What’s Your Website’s Main Purpose?

If you are an entrepreneur and decide to get a website for your business, the best answer to this question is “generating leads” that will eventually become paid customers.

Gone are the days when websites were static brochures, both ineffective and difficult to update. At this day and age, you can have your own branded website in a short time and easily post new content or test multiple landing pages versions.

Websites have become powerful tools for interacting with customers and prospects; moreover, many businesses don’t even need a physical location open to customers – everything happens online.

The next question is:

How do you create a mobile-friendly website which generates leads and takes them all the way through the conversion path?

Here Are 5 Crucial Features That Any Modern-day Website Should Have

1. Mobile-friendly

Your website should provide excellent user experience in all mediums and reconfigure itself depending on the device and browser your visitors are using.

In 2014, mobile has overtaken fixed Internet access and marketing experts are no longer wondering whether mobile marketing should be a priority or not; we already know it is!

The percentage of mobile market penetration in the US during the last three months of 2014 was 75.8 – that is, 184 million people owned smartphones.

People have been using mobile devices for decades how, but only in recent years have we witnessed a major change: Internet users now prefer their smartphones to desktop computers when it comes to spending time online.

This trend also reflects in Google’s algorithm update from April 2015 – the world’s most popular and #1 search engine favors in search results those websites which are optimized for mobile devices.

If these facts and statistics are not compelling enough to make you opt for a mobile-friendly website, check the following benefits you’ll enjoy by adopting responsive and mobile-friendly design:

• Improved experience for mobile device users

When your website content and elements adapt to a wide range of mobile devices, you can reach a larger audience and offer them a better user experience. Mobile users are impatient and websites which load slowly and need to be zoomed in and scrolled in order to view their contents don’t stand a chance in today’s mobile era.

• Better SEO performance

By having a mobile-friendly website, you’ll get found on Google and other search engines more easily, since responsive design has been included in the algorithms of the world’s most popular search engines.

• Ensuring better accessibility

A mobile-friendly website can be accessed at anytime, from anywhere, as long as your customers have an Internet connection. A higher level of connectivity means you can engage your audiences in new ways, no matter where your potential customers are.

• Connecting offline and online media

Printed pages don’t provide as much interactivity as websites, but this inconvenience was overcome by introducing QR codes. QR codes displayed on print can be scanned using a smartphone and subsequently lead to website URLs, landing pages, social network pages, email addresses, or opt-in forms.

• Having a competitive advantage

Even if mobile websites are nowadays the rule and not an exception, many businesses lag behind when it comes to reaching mobile users. If you want to differentiate your business from competitors, being mobile-friendly is one of the best solutions for becoming more attractive to potential customers.

2. Visible Call-to-Actions

Call-to-actions (CTAs) are short and compelling instructions determining the audience to perform a task. These incentives are featured on successful lead generation websites as buttons or links encouraging users to add products to their carts, subscribe to newsletters, start a free trial, or download a free resource.

How can you create an effective call-to-action?

Follow the best practices described below and test, test, test:

Writing call-to-actions

• Keep your call-to-actions short – between 2 and 5 words works the best.
• Be action-oriented – always include a verb in the imperative, such as “Download” or “Sign up”.
• Use second person speech – the CTR rate is up to 100% higher when using language such as “Get your free ebook” instead of “Get my free ebook”.
• Create a sense of urgency – users are more likely to hit your call-to-action buttons when you encourage them to perform a task as soon as possible. Use time indicators such as “now” or “today only” or make discounts such as “Download your free social media marketing course for $30$10!”

Understand your audience

• Eliminate user worries – clicking on a button makes users wonder what will happen next, so state exactly what they’ll get by clicking on the call-to-action button.
• Include extra information – in some cases, smaller explanatory text like “30-day trial, no credit card” helps increasing conversion rates with call-to-actions encouraging users to start free trials.

Appearance

• Opt for a contrasting color – the button should fit in the overall design, but be different from the webpage’s color scheme. Green and orange are considered to work the best, and you can choose these colors as long as they fit in your color scheme.
• Button shape – apparently, rounded button shapes work better than square edges, but once again, the best choice depends on your business and on your website’s feel and look.
• Choose the right size – the call-to-action button should be large enough to stand out from the rest of the webpage, but not so large as to distract attention from page contents or make your website look threatening and aggressive.

Multiple call-to-actions

• Choose a main call-to-action button – if you have multiple call-to-action buttons on your website, make non-conversion buttons less attention-grabbing, by using grey or less vivid colors.
• Give users fewer options – when confronted with too many options, humans struggle with indecision and are a lot more likely to feel unhappy with their choice. Limit the number of call-to-actions and highlight the most desired one over the others.

