By Webstruxure

10/01/2018 Do you want more customers for your business?
And if so, does your website help you gain them?

You could have the best web design in the world, but if it doesn’t lead to your website visitors turning into customers or clients, then it probably isn’t doing its job.

What goes in to developing a great lead generation website? Here are some key ingredients.

1. Make sure your lead generation website is search engine optimised

If you’ve never tackled Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) before, it can seem like an impossibly big and confusing field, full of rabbit holes you can either dive down or trip over – or sometimes both.


But Webstruxure is here to help demystify all that for you. We have pulled together a quick SEO Audit to help you apply search engine optimisation techniques to your own website. You can use this checklist to find out whether your existing website meets the technical requirements for good SEO, or to help guide the development of a new website.
Our SEO Audit is in three parts:

• SEO Audit – Is Your Website SEO Friendly?
  
• SEO Audit – On-Page SEO Checklist
  
• SEO Audit – Off Page SEO Techniques
  

These three posts will keep you skipping through the SEO field on your way to a lead generation website that works. But if your path does become rocky, you can always ask Webstruxure for assistance.
2. Tell a strong brand story

Here is a brand story that probably won’t generate many leads for you:
“Hello, fellow humans. We are generic company X selling generic product Y within generic price band Z. Have a nice day.”

A strong brand story is a brand story that resonates with your users. So the first step in developing a strong brand story is to know your users. Can you create one or a few user personas that capture the way your users think, feel and react? If you can, then you can work out what brand story will best appeal to them.

But knowing your users is only half the story. Suppose you’re selling a household cleaning product – let’s call it Zort. And you’ve just released a new, improved version – so new you’ve decided to call it “New Zort”.

The Big Commerce blog suggests that businesses should create a market positioning statement – like this, but better:

For millennials who need to clean up the apartment in a hurry before the landlord visits, New Zort is an all-purpose cleaning product that zaps dirt fast, unlike [current market leader] Zlop which zaps dirt slowly. New Zort is the fast-acting household cleaner for a generation that lives life on the edge.

From that statement, you can go on to develop your brand story, with its brand hero and a shareable message – one that’s lovable or funny or thought-provoking, one that helps your users define who they are, one that buys into your customers’ self-image.

We reckon it won’t take you long to come up with a better brand story than New Zort has managed!

This blog post has helpful, actionable advice on how to tell a strong brand story:

Marketing Tips: How to tell a brand story people will love

3. Include a contact form or your contact details in every page

If all this story-telling stuff is a bit outside your comfort zone, here is a simple, concrete, easy-to-implement action: make sure that every page on your site includes your contact details or a link to your Contact Us page.
Why? Because most users will reach your site by searching Google and going directly to the page that’s relevant to them, rather than navigating from your home page downwards. You want to capture their attention fast, drum the site’s Call to Action into their heads, and encourage them to contact you while that Call to Action is still top of mind. Don’t let your users’ motivation turn to frustration as they scour your site for that one page that has the contact details on.

4. Include a single Call to Action that’s emphasised by design

What’s a Call to Action? It’s the short phrase on a web page that asks the user to do something – like click a button. Here are some examples:
Buy Now
Subscribe
Subscribe Now
Download Now!
Try It For Free
Get Started Now
Sign Up – It’s Free
Start Now
Join
Join Now
Join Free
Join Thousands Of Kiwis
Join Our Team
That’s just a small selection of the many, many possible CTAs, but it illustrates some of the common features. CTAs typically try to emphasise the ease and urgency of whatever action they’re promoting, and minimise the risk – that’s why you’ll see the words “Now” and “Free” in a lot of CTAs. Sometimes, they will also use social proof to convince people to join.

To be effective, CTAs generally need to be simple – just a few words, just a single concept. That’s partly because simpler phrases are easier to understand quickly, and partly because the CTA needs to stand out on every page. If users have to search around to find the page’s CTA, then spend a bit longer trying to understand it, the desire to act may swiftly wear off.

That said, your CTA needs to reflect your brand story. New Zort could probably get away with a quirky CTA like Zap Dirt Now!, but Trustworthy Financial Services Inc is likely to need something a little less excitable as its CTA.

Putting it all together: tell a story, give a Call To Action and make it easy for your users to act

The headline pretty much tells the story for this one. To create an effective lead generation website, you need to put all the bits together:

• Make sure your site is search engine optimised
  
• Tell a string brand story that resonates with the customers you want to attract
  
• Make sure that every page of your website makes it easy for customers to contact you
  
• Include a single Call to Action, and ensure the design of your web pages makes to that Call to Action stand out.
  

A great lead generation website can make a huge difference to your business. We think the advice above will get you off to a good start, but if you’d like to know more, get in touch.
Original post written by Tim Jones for Webstruxure's blog.