7 Ideas to Generate More Leads From Your Website

If you’re looking for ideas to generate more leads from your website, then you’ve come to the right place.  In this article, I’ll walk through 7 tactics that nearly every business can use that will convert your website from a passive brochure into a 24/7 lead generating machine.

Before we get into the tactics, it’s important to understand there are two very different types of website visitors:

    Buyers – Buyers are visiting your website to learn more about your product or service in order to make a buying decision in the near future.  They know what they’re looking for and are are ready to pull the trigger as long as your product or service fits their criteria.

    Browsers – Browsers are visiting your website to learn more about your product or service, but they aren’t ready to buy.  They are interested, but don’t know if they really need what you’re offering.

Of course we all want more buyers, but the reality at any given time is that the vast majority of your website visitors are browsers.  This is a key insight that leads us to one of the most important jobs of your website, which is to capture contact information from as many visitors as possible.  That way you can follow up with both buyers and browsers until they are finally ready to buy.

With this in mind, let’s dive into the tactics to capture more of your visitors’ contact information.  We’ll start with the basic tactics and move our way to the more advanced tactics at the end.

1. Add a General Contact Form

This may come as a surprise, but I still see websites that don’t have a general contact form.  I guarantee these websites are missing out on potential sales from visitors that would have submitted the contact form with basic buying questions.

For example, many people do research during non-business hours when calling is not an option.  In this case, it’s easier to complete a website contact form to get an answer to a question that could ultimately lead to a purchase.

If you do not have a general contact form, then this is one of the easiest ways to start generating more leads from your website.


2. Add Product or Service Specific Forms

The next step once you have your general contact form set up is to create product or service specific forms.  For example, on your product or service description page, add a “request a quote” or “request a demo” or “schedule an appointment” form to capture the contact information from buyers interested in that particular product or service.

The leads from these more specific forms will tend to be higher quality and further along the buying process compared to leads from your general contact form.


3. Add a Lead Magnet

Once you have the first two types of forms installed on your website, then it’s time to switch gears and focus on capturing contact information from all of those browsers.  Again, browsers aren’t ready to buy right now so they are not likely going to request a quote or ask a buying question on your general contact form.

Therefore, we need to take a different approach by using what’s called a “lead magnet.”  A lead magnet is something valuable (information, coupons, access to a tool) that you can offer on your website for free, in exchange for contact information.  For example, our homepage lead magnet is the Internet Marketing Survival Guide.  Plus, we offer other free tools like an SEO checklist and an AdWords checklist.

As you can see in these examples, the key is to offer something relevant and valuable to your target market in exchange for at least an email address so you can follow up.


4. Use a 2-Step Checkout Process

If you have an e-commerce website, then this is a great way to start generating more leads immediately.

As you probably know, every e-commerce website suffers from shopping cart abandonment, which is when buyers go through the process of adding products to their shopping cart, but don’t end up completing the order.  On many e-commerce websites, the order form is the last step and it’s also the only form that collects the customer’s contact information.  Therefore, when shoppers abandon their carts, you have no contact information to follow up. That is the case, unless you use a 2-step checkout process.

Simply add a step right before the final checkout page to collect a little information like name and email address.  Then after the 1st step is complete, the customer is redirected to the final checkout page to complete the order.  If the customer does not complete the final form, then you can use the contact information you collected on the 1st step to follow up and close the sale.


5. Add Online Chat

I’m sure everyone is familiar with online chat.  There are two types of chat that you can use: Live and Automated.  Live chat is obviously when a live person is chatting with the website visitor.  Automated chat is pre-programmed to answer frequently asked questions from visitors, which can save you time and money (but also can frustrate visitors that have more unique questions).

Generally, I recommend businesses test out live chat during regular business hours as yet another way to capture contact information from leads.


6. Add an Exit Popup

Have you ever tried to leave a website and you were quickly presented with a popup window explaining a special offer?  That’s an exit popup.

Exit popups are a last ditch effort to capture contact information from a visitor about to leave your website (possibly forever).  For example, you can use a lead magnet exit popup to present a free offer or a special coupon, you can offer live chat to get the visitor’s questions answered, or you can offer a free quote or demo.


