Comprehensive website overhauls are declining in popularity as ongoing website optimization becomes mandatory in progressive inbound marketing. This is a trend that you need to keep up with, whether in your inbound program or agency program. If you’re not optimizing your website marketing strategy every month, you’ll be disappointed in your lead generation results.
A lack of ongoing conversion optimization is commonly found when we’re evaluating an existing inbound marketing effort. While the website is typically front and center around optimization, optimization activities should be deployed around content creation, search engine optimization, email marketing, lead nurturing campaigns and social media marketing. The only way to ensure you’re getting optimal results is to optimize all aspects of your program every month.
Here are some areas in which to focus initial website optimization efforts:
Landing page optimization
Identify the top-performing landing pages. These are the pages with the most visitors coming to them, regardless of the source. Then, look at the conversion results from these pages. Landing pages can convert at an upward of 60 percent, so if you’re seeing conversion rates below this, opportunity for improvement exists.
Highly trafficked pages that are converting at 10 percent offer an incredible opportunity to double, triple or even quadruple the leads flowing from that page with a simple series of upgrade tests. Landing pages that are converting at 30 percent still offer an opportunity to drive leads. Make sure you know what upgrades to test. Making changes to the form, rewriting the headline, adding images, changing the copy to shorter or more bulleted text and removing the navigation are all upgrades that improve results.
Home page conversion
Today, home pages can be long, scrolling packages of information that never tell a story, never connect with your prospects and never convert visitors into leads. Look at your home page like a story, and give it a beginning, middle and end. Make sure the home page has the right conversion offers that turn visitors into customers.
Consider using heat-mapping software like Hotjar to see exactly what visitors are doing on your home page. Are visitors getting all the way to the bottom of the page? This is important when pages are long with a lot of content. Where are they clicking? This is also important when you have a lot of clickable content on your home page.
These types of software and analytical tools help you make subtle changes quickly to impact results in days instead of weeks or months.
Blog subscription optimization
Blogging is so important to search engine optimization that you’ll probably overlook the importance of getting people to subscribe to your blog. While blogging for Google is fine, blogging for Google and actual readers is even better.
The only way to do that is to actively promote the blog across a variety of pages on your website. Start by putting blog subscription CTA buttons on your top-of-the-funnel, awareness stage pages. Most blog readers are looking for educational information and thought leadership, so this is exactly the type of content your blog should be producing.
Content mapping to specific pages
This is one of the most frequently overlooked website optimization tactics. Not all pages on your website are created equally. Some pages need to be designed specifically for those in the “awareness” stage of their buyer journey. These pages need to have content that helps people in this stage understand that you have solutions to their challenges.
You’ll also need pages and content for people in the “consideration” stage. These people are aware of the options and are considering a variety of them. Make sure this content educates your visitors about the differences between their options.
Finally, you’ll need content for people who are very close to making a decision. This decision-making stage includes content that helps visitors answer very specific questions. These questions may include “Who will I be working with?” and “How will the service be delivered if I choose your company?”
Each of these stages needs different types of content. The better you are at content mapping, the more leads you’ll generate.
Visitor source optimization
We talked a lot about how to optimize website pages, but you also want to optimize the visitors coming to your website. You do this by making sure you have programs that bring organic search visitors, referring website visitors, social media site visitors, email visitors and direct traffic. If you work on all these sources, you’ll see a nice lift in total visitors.
These are merely a handful of website optimization ideas to get you started. The real secret of lead generation is ongoing optimization that is operationalized and delivered consistently month over month. A simple 10 percent improvement in website visitors every month for 12 months delivers a substantial year-over-year improvement.
To make sure your optimization is executing, try this cycle. First analyze the data, then review the data with your team for insights, move on to creating a series of experiments or tests that you can use to respond to the data and finally deploy the tests in an action plan to ensure you’re working to improve results every single month.
Eric Keiles is CMO of Square 2 Marketing, a leading inbound marketing and lead generation agency. Come see him at The Car Wash Show 2017.
