Conversion Rate Web Marketing Blog 

This is part 2 of our article on The 7 Keys of High Conversion Lead Generation Websites.

Key 5 :- Design for conversion

A website that is designed for conversion will be:

• Easy to read - why do so many designers hate words? I say that because so many of them try to hide your text by making it tiny, grey and putting it on a white background
• Easy to scan - highlight keywords and concepts, use good headlines and sub-headlines, bullet points, short paragraphs and short sentences
• Easy to navigate - It will be intuitive so that your visitors won’t have to think about where to find things
• Easy to act on - Phone numbers, contact details and contact forms will be built into the logical flow of your website content. On a high conversion lead generation website these things will never be sacrificed for aesthetics.

A good lead generation website is designed for content and designed for conversion. It’s not designed for other designers or to be judged at website design awards (did they go the way of the dodo?).

Key 6 :- Get website traffic from the right places

From a conversion perspective not all website visitors are equal. For instance, if your product is only available in Australia then there’s no point in getting traffic from India.

If your product is only for Architects, be sure that they are the ones who are going to come to your website. So you might advertise your website in the local Architects journal. You might decide to use Search Engine Optimisation to get traffic to your website from Google, but you would target the terms and keywords that Architects are likely to use in a search.

If you get website traffic from the wrong sources, your conversion rates will be low.

If you get people coming to your website who are likely to be interested in your services, then your conversion rates will naturally be higher. Concentrate on getting traffic that’s likely to convert.

Key 7 :- Active measurement and continual improvement

A high conversion lead generation website is never really finished. High website conversion rates rise out of continual measurement and improvement.

You need to be continually monitoring your website to know the answers to these questions:

• How many visitors are coming to my website?
• Where are they coming from?
  
• How many leads am I getting?
• What’s my conversion rate?
• Where are the best leads coming from?

You can easily get the answers to all of these questions from your website and your website analytics software. If you want a high converting lead generation website then this must be your priority. At a minimum you need to monitor this every month.

Oh, and Google Analytics is free. The insight that it can give you into your website is remarkable. There’s no excuse for not having it configured on your website.

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So there you have the 7 keys of high conversion lead generation websites. They are:

Key 1 :- Clearly identified customers and goals

Key 2 :- A simple, clear message

Key 3 :- Trust

Key 4 :- Call to action

Key 5 :- Design for conversion

Key 6 :- Get website traffic from the right places

Key 7 :- Active measurement and continual improvement

A well conceived lead generation website will play a critical role for your business by making all of your marketing more effective. TV, newspaper, magazine, outdoor and radio advertising can all leverage a high conversion lead generation website.

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too ;-)!

Contact us on 03 9012 6600 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Yellow Pages® is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

Why do some websites generate leads better than others? Having developed a number of lead generation websites that convert over 20% of visits into enquiries, we know that asking this question is a big step in the right direction.

In several years of striving to improve lead generation website conversion rates we’ve come up with seven keys that will make your website perform beyond expectations.

Key 1 :- Clearly identified customers and goals

The highest performing websites that we have worked on all had two things in common from the beginning. It was clear:

• Who the customers were
• What we wanted them to do (i.e. contact us, become a lead).

There are plenty of reasons to have a website. For example you might use your website to enhance your branding, customer service, customer loyalty or to streamline your business processes. The important thing is that you are clear on what the goal is and that you can measure the outcome.

Having a consistent stream of leads can have a huge impact on your business. After all, that’s why businesses spend so much money on marketing. So let’s be clear that for the purpose of this post, the goal is to generate good quality leads that convert into sales easily.

A good picture of who the customer is likely to be, what they need and how you can help them is also essential. If you don’t invest the time to understand your customers and prospects before you start developing your lead generation website you will not achieve high conversion rates. Knowing your prospects is the foundation of a high conversion website.

We didn’t learn this lesson from the lead generation websites that soared to conversion rates of over 20%. We learned this from the websites that failed miserably.

Key 2 :- A simple, clear message

Delivering a clear, simple and understandable message is as important on a website as it is on a highway billboard. Considering that on most websites, half of the visitors will leave in 10 seconds, you have a very short time to grab your prospects attention.

Don’t be deceived into thinking that a flashy design laden website is the answer to this problem either. Most of those websites haven’t even loaded by the time that half of their prospects have left.

A clear simple message is going to be delivered through copywriting.

Do you remember why people come to your website? They come for useful information. That includes things like descriptions, reviews, recommendations, pictures, videos etc.

