Four Strategies to Generate Website Leads
If you have a business, you have a website, it’s a necessity. But beyond having a website is the need to make it work for you by pulling in visitors and leads day after day, week after week and month after month.
Done properly, your website will act as your best sales representative for your business….a well-oiled machine that works for you day and night to talk with and answer questions for prospective customers and clients.
With information growing on the Internet at an exponential rate, the key to generating leads these days is content that is contextual — *focused* on the buyer personas that your business is targeting.
And to do this, it pays to take the time to drill down to answer some important questions, such as:
- Who exactly are you trying to reach?
- Who are the people that are looking for your business?
What your business offers IS the answer to what thousands of people are looking for. But unless you play by the rules of traffic generation, a website can be likened to a quarter floating in outer space…it’s very difficult to find. Prospective customers are not going to find you unless you pull traffic to your site by appearing in search engine results.
Below are the four overarching strategies that can be used to “get found” and pull in lead-rich traffic.
Lead Generation Strategy No. 1: Do Keyword Research
You can liken keyword research to a building’s foundation — it’s the most important part of the entire project. Nothing meaningful or lasting can be built on top of it until this portion of the structure is solid.
In order to conduct keyword research, you must have a solid understanding of your business and your target market.
Some questions to ask are:
- What target market are we trying to capture the attention of?
- Who would benefit from purchasing our product or service?
- What benefits does our product hold for potential customers?
- What questions is our target audience asking?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you can start in on keyword research by using one of the many free keyword research tools available online.
Lead Generation Strategy No. 2: Place Keywords in the Meta Tags of Your Website
Similarly to the way that humans see the world (by sight) and what they perceive in their minds, search engines have a way of “seeing” and interpreting data through the code that’s on the back end of a website. This code is written into meta tags (also know as meta data). Search engines read this data and then index or file the website accordingly so that their users will be able to find it.
In order for your website / business to “get found” in search engine results, it must be indexed properly. In order for it to be indexed properly, it must contain the correct data.
Since there is a proper way to populate a website’s meta data, we recommend that you read an article from an industry leader before you start. Here’s a great article from Search Engine Journal on how to maximize your website’s meta tags for better SEO and click-through rates (for those companies that participate in Google AdWords).
Lead Generation Strategy No. 3: Write Content
Once you’ve come up with your keyword strategy, start writing content that focuses on these keywords….both in your blog and across the main pages of your website.
Everytime you create a piece of content, Google (and Bing, Yahoo! and other search engines) are notified. Why? Because their algorithm solves for websites that are consistently adding new content.
New content signifies that a business is tuned-in and involved. And since search engines are relied upon for providing valuable results to their users, they “reward” websites that publish fresh content by giving them high search engine rankings. In other words, if a website is adding fresh content on a regular basis, this signifies that it’s highly likely that their user will be able to find what he is looking for.
If you’re not sure what to write about, here’s a great idea about how an FAQ page can help with SEO from a fellow HubSpot partner, The Sales Lion’s Marcus Sheridan.
The articles that you will be writing are basically an in-depth way of answering frequently asked questions (FAQs). And when your business comes up in search engine results, they’ll see that it’s you that can provide the answers and they’ll look to you as a resource.
Keep writing – at least once a week – the more content, the better — you will continue to garner more “online real estate”.
The more traffic you generate, the more potential leads you’ll have. Make sure that your website provides clear ways to get in touch with you by using “Call to Action” buttons (like the one at the bottom of this page). And include something that an applicant can download, such as an e-book about all of the reasons why someone would want to attend your school.
Soon enough, you’ll see a healthy amount of leads coming in in order to increase your applicant rate.
Lead Generation Strategy No. 4: Give Visitors a Way to Get in Touch With You
As mentioned above, once these visitors are on your page, give them a clear way to get in touch with you…as well as a way for you to keep in touch with them. This can be done by through an opt-in box on the website, through an RSS feed, or via social media.
Once they fill out a form on your site, providing their name, and e-mail address, you’ll be able to keep in touch by sending them more material via e-mail over a period of time that answers more “research-related” questions.
E-mail marketing has been shown to be one of the lead generation strategies that’s extremely effective in keeping schools top of mind while leads are still in their “research” phase. If you can get to them at that point, and keep in touch, it’s likely that they’ll choose you over the other options.
Lastly – Rinse & Repeat!
These lead generation strategies are pretty clear cut:
a.) Do keyword research and use it as a guide for content creation across your website.
b.) Label the meta tags on your website accordingly.
c.) Write prospect-focused blog posts and website content on a regular basis.
d.) Give visitors a way to keep in touch with you so that you can continue to provide high-value content and advice week after week and month after month.