7. Add a Lightbox

The final tactic is to use what’s called a “lightbox.”  A lightbox is the more user friendly version of the old pop-up window.  With a lightbox, the form is presented on top of the webpage the visitor was reading.  This is a more advanced tactic because you need to be careful about where you use the lightbox and how frequently the lightbox appears for visitors.  Obviously it’s important to balance the pros of capturing contact information versus the cons of annoying potential buyers.

5 Reasons to Ignore SEO

SEO used to be the central pillar in any online marketing campaign. Your website’s search visibility was the sole indicator of online success. Though search visibility is obviously still very important to most businesses, things aren’t as simple or "clear cut" as they used to be.

Online visibility is now about so much more than search. With the dramatic growth of the social Web, and the new ways we can now analyze our traffic and results, should we still be focusing on SEO as a primary marketing avenue? Or is our obsession with search visibility blinding us to other, more useful channels?

This article is about playing devil’s advocate. Of course, I’m not suggesting that you should stop all SEO activity. Rather, I want to highlight the other opportunities that you may be missing that have nothing to do with SEO. Here are my top five:

1. Content

Most marketers approach content creation from a firm SEO standpoint. Each piece of content must have a clear and direct SEO benefit.

Though I do agree that if you are going to create great content you might as well spend some time making sure it’s created in line with SEO best practices, I don’t think SEO should be your primary motivation for creating great content.

One of the most important shifts over the last few years has been from the SEO-centric approach to content to the "user-centric" approach that Google now richly rewards. The brief is simple: create great content. Decide on your topics based on what your readers and customers want to read or watch, not what will help your SEO the most.

If you can always make sure that the first 90 percent of the content creation process is informed solely by your desire to create high-value content for your audience, then at the last minute, implement a few SEO best practices, you’re going to be much better placed than if the content was driven by SEO from the outset.

The main advantage of this approach is that it ensures that you are creating content that will see a high success rate through all your other marketing channels, whether that’s social, email, or paid advertising. Every day the search engines improve their ability to identify the content that their users love. The recent announcement that tweets are going to be appearing in our SERPs (again) shows that this trend is only going to continue. For marketers, the message is clear: create content that your visitors love, and your search visibility will take care of itself.

2. User Behavior

If you’re reading this it’s likely that you already have at least some traffic to your website. Sure, you want more visitors, but is that the most effective way to increase your sales, engagement, and conversions?

More traffic is the sole aim of most online businesses. After all, if you double your traffic, you’ll double your sales, right? Well, maybe. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best use of your time.

In almost all cases, increasing traffic is often more expensive and resource hungry than simply increasing your conversion rate. Let’s say you have 1,000 visitors to your e-commerce site each month through search. Your conversion rate is around 2 percent so you make around 20 sales each month. If you were to heavily invest in SEO and, as a result, increase your search visibility by 100 percent, six to 12 months later you would get 2,000 visitors. Your conversion rate stays the same and you make 40 sales. Though it’s difficult to argue that these results are anything less than a great achievement, there are other ways to increase your sales.

There are so many ways to directly and indirectly increase your conversion rates. Everything from increasing your site speed, improving your Web copy, and improving your site’s mobile user experience to something as simple as the color scheme can have a noticeable and direct impact on your conversion rate. Changing a single word or switching the color of your CTA button can increase the conversion rate on a page by more than 100 percent!

By split testing each of your landing pages you can reliably and consistently increase your conversion rate. If this isn’t something you already do on a regular basis, it’s very likely that there are lots of easy wins that you’ve been ignoring. If you do it right, you can probably increase your conversion rate by as much as 300 percent.

Let’s go back to our example. Rather than using all your resources on SEO and increasing your traffic, let’s say you focus on increasing your on-site conversion rates. By increasing site speed, improving your sales copy, and split testing your CTAs, you manage to increase your conversion rate on your main sales page to 6 percent. Your traffic stays the same (1,000 visitors per month), but you see 60 sales. Now that’s a real result.

