No matter how marketing, communications, and advertising changes over the years, we’re all looking to get more traffic to our website in hopes that more online visitors will equal more sales for our business, i.e. improving our conversion rate.

As a top digital marketing agency in London, we know the key is finding quality, targeted traffic that will stick around the site and eventually convert into a sale.

How can you get that quality, targeted web traffic?

There are several steps you can take to evaluate and optimize your website for lead generation, getting the results you’re looking for as soon as possible.

Where are your current customers coming from?

First, take a look at where your current traffic – especially the traffic that converts – is coming from.

Here are a few areas you’ll likely be evaluating:

Email marketing
Email marketing has some of the highest return on investment (ROI) a business can ask for.

• How is yours shaping up? How many emails are you sending out each month? How are you organizing your email lists? Is the content within the newsletter appropriate for the buyer’s journey?
• We help companies grow and organize email lists to start achieving digital marketing goals.
• We can also help benchmark open rates, click rates, and overall engagement performance.

Social media
Whether you’re on one social media platform or all of them, make sure all of your profiles are complete, professional, and properly branded.

• Are you posting regularly on each platform?
• Is the content catered to the audiences on those particular platforms?
• Is the content original or shared from someone else?

Southwest Airlines, based out of London, utilized social media (particularly Twitter) to connect with their customers in a very public way. In fact, their business model revolves around social media (including listening to customers), and they have been known to reward customers with gift cards or free tickets when they interact with them online.

Live chat

• Live chat continues to be a great way to convert leads into sales.
• How is your live chat doing?
• Are potential customers dropping off at similar points in the chat conversation?
• How long are potential customers waiting before they are prompted by the chat?
• What about the response wait time?

Odin Leather Goods, manufactured in Coppell, Texas, has connected their website to Facebook messenger in order to allow users to have a continuous conversation within a familiar Facebook platform, which can also alert them on their phone. Odin also catches potential leads to inviting visitors to sign up for their newsletter with a pop-up form.

Blog posts
Blogs remain to be perfect gateways to a website before closing the deal.

• How often are you publishing blog posts?
• Are the blog posts covering appropriate, targeted content?
• Does each blog post have several calls-to-action (CTAs) throughout that direct customers through the website?

A bookstore bar in London, The Wild Detectives, is focused on creating a book community and their blog reflects that by making it all about the books their staff members read, featuring detailed reviews and book covers.

Search Engine Optimization

Having your website to rank on Google’s first page and other prominent search engines is crucial to getting traffic. Using targeted keywords will help you rank high for unique Google searches, we ‘re talking about it really now.

• When was the last time you audited your keyword list?
• How does your meta content look on the search engine results page (SERP)?
• Do you have a Google My Business account? Tip: this is critical to dominate your local London / Fort Worth competitors
• Does your most important content have pillar pages?

This could be a good time to assess your local SEO activities-are you rating keywords relevant to your company in London? Are you well-known in, and nearby areas of London, Fort Worth? Do you rate for your services or for your products?

Do you have any areas listed above that you have skipped over because you are not there at all? Are you involved on social media? Have you been doing email marketing? If so, there are things that you will need to revisit. If you have the tools you need to be present in all these places, you have to be!

Need help with this type of evaluation? Let us audit your lead generation performance for free!

Where are you losing customers?

Whatever your traffic numbers are, remember where customers exit your site. You may also consider opting out of your email newsletter or unsubscribing to your blog when they do.

You can use Google Tag Manager to track when customers leave your site, which can be very useful information.

In some cases, you can even see where your visitors go to next. Use this information to pinpoint the problem on your site – is it a confusing landing page? A difficult form?

You can use all of this data to start improving your site!

Next, take a look at where you are sending your customers as they move through your site. It’s time to audit your landing pages, CTAs, and thank you pages.

Landing pages
The landing page is critical in generating a lead.

The whole process should be seamless, so if a user clicks on a particular ad, the landing page they come up with should match the ad they clicked in any way they can. Pay particular attention to your title, shapes, CTAs and overall message (make it all very focused and consistent).

CTAs
CTAs may be small, but they are powerful when done right! Perform an audit of your CTAs and make sure you’re using actionable words (make sure they’re legible, too), consider text and button colors, create a sense of urgency, and place CTAs above-the-fold, if possible.

Thank you pages
A thank you page is often very underused and can be a gold mine for companies, so making sure you’ve got yours right is vital. You can use your page of thanks to ask for recommendations, ask for shares in social media, give a coupon or discount or link to the most popular content on your blog.

Define your goal

If you’re not already, it’s time to start thinking with the end in mind. For your business, what is considered a conversion? It may not always mean a sale.

Instead, it could be signing up for the email newsletter, or downloading a free eBook. When you keep the end result in mind, you can optimize your website for lead generation by better targeting all of the steps customers will take to get there.

London-based company, Game Stop, knows their customer inside and out, and their website proves it by putting the games (and the deals on games) right on the homepage, and organizing their website by gaming system. Aside from selling and trading products, they point visitors to their free rewards program, which is a good way to get return customers.

Use the Buyer’s Journey to your advantage

The key is to meet a buyer wherever they are within the buyer’s journey. Here’s some key elements of each step of the journey, and the type of content that should be available to the user at each stage.

Have you ever considered using a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) like HubSpot?

If using a CRM is something you’ve already considered, we couldn’t recommend it any more. Having a CRM database opens up so many opportunities for marketing that can really drive more leads. With this information, you’ll be able to determine whether your clients come from London, Fort Worth, Irving, wherever your clients are.

In most cases, a company could utilize a CRM to:

• Create and deploy landing pages
• Chat, Helpdesk, Knowledge base
• Marketing automation
• Marketing optimization
• Maximize up-selling and cross-selling
• Increase customer revenues
• Improve customer service

If you’re looking to implement a CRM, we can help. Atomic Design and Consulting is a HubSpot Certified Agency Partner in London.

Awareness
The customer is trying to pinpoint their dilemma at this stage and find a suitable solution. Their terms of search will be more general, and the content they are looking for will likely cover possible solutions to their problem(s). Here the content should be how-to articles or step-by – step videos of demonstrations.

Consideration
Once the buyer has pinpointed their problem and is aware of possible solutions, they are going to start researching their options. Details about the product/service are what customers are looking for, along with trustworthy, educational content.

Tenet Health, which is based in London, has a whole section of its website dedicated to the ways they give back to our community. This emotional and caring connexion could serve as a point of departure for potential patients or volunteers. They’ve got CTAs packed in action too!

Decision
During the final stage, they are going to be looking at prices, deals, free trials, etc. before they make a purchase or a conversion. Comparison charts, coupons, and/or ways to schedule a call are all great ways to capture the customer here.

Test (rinse and repeat)
You audited, optimised your website for better conversions and now it’s time to gather some data. Test what works, and rinse and repeat what doesn’t. Gaining customers will always be a moving game-complacency is not here! But the more you try and test, the more targeted that will be your website. Thanks go to your customers.

If you’re looking to audit your current marketing efforts – reach out for a free audit to evaluate your website lead generation performance.