How To Build a Website for Lead Generation
Quick Navigation
- What Is a Lead Generation Website?
- How Can I Generate Leads Online for Free?
- Where Is the Best Place To Get Leads Online?
- Core Features of Lead-Generating Websites
- How Do I Create a Lead Generation Website?
- 7 Ways To Optimize Your Lead Generation Website
- Examples of Lead Generation Websites
A website versus a lead generation website: what’s the difference? Regular websites inform visitors, while lead generation sites try to get visitors to complete a specific action. Creating a lead generation site is more than just having a nice visual design and quality coding. There are other aspects that you can consider to capture your viewers’ attention and turn them into customers.
What Is a Lead Generation Website?
A lead generation website attracts visitors and collects their information in order to gather new sales leads. Their purpose is to turn someone who may have little or mild interest in your company into a paying customer or subscriber. The information and features that viewers find on your website should encourage their enthusiasm for your brand. Depending on what type of business you’re in, the tactics you use to do this may differ.
Lead generation sites do more than just collect user information. They also help maintain customer interest and provide valuable content. This emphasizes that your company is ready to meet any customer needs.
How Can I Generate Leads Online for Free?
There are multiple ways you can attract leads online for free without engaging in paid advertising and other expensive methods. Some methods include:
- Making a website: Creating a website that you can optimize into a lead generation website is a good first step toward gaining new customers. Even if it’s not perfect in the beginning, an online presence is a place where you can direct customers and collect their information.
- Using social media: Similar to having a web presence, staying active on social media helps you connect with people in a virtual one-on-one environment. Sharing your content through these channels and engaging in conversations with people can get you more leads.
- Working on your search engine optimization (SEO): Optimizing all your content for search engines is a suitable technique for generating free leads online. SEO focuses on organic search traffic, which is free traffic you gain from people finding your sites when they search keywords related to your content.
Where Is the Best Place To Get Leads Online?
Some of the best sites and tools you can use to find leads online include:
- Discussion forums
- Email lists
- Email newsletters
- Online forms
- Online live chats
- Personal websites
- Quora
- Slack
- SlideShare
- Tumblr
- Webinars
- Yelp and similar websites
- YouTube
Core Features of Lead-Generating Websites
There are five core features you can focus on when creating your lead generation website. They include:
- Usability: These tactics make a website easy for visitors to use. They help users find and interact with the information they’re searching for.
- Mobile design: Websites that work well on mobile devices make it easier for users to complete conversions right from their phones and tablets.
- SEO: Websites optimized for search engines may get more organic traffic and visibility than those that aren’t optimized.
- Copywriting: This feature works with your content marketing to increase SEO. It’s also what attracts people to your site, keeps them on your pages, and encourages them to return.
- Conversion: These techniques help you turn a lead into a customer. They’re the persuasive elements that encourage people to pay for or subscribe to your services.
How Do I Create a Lead Generation Website?
You can follow tips from the five core areas of lead generation to help create your website. Paying attention to all five can help you make sure you’re hitting all the most important points:
Usability
Lead generation websites are dynamic and encourage interaction from visitors. A useable site is easy to work with and makes it simple for people to complete the actions you want them to complete. Some ways to make your site more useable include:
1. Thinking About Responsive Elements
A responsive web design helps the page and all its elements adjust automatically to optimize the display on any screen size. This means people can view your website on a big desktop monitor or a smartwatch without issues on either device. This helps keep the viewing experience the same for all users.
2. Monitoring Speed
Page-loading speed is important for usability. Think about when you have to do something on a deadline, like make a phone call during your lunch break. If you try to use a company’s website to get its phone number, but it takes 10 minutes for the page to load, it might frustrate you before you even get to make the call. Website speed is also important for your ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). Google’s algorithm prioritizes fast-loading websites over slow ones. Therefore, having a fast-loading website can help you rank higher and get more organic search traffic.
3. Focusing on Image Loading Techniques
The types of images you use and how you upload them may directly affect your page loading speeds. Image size, resolution, file type, a d the retrieval process can make your page load more quickly or more slowly. Smaller file sizes make it easier for a page to load. Using a WebP file format, which is smaller than a JPEG but keeps similar quality, could also help with page loading speeds.
4. Using White Space
Leaving blank space around your content may be preferable for usability. White space is the area around images, between sections, or anywhere else on your site that doesn’t include words, images, or other elements. Using enough white space makes your site look more tidy. It also helps direct the viewer’s attention to the most important content, like your calls to action (CTAs).
5. Trying Static Headers
Rotating header carousels may be trendy, but they might not help attract leads. If there’s something you want people to do on a certain page, you want that information to stay visible at all times rather than scrolling away. In a rotator, people have to click through or wait for the relevant information to come up again. Carousels can also slow page loading times because they’re more complex and have more content than a static image.
6. Prioritizing Site Architecture
The architecture of your website can make it easier to use. It includes elements like your navigation, site map, and internal linking structures. Creating a logical site map by figuring out how to structure your menus, pages, and subpages can make it easier for users to locate the information they want. This is helpful for lead generation because if someone goes to your site knowing exactly what they want to do, being able to do it quickly allows you to capitalize on that impulse. Logical site structure also helps your SEO.