3. The Social Web

This is probably the most obvious example of how you can increase your traffic without SEO. The social Web has opened up literally thousands of possible traffic sources. One well-targeted, well-timed post, tweet, or pin can result in traffic spikes that most servers will struggle with.

With developments like the integration of tweets in the SERPs and the traffic opportunities offered by LinkedIn Pulse, social media is clearly going to continue rivalling SEO as the most important traffic source.

4. Paid Advertising

The effectiveness and relevance of paid advertising is largely dependent on what sector you’re in. However, most marketers and SEOs don’t give it the credit it deserves.

Paid advertising allows you to go out and get the specific traffic you want. The data, targeting, and immediacy that paid advertising gives you make it an important weapon in any marketer’s arsenal.
Most marketers dismiss paid advertising due to the CPC costs of their primary keywords. Instead, they pour all their resources into ranking organically for these terms. While this is a good long-term strategy, ignoring PPC will deny you many key benefits.

While you are building your organic rankings, paid advertising offers a unique testing opportunity. By running a paid campaign, in just a few days you have the ability to gather more data than you might see in months of organic traffic. This means that, by the time you begin to rank organically, your landing pages can be fully optimized and the quality of your search traffic will be full validated.
Another advantage of paid advertising working alongside organic SEO is the "reinforcement effect." If you are ranking organically, above the fold, and you also have an ad in the top positions in the SERPs, your click-through rate on both these listings are likely to be much higher than if you just had one. The reason for this is that, by having two listings above the fold, you reinforce the trust that Google’s users will associate with your site. Trust me, it works!

5. Traditional PR

Press releases have long been a reliable link-building channel for many SEOs. Obviously, the direct SEO benefits of links from press releases, especially if they are low-quality, are limited at best. However, that doesn’t mean that press releases and outreach don’t have value.

Traditional PR can have many positive crossovers for SEO and online marketing in general. For example, by using a press release as it is intended – to get your news out to the wider world – marketers can see huge spikes in traffic, engagement, and opportunities. If you can get your story picked up by journalists, whether they work for a print or online publication, and if people are writing about your business, it is going to result in traffic, links, and strong social signals.

If you can rethink the way you approach the press and traditional PR, they can bring great results.

Summary

The increasingly integrated nature of the Web means that things are never going to be as simple and clear-cut as they used to be. We’re all going to have to explore new marketing channels and continue to measure different metrics as the Web and user behavior evolves.

I hope this article has given you a few ideas to start exploring ways to increase your results without even thinking about SEO. Have you got other channels that you use? Have you found some "easy wins" that you’re happy to share? Let me know in the comments below.

Spy vs. Spy: 4 Tips to Use Auction Insights for Smarter PPC

Have your CPCs been rising, or your conversion volume declining overtime? If so, your competitors may be making moves. Tracking and analyzing your PPC performance is critical, and you can’t truly know how you’re doing without an account analysis tool like Auction Insights. This tool will give you a benchmark for your performance, and then show you how you stack up against competitors. 

This is information that can help you make smart decisions – and ultimately lead you to the "winning" side of things.

Today we’re looking at:

1. Where to find the Auction Insights tool, and which metrics (fields) in the tool will be most helpful
2. 3 tips to help you focus your efforts
3. An example of one advanced use of the tool

3 Sources of Change: Account, Search Behavior, and Competition

Driving performance in digital marketing is about learning from change. Be excited when metrics in your account change, because good or bad, it’s an opportunity to learn. Hopefully your tests are driving the change. Improved landing page? Should see an increase in conversion rate. Create a kick-butt ad? Hope to see an increase in click-through rate.
Before jumping into competitive analysis, it’s important to rule out the other sources of change. Good news, though there are hundreds of factors that can cause change, there are three fundamental sources of performance changes. And there are easy to use tools to troubleshoot each source.