3. Effective Opt-in Forms

Opt-in forms are used to collect user addresses and build subscriber lists for email marketing purposes. Email marketing remains an extremely powerful tool as long as you send relevant and engaging messages and personalize your emails.

The first and most difficult step is getting potential customers to sign up for your newsletter.

When developing opt-in forms, you should apply the same thinking scheme used for effective call-to-actions – favoring user experience, saving time, being compelling, and letting users know exactly what will happen next.

Here are some short tips that will get more prospects filling in your opt-in form:

• Avoid long terms, as most users won’t have enough patience to go through the entire form.
• Let them know what’s in for them – your prospects are already receiving dozens of emails every day – why would they want to have their inbox even more crowded?
• Use catchy headlines.
• Choose attractive images and color themes.
• Make use of social proof – number of subscribers, media mentions, testimonials, and reviews.
• Tweak your opt-in form constantly and test it – changing fonts, colors, text, and images can make a huge difference.

Extra tips:

• Ask users how often they’d like to receive emails – sending messages frequently may cause prospects to ignore your emails or unsubscribe.
• Send a welcome message after people have signed up. Ask them to confirm the subscription and add your address to the safe sender list, so your messages don’t reach the spam folder.

4. Valuable & Useful Content

As a small-business owner, it’s impossible to not have heard the phrase “Content is king”.

It’s easy to understand why valuable content matters so much when it comes to creating a powerful online presence:

Audiences just love engaging information!

It’s difficult to imagine a day without having access to news, videos, music, social media content and so on. Audiences interact with your brand as long as you are offering them something useful, entertaining, or thought-provoking.

One of the most effective and easy ways of including valuable content into your website is starting a business blog.

These are the biggest benefits of blogging for your business:

• More website traffic
• Building authority
• Building loyal customers communities
• Attracting more subscribers
• Making your company look more human and friendly
• Using links to blog posts for social media updates
• Increasing brand awareness
• Getting feedback from customers

Just starting a blog is not enough, though. If you want to cultivate loyalty among your audiences and keep search engines indexing your pages, you’ll need to regularly publish fresh, high-quality content.

5. SEO Optimized Website

Valuable content and SEO go hand in hand, but besides providing interesting resources, for best results you’ll also need to take care of a few technical search engine optimization aspects.

Simply put, SEO is both a technical and creative process.

On the other hand, search engine optimization is an extremely vast field, so for this short guide we’ll only review the most important aspects or SEO basics:

• Valuable content – search engines give priority to websites which are relevant to human readers, so make sure content plays an important role in your marketing strategy.
• User experience – if the user experience provided by your website is poor, visitors will spend little time viewing your pages. Search engines take this aspect into consideration when establishing rankings, and disadvantage websites that are difficult to navigate around.
• Links on other authoritative websites – being used as a reference by top-rated websites also helps you with SEO.
• Internal links – this is one of the easiest SEO techniques – integrating internal links (or links to other pages on your website) whenever you post new content.
• Ranking for the right keywords – this will help you attract the right kind of visitors on your website. Focus on long-tail keywords, because they catch people later in the buying cycle and target local audiences. For instance, if you own a flower shop, ranking high for “flowers” won’t help you too much, but optimizing your website for searches such as “bride bouquet offers in Tampa” is a much better choice!
• Social media impact on SEO – a powerful social media presence and promoting your business on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other networks also helps you rise in search engine ranks.

Most important of all:

Your Website Must Be for Humans and Not For Search Engines.

Black-hat techniques like keyword stuffing have already lost their efficiency a long time ago, and as search engines grow increasingly smarter and able to detect websites offering a good user experience, developing valuable and engaging content becomes more important than ever.

Also remember that SEO is not a magic formula, but an ongoing effort, and that results may take months to show.

Conclusion

If we were to summarize this guide, we could say that creating lead generation websites involves:

• Reaching your audience on their favorite devices (having a mobile-friendly website)
• Getting found on Google (search engine optimized websites)
• Providing value to potential customers (valuable content)
• Determining prospects to take action (visible call-to-actions)
• Taking prospects through the marketing funnel and converting them into leads (effective opt-in forms).

The 5 must haves listed in this guide can be organized in a logical sequence and many of these elements are interrelated –  for instance, a good opt-in form is useless if you don’t use persuasive call-to-actions, and your SEO strategy is not complete without valuable and fresh content.

Make these 5 tactics your top marketing priorities and you will manage to transform your website into the lead generation machine your business needs!

 

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• Get more leads from your website
• Attract and retain more local customers
• Get found on Google by having a higher search rank
• Increase your profits today

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