Mobile Design
One advantage of the mobile device shift in society is the ability to turn anything into a lead generation tactic. Our smartphones are essentially lead tools. We can use them to make phone calls, send texts, read emails, do research, and browse social media. We can do it all from these devices, so making sure your lead generation websites work on them is critical for your strategy. Some ways to optimize your website for mobile include:
1. Using Sticky Navigation
Sticky navigation, or sticky navs, scroll with the page as you view it on a mobile screen. They’re essentially “stuck” to the top of the page as you move throughout the site. The benefit of a sticky nav is that people can always see it, no matter where they land on the website. It follows them so they can use it without having to scroll back to the top of a long page.
2. Considering the Display
Laptops and desktop monitors typically use horizontal displays, while mobile devices use vertical ones. Think about the layout of a mobile screen when choosing where to put your buttons, links, and images. How do these elements look on a small, narrow screen?
Another thing to consider with mobile displays is the fact that they’re touchscreen capable. Consider which elements to make interactive and how they work. Designing with both mobile and desktop use in mind may also let you create shape-shifting sites. On these sites, some elements available on the desktop version change or disappear on mobile. For example, on your desktop site, you may have a contact details panel on the right of the screen, but it collapses into contact icons in the navigation bar on mobile devices.
3. Prioritizing Anchor Text
Anchor text is a fancy name for the internal links that allow users to find specific information on a page. They’re good for quick navigation selections that link people to specific headings. This is important for mobile sites because it allows people to jump right to the section they want without endless scrolling, especially on pages with a lot of content. This follows the same purpose as optimizing for page speed. If somebody knows what they want to find, let them get right to it without taking up too much of their time.
SEO
There are many ways to design an SEO-friendly website. Many of these tips apply to all websites, not just lead generation ones. Some ways you can try to get higher rankings in SERPs and grab more organic traffic include:
1. Using a Keyword Strategy
Keywords are the important search terms you want search engines and visitors to associate with your company. Creating a keyword strategy and doing keyword research helps you decide what content to create and put on your pages. These words can drive the themes of your blog posts, product descriptions, and CTAs. Need help with your keyword strategy or content creation? We can help! Start a call with CopyPress to talk about our content writing services.
2. Adding Title Tags and Meta Descriptions to Every Page
Title tags are unique to each page. They tell the search engines what the page is about, and they have target keywords to help you rank better for that query. Meta descriptions function similarly for search engines, but they’re longer and provide more information. They use more variations of the keyword or keyword clusters to drive both readers and bots to the right content.
3. Using Clean and Custom URLs
Clean and custom URLs help target the relevant keywords for your page. Unclean links are those that have extraneous characters, like symbols or numbers that have nothing to do with your content. Clean links help the search engine bots understand what your pages are about. They also look nicer and less like spam. A great URL can tell someone what the page is about before they even open it.
4. Prioritizing Header Tags
Header tags are another tool that help search engine crawlers understand your content. They also help the bots discover the layout structure of your page. These are where you often put anchor tag code, so it’s important for understanding the behind-the-scenes linking structure of your site.
Copywriting
Professional copywriting can help with lead generation. These professionals create the content that pulls customers in and gets them to stay. A well-worded CTA or content writing piece can help increase conversions. Some ways to optimize the copywriting for your lead generation website include:
1. Prioritizing Quality
Writing anything and posting it online isn’t likely to be the quality content that gets you more leads or improves your SEO. When hiring a copywriter or creating your own content for your online channels, consider elements like:
- Relevance: Do your current customers and potential leads care about this topic? Does it have anything to do with your company and what you can provide them?
- Persuasiveness: With your lead generation website, you’re trying to make a sale or convince people to do something specific. What is it about your copy that gets them to complete an action?
- Authority: Why is your company qualified to talk about this topic? What do you do or provide that makes your writer or your brand an expert?
- Usefulness: What does this content do for your audience and what reason do they have to read it? Can it solve a problem or answer a question they have?
- Shareability: Is it easy for customers to share your content across the web? Do you have options for sharing to social media, texting to friends, or forwarding through email?
2. Reviewing Your Content Structure
The content itself is just as important as how it appears on the page. People should be able to read your content easily on any device. Consider focusing on structure and design areas such as:
- Using headings and subheadings when necessary
- Creating bulleted and ordered lists to emphasize certain content
- Picking strategic places to use bold or italic text
- Writing brief paragraphs of 100 words or fewer to keep content to smaller, more readable chunks
Conversions
Conversion optimization is unique to lead generation websites. These techniques can help you get as many conversions on your website as possible. Some of these strategies include:
1. Using Calls To Action
Though it might seem like common sense, using calls to action throughout your pages and content is a way to optimize your lead generation website. You can use links, buttons, and forms to get people to recognize your CTA sections. Ensure that your CTAs are easy to find and clear in their purpose. Consider putting them in your headers, page banners, or the sticky navigation bar. Color coordinating any CTA buttons or banners may positively affect your conversions.
