Turn Your Website into a Lead Gen Machine 
5 Best-Practice Fine-Tuning Tips

Remember the days when companies’ homepage of their website was some sort of animated flash, with the “skip intro” link as a way out? With all due respect to interactive web designers, websites today need to be much more intentional, targeted, and fine-tuned in order to achieve maximum impact, visibility and usability.  Nowspeed Marketing has help numerous clients optimize their corporate website for effective lead generation. Below are five best-practice tuning tips you can deploy to turn your website in to a lean, mean, lead gen machine:

Tip #1: See your website through your prospect’s eyes

Visitors to your website want to quickly understand who you are, what you can do for them, and be given, clear, targeted ways to navigate through the site for more information. This means you’ve got to design content and offers to speak directly to different target audiences (for example, IT “geeks” vs. corporate “veeps”) across the buying cycle (“tryers” vs. “buyers”. Start with your homepage, but don’t stop there. Make your interior pages content-relevant and offer-specific as well. 

Tip #2: Keep it clean, clear and concise

A common mistake is to put so much information and links on the homepage or interior pages, that they quickly become cluttered. You’ve got valuable, limited real estate. Utilize it wisely. For the homepage, Include an SEO-optimized description of who you are and what you do; clear click-thru paths for different types of visitors (customers/prospects/info seekers), and place high-performing, relevant offers where the eye can see them without the user having to scroll down the page. 

Tip #3: Balance search with simplicity

Optimizing your site for organic search is critical. Jupiter Research estimates that organic indexes generate 87 percent of commercial referrals from search engines. However, you need to weigh the benefits of high keyword placement with simplicity and usability from the visitor’s perspective. Don’t go SEO-overboard. Our advice is to SEO-optimize your copy and tags around keywords that have the following characteristics: high traffic, low competition, and are a good fit with your business. For example, the keyword phrase “B2b lead generation agency” works better for us than “interactive agency.” Keep copy targeted around these parameters, and you will not only connect well with your audience, but will also rank high in organic search.


Tip #4: Evaluate traffic patterns for best offer and content placement

Use a web analytics tool to see where people are clicking through from your homepage, and which interior pages are receiving the most click-thrus and/or longest retention. Then, place your best offers there. You may be surprised to find that what you think is important, such company news links on the homepage, is a low traffic area. If it is, consider replacing that link to a page that is more relevant. Or, if your “About Us” page is getting a lot of traffic, place more links and offers on that page to encourage them to explore other areas of your site and request information.


5. Test, update, and fine-tune

Once you’ve got a solid, lead-based architecture in place, monitor visitor behavior and fine-tune the different elements of the site until it is performing at optimal effectiveness. Utilize web analytics to perform offer and message testing. Remember that, like content, offers can quickly become dated. As their popularity begins to wane, refresh your site with new offers.

These tips will get you started, but they are only the beginning. For a more in-depth analysis of your site and how you can lead-optimize it, contact us. If you’d like to see some websites that Nowspeed has successfully optimized for leads, visit Heroix (www.heroix.com) and Tangosol (www.tangosol.com).

Have any comments or suggestions regarding this topic? We’d love to hear them! 

Email your comments to info@nowspeed.com.