You hired an SEO agency, but your sales team isn’t seeing more leads. Here’s how to fix it…

You’ve finally focussed on ‘fixing our website’ and your Inbound Marketing campaign is underway. To kick things off, you have pushed the button on an SEO guy, and you are generating more traffic.

Yay!

So far, so good.

But what happens next?

All that yummy new traffic pushing the blue line up the graph in your Analytics account doesn’t mean squat if you don’t turn some of it into dollars.

The big picture: what are your digital marketing goals?

Your SEO strategy is important.

So yes, by cranking it up, you are off to a good start.

(If you'd like to read an article about how to set up an SEO friendly home page, here's the link.)

But you must remember that it is only one link in the Inbound Marketing chain.

SEO is right at the top of your Sales Funnel, at the Attract stage, bringing potential buyers to your website.

What you REALLY want to achieve from all this effort isn’t just traffic.

You want to produce Sales Qualified Leads, right?

Which brings us to the next link in the Inbound Marketing chain — Convert.

There are all kinds of conversion opportunities on your website. At least, there should be!

There are your:

• Micro-conversions — such as newsletter signups, requiring an email address so you can build your nurturing lists.
• More substantial conversions — such as downloading a brochure, an eBook or other resource, requiring more detail such as a name, ‘your biggest challenge’ or ‘industry sector’ or any other useful information you decide on.
• Payday conversions —  a solid Sales Qualified Lead, or if you have an e-commerce site, a trip to your shopping cart.

To do that?

You need to give them answers to what they need, and give them a good User Experience to get there.

If you don’t, they will just be ‘traffic’ — that’s before they click away to find what they want elsewhere.

A quick overview — what is website User Experience (UX)?

Defining User Experience is simple. I just Googled “define user experience”, and presto! Here we have our answer… 

HOWEVER…

The task of CREATING a good experience on your website is not so simple.

In many ways, it is a balancing act.

On the one hand, there is so much you want to tell your potential buyers about:

• How cool your products and services are
• How good you are at what you do
• Why they would be barking mad to go elsewhere
• And how you can make their lives so much better

But on the other hand, if you’re not careful, you’ll end up with a whole stack of different elements on the page, each screaming for attention — and all getting you nowhere.

To make your website page convert, you need a s-i-m-p-l-e message.

If I were to tell you that to get conversions off a web page, you must:

1. Have a strong offer with a high perceived value, and
2. A clear, simple path for people to follow to get the offer.

You’d roll your eyes and say “Duh! Yes, I already KNOW that!”.

But there’s more to this than meets the eye.

Here’s why…

The people you want to reach with your website have a very limited attention span.

As this table shows, the experts tell us that it is now around 8.25 seconds.

If you haven’t grabbed them and shown them where to find what they are looking for before that time bleeds away...

They’ll be G-O-N-E.

Those six words, “find what they are looking for” are your key.

You can give people what you want them to have until you are blue in the face. But you’ll starve to death.

To get potential buyers to convert and turn into leads, you must look at the world the other way, and GIVE THEM WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR.

To do that, you need to think about the Buyer’s Journey.

You need to think about how you can set up each page so that it gives your potential buyer what they need AT THEIR STAGE in their journey.

(You’ll read more about this on our User Experience page, where we explain our approach in some detail.)

But here’s the quick summary about the way we tackle it…

It isn’t an exact science, and there will always be room for improvement.

That’s why you need to test and measure your results to squeeze better ROI from each page.

But the principle… the thinking… the approach… makes a lot of sense.

Design your website with lead generation in mind

If there is a big take-away from all of this, it is that you need to think about the endgame of generating leads right from the start — when designing your website.

But let’s assume that right now, you are past that point.

You already have a website and you want to generate more leads.

If the site isn’t a total train wreck, it isn’t too late to fix things.

Here are the three things to do:

1. Understand the stages of Inbound Marketing

Reading this article will have moved your thinking a long way. You now understand why just ‘getting some SEO work done’ isn’t going to feed your family.

SEO is definitely a part of it.

But to generate leads, you need to think through all the steps of Inbound Marketing methodology, and set your site up accordingly. To recap, the four steps are:

1. Attract
2. Convert
3. Close
4. Delight

Think about how you can do better at each of these stages to make your website more profitable.

To learn more about this, we strongly recommend you click the following link and get your free copy of our Inbound Marketing explainer.

2. Figure out the role of each type of page on your website

It isn’t easy. There are no fixed rules and there will be blurred lines all over the place.

But the more you bend your brain on this, the better off you will be.

Think about your potential buyers and what they need to know at each stage in the Buyer’s Journey.

1. Awareness — Give them broad info about the types of problems/challenges they have.
2. Consideration — Give them info about options and ways to solve their problem.
3. Decision — Tell them why YOU are the best choice to do the job.

Brainstorm with your team, (or get our Brisbane digital marketing team to help, we are REALLY good at this!), to figure out what your potential buyers are looking for at each of those stages.

Use the Google Keyword tool or other resources to figure out the search terms your potential customers are using, and set up individual blog posts with the answers.

Doing this is all good SEO work and will help you to attract the right kind of traffic — thus giving you a platform to move more people through your sales funnel.

3. Plan your conversion path

Don’t try and get everyone to jump over a high bar offer and click the ‘Yes! I want to buy now, this minute’ button.

Yes, you will get some of those at Decision stage in their journey to do this.

But if that is all you offer to those at the Awareness and Consideration stages, they will go elsewhere — to your competitors for example — to find what they are looking for.

What can you offer on the site to increase your conversion rates? ESPECIALLY for those people who are still doing their research in the Awareness and Consideration stages.

Those people can be more difficult to convert as they are less motivated, so make sure you use good copywriting expertise to create offers that are appealing and have a high perceived value, to get more of them over the line and onto your lists for nurturing.

Seriously.

You MUST build those lists, so you can nurture more people through your sales funnel until they become a Sales Qualified Lead.

Get help with website lead generation

No matter where you are in Australia, we are mad-keen to help you to grow your business.

How do we do this for you? The easiest way to find out is to have a chat on (07) 3891 3800 about your objectives and challenges.

We can talk about how Inbound Marketing might help, look at some numbers, and make some recommendation as to how you might move forward profitably.

You won’t get an ‘agency sales pitch’. Instead, you’ll get helpful ideas and inspiration that will give you more confidence about what you are doing.