Your clear, readable written message should wrap up all of your content (useful information) in a way that’s easy for people to quickly scan and understand.

Take a look at your lead generation website and ask yourself if it’s clear at a glance:

• Who it is intended for?
• What problem it solves?
• What the benefits of solving that problem are?

Even better, ask some prospects if it is clear (no, not your friends, colleagues or relatives).

Key 3 :- Trust

If a visitor from your target market lands on your website and is motivated by your clear simple message, what’s stopping them from contacting you?

The barriers that sit between a captivated reader and a lead are keys 3 and 4, call to action and trust.

The first hesitation that a prospect will likely feel is related to trust. Unless you have a brand that is well known to your prospects it is likely that they have some questions about you floating around in their heads. They will be wondering:

• Why should I trust your company?
• Who are you?
• Can you really solve my problem?
• Will you get back to me?
• Are you reliable?
• Can I trust you with my contact details?

Being able to address questions like that concisely in your lead generation website will boost your conversion rates.

Key 4 :- Call to action

The second problem that many lead generation websites start out with is a complete lack of call to action mechanisms. Call to action for lead generation is all about this question that a visitor to your website should never have to ask:

I want to contact you, but how can I do it?

Answer this question before it’s asked by carefully considering the placement of the following on your website:

• Local phone numbers
• Contact forms
• Physical address details
• Maps
• Details of the real people that you might speak to.

If you can build a high level of trust with your prospects and combine that with simple ways of getting in touch, you are well on the way to having a high conversion website.

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This is part 1 of a 2 part series. Read on to part 2 of The 7 Keys of High Conversion Lead Generation Websites

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too ;-)!

Contact us on 03 9012 6600 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Yellow Pages® is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

Piano Removalists - Network Piano Carriers - entered the online removals world late last year with their first website. To their great credit, this highly professional piano removals company systematically measures the outcome of everything - especially their marketing activity.

Google rankings can be hard to achieve if you’ve never had a website before. Many companies can expect to wait over six months before seeing their site show up in important searches. Yet the Network Piano Carriers website hit the ground running with strong Google rankings and the highest lead generation conversion rate that we’ve seen yet.

In addition to strong Google rankings, Network Piano Carriers are using other marketing to drive traffic to their website including:

• Yellow Pages® Directory
• Yellow Pages® Online
• Good Truck Signage
• Strong Referral Marketing

In only three months, Network Pianos achieved a staggering 31.5% lead generation conversion rate.

Visit to Lead Conversion Rate = 31.5%

Bear in mind that Network Piano Carriers only service Brisbane and Melbourne, but Google rankings bring website traffic from everywhere. With that in mind, 30% of people visiting the site came from Markets that Network Piano Carriers do not service. The adjusted lead conversion rate is over 40%.

So what makes a lead generation website work so well? Stay tuned… We will be examining what makes a high performance lead generation website in our next post.

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too ;-)!

Contact us on 03 9012 6600 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Yellow Pages® is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

Newt Barret explained an important shift in his blog post today, “Real World Experiment Explains Impending Demise of Yellow Pages”

Talking about the Yellow Pages® he says, “Their old slogan, ‘Let your fingers do the walking,’ was all about how easy it was to use the print directory compared to wandering around downtown looking for a store, a lawyer or a doctor.  Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and all the rest of the search engines are letting our fingers do the walking today.”

Newt’s statement perfectly explains the biggest challenge for the Yellow Pages® today. For many years the Yellow Pages® was the only way to find things easily. Those days are long gone.

Here in Australia, the Yellow Pages® is run by a former government monopoly called Sensis (part of Telstra), and it appears from Newt’s review that our Yellow Pages® does a much better job than the local Yellow Pages® in Florida.

According to Sensis, the Yellow Pages® book in Australia yields around AUD$1 billion of advertising annually and the Yellow Pages® Online a further $100 million.

Access is the key to Yellow Pages® success.

The Yellow Pages® is actually a massive repository of content. In the information age, what will make or break it is access to its content. Traditionally it could only be done through the book or the website directly.

A company of this size is typically slow at responding to market trends, however there’s too much at stake for them not to take action fast.

Yellow Pages® in Australia have responded to the challenge of access with initiatives like:

• Yellow in the Car - A small directory for use in the car
• Yellow Mobile - Online Yellow Pages® for mobile phones
• Go Stay® accommodation guide
• Yellow at Home portal website
• Choice buyers guides on the Yellow Pages® online
• Partnership with NineMSN and mylocal.com.au.

They’re making some good moves. 

