“Build it, and they will come.” Unfortunately, many business owners have taken this advice literally. They figured building a new website was all they had to do to generate new leads, but nothing has happened. No new leads. No converted customers. No extra sales.
These days, just about every company has a website thanks to the availability of hundreds of online website builders in the market. Some of them are free despite the backing of giant tech companies. For example, Google has its website builder offering about which you can read in this Google Sites review. However, despite such offerings, each website will have varying degrees of success. And how successful your website becomes is up to you. Building a new site is a significant first step to getting on board with inbound marketing, but it just isn’t enough to generate new leads—no matter how much time, effort, and money you spend on it. To create new leads, you need to put in some extra effort. Here are five reasons why.
You Need to Add Content
Building a new website and then leaving it untouched won’t generate new leads. A static site will get stale in about 2.2 seconds. Content is king in the online world, and you need to continuously add a variety of relevant and enticing content to your site if you want to get people interested in checking it out. You need to lure people in with fascinating infographics, informative whitepapers and e-books, fun how-to guides, and more. You need to give internet users a reason to head over to your site. One of the easiest ways to do this is to start a blog and update it regularly with original and exciting entries.
You Need to Optimize for SEO
Google has sophisticated algorithms that determine which websites show up first on search engine result pages. Building a new website won’t be useful if it isn’t optimized for SEO with relevant keywords. If it wasn’t built with SEO in mind your site isn’t going to show up on search engine lists, so your audience isn’t going to know that it even exists—and that’s a pretty good reason why you haven’t gotten new leads from it. Plus, the list of best keywords changes all the time so you need to stay up to date to ensure you’re adding the keywords that your audience will be using.
You Need to Monitor Traffic
Leads are a product of your website traffic, and you need to be monitoring that traffic to understand what’s going on with your site—what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to be fixed. When building a new website, you need to ensure that you have access to analytics so you can monitor your lead conversion rate and study your traffic. When you know where your traffic is coming from and why users are accessing your site, you can generate new leads more effectively.
You Have No Calls to Action
While building a new website, you might have added in the necessary company, contact, and product information, but that’s just basic content—the minimum that you need. You also need to add calls to action.
Without calls to action enticing your visitors to take some action that starts a relationship with you, you’re going to have trouble generating new leads. You might get visitors, but they won’t be converted into leads that you can nurture and sell to. Calls to action get your website visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, download content, fill out a form, or buy a product—taking them one step further. To generate new leads, make sure you have many calls to action throughout your site.
Your Website Is Working Alone
Your new website should be your digital marketing hub but it shouldn’t be working all on its own. You need to have an integrated strategy that includes social media, pay-per-click advertising, landing pages, and other digital marketing tactics.
Congratulations on building a new website. I hope by following the above-mentioned tips, you can make your website a lead generating powerhouse.
