This is a guest post by Brad Shorr. He is the Director of Content Strategy at Straight North. Shorr has more than 25 years in sales and marketing, and has been featured in leading online publications, including Forbes, Moz, and Webdesigner Depot.
When it comes to web design, if you’ll pardon the indulgence, it seems too many businesses follow the credo of Billy Crystal’s lounge lizard character from the ancient ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketches: “It is better to look good than to feel good.”
A splashy website design is all they think is needed to draw visitors to their sites and make them convert. Although it’s true that the aesthetics of a website play an important role in its effectiveness, the web design skills that are required to build an effective lead generation website have to go much deeper than that. There is nothing wrong with looking good, but your website has to be engineered to feel good to the visitor, too.
Key characteristics for a powerful lead generation website
At Straight North, a Chicago-based SEO and PPC marketing agency, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve our clients’ performance when it comes to their lead generation websites. Through our experience and expertise, we have identified some of the most common characteristics of high performance lead generation websites. These are often small but crucial elements that can be found “under the hood” of websites. Just because they may not be immediately visible to visitors doesn’t mean they’re not influencing visitors’ drive to become customers, however.
We’ve identified five major categories of characteristics that powerful lead generation websites all seem to have in common – usability, mobile design, SEO, copywriting and conversion. These characteristics tend not to draw attention, but they work behind the scenes as a visitor peruses a website, and influences the visitor’s decision to do business with the owner.
Usability of your website
Usability affects a visitor’s ability to seamlessly navigate a website and easily find what they’re looking for. Common elements found in pages with strong usability include good use of white space, fast loading and design that optimizes the display on any type of screen. Optimal mobile design is essential for grabbing the growing number of visitors who access sites from their phones or other mobile devices, and common elements include sticky navigation elements and ample anchor text.
SEO is more than just keywords
SEO goes beyond dumping keywords into a site’s text, and should involve a great deal of research and optimized body content. That leads into the copywriting element of a successful lead generation webpage. Copywriting needs to be informative, persuasive and relevant as well as optimized for SEO performance. The ideal copy for a lead generation website combines all of these things in a format that’s also highly sharable, prompting visitors to pass it along to other interested parties.
It’s also crucial that typography be considered when optimizing copywriting on a website, as the right typography can make it even easier for visitors to scan a page and find what they’re looking for right away.
Convert your customers
Finally, a strong lead generation software or website must be designed to convert as early and as often as possible. This includes prominent calls to action, and a quick and easy form submission process. However, a well-optimized lead generation process doesn’t end with capturing form submissions – it’s about what happens next.
Tools like Chili Piper have gained popularity for managing lead routing and scheduling directly from your website. Fortunately, you don’t have to limit yourself – there are plenty of Chili Piper alternatives available that can optimize these processes – offering features like automated follow-ups, round-robin scheduling, and analytics to optimize your conversion strategy.
The following white paper goes into more detail about the most common characteristics high performance lead generation websites share. Take a look, and learn what you can do to make sure your website feels as good as it looks to visitors.
Want More?
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Written by DesignCrowd on Monday, March 27, 2017
DesignCrowd is an online marketplace providing logo, website, print and graphic design services by providing access to freelance graphic designers and design studios around the world.