Since businesses started building websites, there’s been a question of how to turn website traffic into leads and sales. If they come to your website, in theory that means they’re interested in your business or product offering. Or at least it means they’re interested in learning more. It seems like a logical argument to make. So how do you better convert people to make that phone call, visit your business, or fill out a lead form on your website?
All these are great questions that business leaders and marketers have asked for years. This article will walk you through things that stop potential customers from converting from your website, then outline 8 strategies you can use to help convert that traffic you get into leads for your business.
Table of Contents
What Stops People From Converting On Your Site?
- The Wrong Intent
- You’re Not Telling People What To Do Next
- Poor User Experience
- A Barrage of Ads and Popups
8 Steps for How to Convert Traffic into Leads
- Improve your content
- Give social proof/case studies
- Create a lead magnet
- Improve your offering
- Improve your CTAs
- Create A/B Tests, Conversion Rate Testing
- Install a Chatbot
- Newsletter Signups, Email captures
What Stops People From Converting On Your Site?
1. The Wrong Intent
Have you heard the phrase ‘user intent’ lately when it comes to SEO and search engines? With the Page Experience Update, User Intent became a ranking factor. With that, you want to make sure your website is optimized for the user experience so that it’s built with user intent in mind. What would a user want to find and do you make it easy to discover that through your website. We could write an entire post just about website user experience.
However, a key piece we want to share regarding website conversions into leads comes with making sure your website is geared for the right audience. If you’re not getting many website leads or conversions it likely means you are targeting the wrong audience, or they’re not relating with your content. Either way, you have a problem.
If you don’t know who your target audience is, it’s time to do some research. Do some demographic analysis on your current customers. Survey them, ask them in person, and learn all you can to know why they came to you in the first place. Then change up your website and the content on it to better connect with those target customers. And if you find that your current audience and customers aren’t who you want them to be, this is also a chance to start marketing campaigns and targeted content to reach the customers you want for your business. Create personas and audience analysis to help you connect your business persona with that target audience.
2. You’re Not Telling People What To Do Next
This may seem like an audience step, but you need to help guide your audience and website visitors through the conversion funnel. You can’t just tell them about your awesome product or new location and hope they do something about it. You need to actively create CTAs and direct your customers on what to do next. They may be visiting your site, but they lack a CTA or a motivation to take the next step, so they don’t convert.
This is an easy fix. To increase your leads, you need clear action items. Things like “Call today!” with an active button with a phone number. Or you could have a lead generation form that leads them to download a piece of content. To really increase your leads and conversion rate, you need clear action items specified at every point of the funnel for your customers. Tell your customers what to do next. NEVER just assume that they’ll take an action without being prompted. We’ll talk more about this further down in the article.
3. Poor User Experience
Similar to the first item, you need to make sure your customers have a good experience when they come to your site. You need to make sure your website follows a logical user flow. Bad user experience can mean too little content, so someone is confused. It can look like too much content and just a wall of text that is hard to follow and navigate. Both those items will cause a user to just go onto the next search result. You need to make sure your page design is easy to navigate. And you need to make sure your content is easy to read, follow, and gives quick answers to the questions a user asks.
Google is putting more of an emphasis every year on having a good user experience. So much so that bad experiences and poor web design, or those large content blocks, means that the Google algorithm will actually decrease your rankings and where your site shows up in the SERPs.
4. A Barrage of Ads and Popups
While this can fall under a poor user experience, it’s worth making special note of. Remember when pop up ads were just an annoying thing you had to deal with on websites. Even though they’re not as obnoxious as they once were, Google now penalizes sites for having a large number of popup ads, obnoxious and intrusive ads within your content, or what’s called intrusive interstitial ads that take over a screen. Intrusive interstitials are a ranking factor for the Page Experience Update on both desktop and mobile pages. So if you have ads capabilities on your site, or you have your own popup ads that encourage users to take action or go to another page, it’s likely that this is hurting you with your users and with Google who will start to drop your website’s rankings.
8 Steps for How to Convert Traffic into Leads
1. Improve your content
Improving your website in general and your conversions starts with your content. From keywords to product descriptions, to calls to action, and beyond, having good content makes or breaks your website. If you’re not getting the kind of leads and conversions you want on your website, it’s time to start improving your content. You should create opportunities with your content for someone to fill out a form or contact the company directly.
Also learn from your current customers about their pain points, common questions, and what kind of experience they will get from your business. Then put that on your website. Do that with an FAQ page, if they have a pain point that you can fix, make that change across your business. Explain how you differentiate from your competitors. Make it clear on your website what sets your business apart and how you can fix customer pain points. Good content leads to better conversions. It’s that simple.
