As I work with an increasing number of businesses, and their web developers, I’ve realized there’s still a huge opportunity for most businesses to leverage their websites to generate quality leads.
In the 1990′s, having a website meant putting up a “brochure site” and being on the Web. That was then…
Today, Google is the new “Yellow Pages” (sorry YP – it’s true!) When’s the last time you picked up a hardcopy directory to find something? (if you’re reading this, I’ll bet it’s been years)
When people need something, they go straight to Google and type in their search criteria. Whatever shows up on the 1st page is what 90% of those users accept as “good enough”.
So, is your website showing up in the new directory (Google)? If you haven’t invested and maintained your SEO rankings, then answer is almost certainly No. If you aren’t paying Google to list you in their directory (Google Adwords), then you’re lost in cyberspace somewhere (a place that not very many people are finding you).
Assuming you are properly listed and showing up in the Google “directory” in the organic search results and/or PPC results, that’s the first step. Unfortunately, many large corporations stop there – and waste most of their investment…
Far too many of these companies simply refer their traffic to their site’s home page, and make the user go on the equivalent of an Easter egg hunt to locate what they really wanted. Instead, these users coming from Google should be going to a relevant “landing page”.
Why don’t more webmasters and website design companies fix this for their client’s websites? It’s not as if landing pages are a new concept! Landing pages are the “front-door” for lead-generation for a website today. It’s where the website encapsulates a focused value-proposition and offer to turn that “visitor” into a “lead”…
Website owners need to carefully evaluate their websites and fix these “lead leaks” – the places where visitors are simply evaporating and never turning into leads.
Once the lead is captured, the next common leak I see is a lack of a coherent “lead nurturing” strategy or system (e.g., an auto-responder sequence). We’ll save that topic for another post.
So to summarize… website owners, designers and developers need to help their clients get out of the 1990′s and into this century by designing websites that focus first on getting into the Google directory (SEO/organic results), second on landing pages that synthesize visitors into leads, and then back-end processes that nurture those unqualified leads into better quality lead streams that flow into the sales process – sales department (for offline sales) or sales page (online sales).
I suppose I should be glad there’s still so much opportunity out there to improve businesses’ lead-generation results…
Tags: lead generation, lead nurturingRelated posts:
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