landing pages, read our article on 11 Tips To Optimize Your Google Ads Landing Page For Conversions And Mobile

Example of a Landing Page with a CTA

This is a good example of a landing page from Mailchimp.com. They use a bright background for the page and the CTA buttons stand out. There are not one but two CTAs on the page to “Sign Up”. As you scroll down on the page, they build customer trust with assurances of their support policy. They also show business logos of their customers, and answer frequently asked questions to gain the customer’s trust.

6. Your website must be professional, mobile-friendly and responsive

Your website should look professional with an attractive design. It should display your logo, have clear navigation and provide your business contact information. Your privacy policy and customer service policies should be easy to find.

The majority of online users today access websites on mobile devices. Your website must be mobile-friendly with responsive web design to reach mobile users and perform well on devices of all sizes.

A mobile-friendly website is a search ranking factor to improve SEO rankings. In 2018, Google converted their search index to a mobile-first search index. Their mobile-first search index uses the mobile version of your website as the primary version for crawling, indexing and ranking for the Google search results.

Here are some interesting mobile statistics from Google,

• In 2015, the number of search queries on mobile devices on Google in the USA exceeded those on desktops.
• It is estimated that 85% of customers begin their search for new products and services on the internet.
• 94% of people in the USA who own smartphones use their smartphones to search for local information.
• 82% of smartphone users search online to find local businesses

For more information read our article on Mobile Friendly Websites: How to Reach Mobile Users & Increase Conversions .

7. Your website must load fast

Website visitors today expect websites to load fast or they will leave and go to the next site. Fast page load speed is very important for users on mobile devices.

According to Google research:

  • 53% of mobile site visitors will leave a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
  • The recommended average website page speed should be 3 seconds or less.

This graph shows how the bounce rate increases as the page load time increases.

Page Load Time vs Bounce Rate Graph

Large slow-loading images are one of the main reasons for slow web page speed. All images on your site must be optimized and compressed to load quickly.

For more information, read our article on Speed Matters: 5 Reasons Why Page Speed Impacts Website SEO Rankings & Conversions.

8. Use Compelling Calls to Action on every page

Every page of your website should have a compelling calls to action (CTA) to encourage the customer to contact you for more information.

Your Home Page is at the top of the conversion funnel. It should increase awareness and interest with a call to action to “get a quote” or “subscribe to newsletter”. Your service pages are at the middle of funnel and should increase interest and consideration with compelling CTAs.

Use a bright color for your CTA buttons so that they stand out from the surrounding page elements. Use personalized, action-oriented CTA text with action words like “Get”, “Start”, “Download” which are consistent with the goals of the page.

Personalized calls to action perform 202% better than basic CTAs.(HubSpot)

You can also place contact forms on high-traffic pages to have customers contact you directly from the page.

Examples of CTA (call to action) buttons

Here are some examples of CTA buttons from the web.

9. Provide informative content with images and videos

The quality of your website content is very important both to provide a great user experience and to improve SEO rankings.

When your website content has high SEO rankings on the search engines for your target keywords, it attracts even more of your target customers to your website.

Your blog posts and website content should be informative to your target customers. Web pages should have keyword-specific headers and subheadings. They should have great images, charts and videos. All images should be compressed to reduce page load time and bounce rate.

The page content should answer the customer’s questions. You should provide in-depth content and related resources to engage the customer. Use internal links to link to related content on your site.

With Google’s page experience update, the user experience of a website is a search ranking factor and impacts your SEO rankings.

10. Display Testimonials and awards

Customer reviews helps potential customers to learn more about the business. You should display your customer testimonials on key pages of your site. Also display business awards and trust symbols like business certifications and memberships.

Press mentions should also be displayed. This helps to establish business credibility and increase customer trust.

11. Provide business information in the About Page

The About Page is a critical page for building customer trust and business credibility.

The About page should have information about your business including the mission of the company, company background and company history. It should profile your company leadership and team members with links to their bios.

Company awards, business certifications and memberships should be listed. Brand names you service and logos of business partners can also be listed here.

12. Use Simple Contact forms

To encourage visitors to contact you, your contact forms should be simple with a minimum number of fields to fill out. Long contact forms which request lots of information do not help with conversions.

The contact form should request the name, email and reason for contacting you from the customer. You can always follow up for more information after the customer contacts you.

Many websites bury their contact forms and the customer has to search for a few minutes to find it. Make the contact form easy to find on the header or footer of your website. On the contact page, provide all your business contact information with a phone number, email, address, map and directions to your business. You can also display trust symbols like business certifications.

Once the customer has filled out the contact form, they should be directed to a thank you page which informs them when they will be contacted with a response.

13. Follow Up with Information

Once a lead contacts you, follow up with your lead nurturing process to provide additional information and answer questions. By increasing their interest in your products and services, you can get them to convert to a customer.

Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. Source: Forrester Research

14. Measure website performance

You should constantly track your website performance with Google Analytics. The analytics data can help you identify where customers leave your conversion funnel and make improvements to improve your conversion rate.

Google Analytics tracks how visitors interact with your website and provides:

  • number of site visitors
  • website bounce rate
  • website traffic channels – direct, organic search, social, referral and other.
  • Landing pages
  • Exit pages
  • Conversions and much more

For more information, read How to Use Google Analytics Reports to Track Website and SEO Performance

15. Test and Improve

You should continually test and improve your website to improve the lead generation rate. Your website needs to constantly change to keep up with changes in technology and marketing and remain competitive.

You can use A/B testing to test different variations of headlines, landing pages, forms, form placement, button colors and CTAs. You can then monitor changes in performance with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Conclusion

A website has to have a clear lead generation strategy to generate targeted leads and remain competitive. The information that the customer seeks changes along the conversion funnel from Awareness to Action. Your marketing strategy has to change as well for each stage of the buyer journey.

You can increase leads and conversions by ensuring that your website is optimized for lead generation with compelling CTAs, informative landing pages, in-depth blog content and simple contact forms. It should also be mobile-friendly, responsive, fast and provide a great user experience.

We hope you found this article helpful to increase leads from your target customers on your website.

Need Help With Your Website?

If you need help with your website, we can help. We help businesses with digital marketing services including Web Design & Development, Google Ads PPC Marketing, SEO and Digital Marketing Consulting services. We are located in Plano, TX outside Dallas and serve businesses in the USA. Contact us at https://goldmangodesign.com

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