Source of Change	Examples	Troubleshooting Tool
1. Account	Increase bids drive position and click volume Add keywords Change targeting settings Keyword disapproval	Change History
2. Consumer search behavior	Fewer searches due to weekend More searches due to seasonal event News event drives spike in searches Gradual shift in search or buying behavior	Top Mover Traffic in Bing Ad Intelligence
3. Competitors	Agressive bids Decreased budget showing fewer impressions	Auction Insights

Account changes are easy to undo. You can’t change consumer search behavior without significant investment. What about competition? You can’t control the competition, but you can react to it.

Symptoms of Increased Competition

The symptoms of increased competition can show up in a number of ways. The most common symptoms of increased competition are:

1. Higher CPC driving a higher CPA (if your conversion rate is lower that’s usually something else)
2. Lower position driving lower conversion and click volume

If you see one of these problems, that’s where Auction Insights comes in.

Where to Find the Auction Insights Tool in the UI

The tool is available right in your "Keywords" tab, under the "Details" menu in both the Google AdWords and Bing Ads UI. You can generate a report for keywords, ad group, or campaign, as long as you’ve met a minimum threshold of activity.

Now that you’ve found the report, let’s go through a few tips to help you get the most of it.

Tip #1: Use Auction Insights One Keyword at a Time at First

A common rookie move is loading the tool with all 3,000 of your keywords. More than a handful of keywords can be misleading – the data is based on impressions, a single high-volume impression keyword with a different set of keywords a cloud the data. Drilling into the top terms will give you a solid picture of the competitive landscape. Typically, you’ll want to analyze your top-performing or top-priority keywords from brand terms to keywords you just added because your CMO says it’s a must.

When possible analyze one keyword at a time.

Tip #2: Use Competitive Metrics for Identifying Your Top Competition

Now that you’ve picked your keyword(s), it’s important you know what you’re looking at. The two important competitive benchmarking metrics that show up in the auction insights report are Overlap Rate and Position Above Rate. Use them to monitor progress, but also to identify your competition.

• Overlap Rate – Tells you the percentage of time competitors’ ads showed up on the search results page when your ad was shown. The higher your overlap rate, the more competition you face from their competitor. Any competition that share an Overlap Rate of more than 25 percent, pay attention to.
• Position Above Rate – The percentage of time competitors’ ads showed up higher than your ads on the search results page. The more they’re above you, the more work you’ve got to do.
• Impression Share - One of my favorite metrics, Impression Share, will tell you what share of searches you’re showing up for. If your impression share is low pull a Share of Voice report to get specific details on what you should change.

Tip #3: Be Aware of Your Quality Score

And remember, a huge chunk of quality score is a competitive CTR benchmark – how well is your ad performing versus the competition. So combining quality score and auction insights is powerful.
If your quality score is 10/10 for the keyword, you have little room for improvement in CTR. Focus on bids and targeting. If your quality score is 2/10, focus on better ads, negatives, and potentially restructuring the campaign.

Pro Tip: Compare Different Time Frames on the Same Keyword

In addition to providing look in to the previously-mentioned metrics, the Auction Insights report can be a valuable tool in troubleshooting the occasional CPA spike at the Keyword, Ad Group, or even Campaign level. This is best done by identifying inflection points in your account performance- points where your CPA takes a noticeable turn for the worse, in this case.
Like so:


In this particular account, we’ve identified that CPA performance for this keyword has taken a jump starting on January 16. We see a brief relapse back to our normal CPA for this keyword, but as of the last seven days, it went haywire. There are no bid, budget, or targeting changes on our end to account for this, so what happened?

Here’s the Auction Insights report from before the CPA increase, looking at January 12 – January 18.

And after, looking at January 19 – 25…

And we see an immediate difference in our competitive landscape. While we see Competitor #4 dropping out of the marketplace, we have five new competitors entering the space to replace them.

In addition, several of our existing competitors have become more aggressive – Competitors #1, #2, and #5 all see an increase in both Overlap Rate and Position Above Rate – meaning that we’re competing against them more often, and they’re now showing above us more often, too. Recognizing what’s going on here helps us understand the CPA spike, and how we should or shouldn’t respond.
Combining Auction Insights in different time periods gives you incredible insights.