2. Give social proof/case studies
When people come to your website, they want to first see if you can fix their problem or answer their question. Next, they want to see if others have had a good experience with your business. They will do this by checking your Google My Business profile or other review sites. But it also helps to put some social proof and success stories like testimonials or case studies on your website. People want to see that others have had successful campaigns or interactions with your business. That way they have more confidence that you’ll do a good job with their needs as well. Testimonials, case studies, and positive reviews on pages with conversion and lead generation points can really help to close that loop and encourage someone to take action.
3. Create a lead magnet
Lead magnets are things like free downloads or other valuable perks that could convince someone to give you their contact information. This looks like a form where people can put in their name, phone number, email address, and other information you will find helpful for your business, and they get a free consultation, a free white paper download, an analysis of their website or something else that you specialize in. People who fill out these kinds of forms are warm leads, or they’re more likely to convert because they’ve already visited your website, liked what they found, and engaged with your content. Use these forms to collect data that you will find most helpful in order to convert the lead. Things like employee number, job title, etc., can help you better understand their intent behind requesting information from your business website.
4. Improve your offering
If you don’t get a lot of leads and conversions through your website, there’s a chance it could be your product offering itself. In this case you need to check to see what your competition offers. Do you have the same product? Do you offer it at a reasonable rate? What makes your business stand out from the competition? You need to think long and hard about the answers to these questions. If you have a similar product offering to your competition at around the same monetary value, then it’s time to start figuring out how to stand out. What would make someone choose your product over others? This is where promotions or improvements on your product come into play. Also adding additional products/services can help. Having a good reputation and good social proof can also help you to improve your offering and set your business website apart from the crowd.
5. Improve your CTAs
We’ve already mentioned this in the article, but Calls to Action are crucial on your website. If you want to convert traffic into leads, you need to make sure you have CTAs on your site, and that they’re effective. For the white paper download mentioned earlier, you need a button that grabs a user’s attention and urges them to fill out the form. CTAs look like links or buttons that stand out from the rest of the site. If you have an e-commerce site, a CTA could be the “buy now” or “add to cart” buttons. On your blog, it can encourage people to sign up for a newsletter.
If you already have CTAs and forms throughout your website, but they still aren’t converting, now it’s time to do some QA and A/B testing. First, make sure your buttons actually lead to where they’re supposed to go. That the links to a landing page actually lead the user to the right place. Then, try using some different language. There’s a host of different ways to phrase something that might compel users to take action more than what you have now.
6. Create A/B Tests, Conversion Rate Testing
Like we just mentioned, it’s important to test out your site to make sure your conversion points are actually converting the way you want them to. A/B testing is some of the best ways to make sure your website can convert traffic into leads the way you want them to. This is a chance for you to test for most things mentioned in this article. Make sure your content converts, see what messaging rings with your audience, test to make sure you have the right target audience you’re reaching out to. Conversion Rate Testing (CRO) also helps you to test various pages, messaging, content, and more to make sure traffic converts to the maximum possible. There are plenty of software options and digital marketing services who can help you with your A/B or CRO testing. But it’s also possible to just try different messaging on your own site.
7. Install a Chatbot
Do you have a chatbot installed on your website? If not, you’re missing a big opportunity. Many are resistant to chatbots because they feel you lose that personal connection with the customer. People today want to get their answers quickly, and don’t always want to call into a business to figure out what they’re looking for. Every year more and more people start using chatbots. So it’s time for your business website to adapt as well. Load a set of responses to your most frequently asked questions into the chatbot for times when an employee can’t be available to answer as needed. And if someone isn’t available to answer live, and the pre-loaded answers don’t answer their question, then you can capture their email address or phone number which is a great way for you to grow your database and lead list. Then you can personally reach out to connect with that person and make an impression. This is a great way to help convert people on your website and engage with them, even if you’re not available 24/7.
8. Newsletter Signups, Email captures
If you already have a decent amount of traffic or followers to your website, but you want to increase conversions, start doing that with strategic CTAs that invite them to visit your site again. You can do that by having a newsletter that distributes your content. When they get it to their inbox, they have to come back to your site. You can have an advertisement encouraging someone to sign up for the newsletter, There’s also interstitial ads in your blog content, or have links that take them to a landing page to fill out the form. Like we mentioned earlier, form fields and CTAs are one of the best ways to convert traffic into leads, then leads into customers.
How Best to Convert Traffic Into Leads?
Unfortunately, there’s no one magic formula to convert traffic into leads for your business website. But if you don’t get the kind of lead volume you want, it’s time to try up some new things on your website to improve your conversion rate. It’s that age old phrase about the definition of insanity. That doing the same thing or essentially just leaving your website and hoping for something different, won’t work. You need to improve your CTAs, your content, and a host of other things to try to improve your lead volume. And if you try something and it doesn’t work the way you hope, then try something new. At least you learned and can grow from the new information.
For Boostability, we can help with Conversion Rate Optimization. But we can also help implement all these things for your customers if you’re a digital agency. We are a white label SEO company that can optimize and improve websites and improve lead volume. Get in touch today to learn more!
