What happens after you launch a website?
Maybe it has been a few months, maybe even a few years, since you pressed that button to make it real. Now you want to take that plunge and refresh it—either to change the look and feel, or overhaul the content. Maybe you’ve heard a bunch of the latest industry buzzwords like content marketing, marketing automation, online lead generation.
Getting your online business up to speed doesn’t have to be a daunting task, and often, it may not even require a complete overhaul of your current website. Here are some quick tasks to get you moving in the right direction:
1. Analytics Audit
If your site has some sort of analytics measurement tool for tracking visitors and pageviews, take a quick look at it. If you aren’t sure off the top of your head, ask your web developer or in some cases, your hosting provider.
We’ll keep this simple, find out what the top 15-20 pages are on your website. These are the pages where significant changes will likely have an impact on your site’s traffic.
2. Search Data Audit
Take a look at Google’s Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) for your site. If you haven’t ever set this up, it only takes a couple of minutes if you have access to your site or domain name registration.
If not, get a hold of your web developer, it should only take them a couple minutes to help out. If they give you grief, you might want to find a new developer. Search Console gives you a quick insight into the search terms people are using to find your site on Google.
3. Contact Audit
Take a look at your site. Do you have a contact form? Is your phone number easy to find. If you are active on social media, do you have links to those profiles?
Make sure the contact methods you have on your site are all still active. Fill out the contact form. Click to send an email if you have an email displayed. Call the phone number. If any of this data is out-of-date or broken, get it fixed.
4. Find Underperforming Pages.
Can you spruce up keyword based content on those pages? The length of the written content? Are there interactive elements you can add such as YouTube or Facebook videos?
5. The Call-To-Action
Let’s face it, the reason you are in business is because you have a unique skill.
You know something about your industry that sets you apart. It may be second nature to you. You might even think it is obvious.
Take a minute and write out a couple quick sentences on how or what you do that makes you unique. Is this something you could offer as a download? Do you have free offer you typically use in your sales process? Consider crafting a call-to-action along the lines of:
- “Download our 8 tips to simplify ACA filings”
- “Sign up for a no-obligation free trial”
- “4 Ways to get your website back in action”
Next, take these call-to-action statements and place them on your top pages (you may need your web developer’s heal).
Link through to a contact form to collect relevant personal information (name, email, phone, etc.) and include a disclaimer that by filling out the form they are agreeing to be contacted via email or phone in exchange for your offer.
6. Email Marketing
Take these new leads and add them to your email marketing list.
Don’t have one? Email marketing is still the number 1 channel for web-based leads. We’ll cover this in a future post.
Once you’ve gotten this far, you are ready to start enhancing these steps with some more advanced tactics:
- Split testing headlines & calls-to-action to see what words/offers are more attractive to your audience.
- Running a survey on your site to ask your visitor what they like about your site and what information or content may be missing.
- Running heatmap tests to see, in aggregate, how your visitors are moving about the page; where they click, where they scroll, etc.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we’ve performed a couple simple audits to your site to uncover any problem areas. We’ve uncovered the top pages in your site, and have given you a minor task to freshen up the content on under-traffic pages. Finally, we’ve taken baby steps to get your website to actually work for you. Welcome to the lead generation era.
Unsure about your company website’s performance? Improve the quality and impact of your online marketing with the help of proven lead generation tactics.