2. Considering Contact Placement
Picking the right place to display your phone number or email address on the website can help you get more conversions. In a desktop view, one of the best places might be in your navigation bar in the upper right corner of the screen. For mobile sites, you may consider icons in the navigation bar, like a phone or a letter to depict the right mode of communication.
The more consistently your leads see your phone number or the more places they have the option to chat or email you, the easier it may be for them to make those kinds of conversions.
3. Keeping Forms Short
If you use form submissions for conversions, try to keep them as short as possible. Five fields may be the maximum number that people feel comfortable filling out quickly, but the shorter, the better. Try to get just the most important information from people in these forms, like their name, phone number, and email address. Once they’re in your system, you can contact them further to get more information if you need it.
7 Ways To Optimize Your Lead Generation Website
Use these tips to help optimize your lead generation website:
1. Add Forms
Put forms on pages that get the most traffic. You can discover which pages are most suited for a form by auditing your site. Think about pages where you direct visitors from social media, live chats, blog posts, and email marketing. These pages may benefit the most from CTA forms. You may use them to get people to do things like sign up for your newsletter or register for a webinar.
2. Use Your Other Tools for Feedback
Look at how your other lead generation tools and tactics contribute to your conversions. These can give you insights regarding ways to improve your website structure and content. For example, learning what language or design strategies work best for email or print lead generation may help you create better landing pages. It may not be possible to apply every lead generation tactic from other tools to your website, but it can give you ideas about what works with your audience.
3. Focus on Each Step of the Process
Lead generation is a cyclical process that starts with company or brand awareness. As soon as a potential customer learns about your company and visits your website, you can start learning about their particular conversion path. In a perfect world, this path starts with them finding your site and ends with them making the desired conversion, like filling out a form or making a purchase.
But this path may not always go exactly as planned. Monitoring and optimizing every step in the conversion process can help you figure out where certain customers abandon the process and what you can do to keep them moving to the next step. Areas of focus include:
- Calls to action: Use coordinating colors with your links or buttons to make them stand out among other text and elements. Make your CTAs simple to read and easy to locate.
- Landing pages: Many landing pages focus solely on creating conversions, and using one can increase your chances of encouraging people to complete the actions you want them to complete. Consider using a landing page template to get started.
- Thank you pages: These pages appear after a visitor makes the conversion. Some of these pages include links for downloads, a video, or words of encouragement to make the lead feel they’ve made the right choice by completing a specific action.
4. Put a CTA on Your Homepage
Your homepage is one of the top elements of your marketing funnel. Including a CTA there can help catch people’s attention. Offer something like a free trial or a subscription for your newsletter that has a simple sign-up process. Try using language like “subscribe for updates” or “try it for free” to attract attention.
5. Offer Downloads Within Specific Posts
Putting CTAs for downloads within blog posts or articles can help provide leads with valuable information. This tactic aids both your lead generation and your SEO. Content marketing can help you develop authority in a field, and relevant blog content can help you rank higher in search engine results. You can provide downloads with links or in-line forms for people to fill out as they read.
6. Use Live Chat Features
Live chat services on websites are popular and even expected in some industries, such as retail. A live chat option helps with lead generation because it creates the opportunity for people to ask questions before they make a purchase or complete an action. When incorporating live chat into your services, audit your site pages to see where your visitors spend the most time. If you’re limited to where you can include a live chat, these pages may be your best option because they’re likely the areas where visitors need the most help.
7. Run Tests
A/B testing can help your click-through rates and conversions. This process shows two or more different versions of a page, CTA, or another web element to visitors at random. You can monitor the conversion results for each option to see which one performs the best throughout the trial period. Then you can use the more successful option in the future. Doing these tests can also provide valuable information about how people browse the internet and what they like. You can use that data to influence other lead generation decisions.
Examples of Lead Generation Websites
If you’re looking for examples of successful lead generation websites, consider:
1. CopyPress
Yes, CopyPress is a lead generation website. We provide quality content through our library, knowledge base, and blog. We’re optimized for mobile use so that you can browse our website on any device. The CTAs throughout our site help us gather lead information to collect potential customers and decide how we can best help them meet their content marketing needs.
“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”
Kevin Doory
Director of SEO at Auto Revo
2. OptinMonster
Image via OptinMonster
OptinMonster offers services like conversion rate optimization (CRO), so it’s no surprise that it also has a lead generation website. Like CopyPress, OptinMonster offers testimonials from customers, which serve as trust signals. This means the company displays its past work and quality to encourage people to use its product. This also tells readers that the content and services OptinMonster provides are valuable and accurate, according to current and past clients.
3. iRobot
Image via Wikipedia
iRobot’s main conversion and lead generation strategy is making sales. The first thing you see when you visit the site is a pop-up to join the company’s email list. This short form requires just an email address to register. Like CopyPress, the iRobot home page is full of CTAs incorporated throughout the sections. These CTAs invite visitors to do things like shop and compare products.
Image via iRobot
Focusing on digital marketing on your website can help with your lead generation efforts. Optimizing for conversions can make this strategy even stronger. Pay attention to areas like content quality, loading speed, and mobile-friendliness to increase your chances of generating leads online.
CopyPress writer
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