For what it’s worth, here’s what I’d do to make the Yellow Pages® Australia into a $2 billion guide and to massively increase the value that it delivers to its customers:

1. Open up the category pages to Google

Imagine if the Yellow Pages® category pages came up number one in Google.

For example, search in Google on “Restaurants Melbourne.” Yellow pages are nowhere to be found. 

Would you be interested in advertising in the Yellow Pages® if it was number one in Google?

A quick review of the Yellow Pages® robots.txt file shows that they do not allow any search engine indexing of their content. This seems to be a legacy of pre-information age thinking about content (keep it all to yourself).

What if they simply created search engine friendly pages of content for each of their categories? They don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

2. Optimise the Yellow Pages® websites for conversion

The current Yellow Pages® online listings are set out very poorly for lead generation. Smart application of simple conversion techniques could massively increase the number of leads generated, and overall change the perceived benefit of the Yellow Pages® online from cost to investment.

One Melbourne business that we deal with gets over 400 leads from its website each month compared with 20 or 30 from the Yellow Pages®. However, this would be very different if the Yellow Pages® took these ideas on board.

It will be interesting to see if the Yellow Pages® can catch up to the massive market shift that happened when Google became the dominant search engine in early 2000.

What I do know is that you’ll see the Yellow Pages® around for many years to come. It’s a question of what form it will be in. Just don’t expect it to be in the form of A-K and L-Z.

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too ;-)!

Contact us on 1300 248 362 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Yellow Pages® is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

Many of our clients use the Yellow Pages® Directory and the Yellow Pages® Online to generate leads for their businesses.

Over the last year we’ve had a chance to to try out the Yellow Pages® Online Platinum Ad concept with our clients. As illustrated below, the Platinum Ad is a group of 3 small ad tiles that sit above the search results.

If one of the 3 spots is available you can take up pole position in the search results for a selected keyword in your geographical area. The ad tiles link straight through to your website. Sounds good right?

Well, you’d think that having such a high position in the search results would mean guaranteed success. However, we’ve found a number of businesses who have been disappointed with the results of Platinum Ads. So we decided to examine the ads to find out why.

We reviewed 44 ads in the Yellow Pages® Online platinum ads system and we asked the following questions.

• Are the ads customer focused or self interested? 
• Will the ads be affected by banner blindness? i.e. Do the ads look like ads?
• How effective is the website behind the ad? 

The results show that there is plenty of room for improvement.

Are the ads customer focused or self interested? 

Good ad design, like good copywriting is focused on the client. That means, it targets their needs, pains, problems or wants and offers a solution.

Looking for references to the customer in the 44 ads, we found the following ratio:

Self interested : Customer focused 

40 : 4

We found that many of the ads we reviewed were accompanied by claims like:

• Largest range
• Best quality
• Lowest prices
• Best value
• Number 1

But what do these claims really mean? They might mean something to the advertiser, but what do the mean to the customer? Since the claims lack any specifics they are easily dismissed.

“Need help selecting…?” was the only customer focused question that we found in any of the ads.

A large number of the ads appeared to be solely focused on brand, offering little reason to click through. Others ads seemed to be designed in the hope that just saying “click here” would do the job.

Will the ads be affected by banner blindness? i.e. Do the ads look like ads?

One of the big problems that we found with Yellow Pages® Online platinum ads is that they typically look like ads. It’s well established that website visitors are becoming increasingly blind to online advertising, particularly banner ads. The phenomenon demonstrated by Jakob Nielsen is know as banner blindness.

Now I know what you’re thinking… Aren’t all Yellow Pages® Online listings ads?

Of course the answer is yes. All Yellow Pages® Online are paid ads. But most of them don’t look like ads, they look like search results. So we reviewed the ads in the study to determine if they were likely to be subject to banner blindness.

Look Like Ads : Don’t Look Like Ads

42 : 2

In reviewing the 44 ads, we found that 42 of them looked like banner ads. With only 138 x 95 pixels to play with, you don’t have a lot of room. However, the more heavily formatted the ad is the less likely it is grab attention.

How effective is the website behind the ad? 

When we looked at the websites behind the 44 Yellow Pages® Online platinum ads we found an even bigger problem. Most of the websites were poorly designed for lead generation.

We reviewed each site to see how easy it was to find the company’s contact details, and how easy it was to make contact with them. We rated it this way:

Poor: Contact details only available on contact page, if at all.

Average: Contact phone number on each page with a contact form on the contact us page.

Good: Contact phone number on each page with contact forms used well or a call to action used throughout the content.

What we found was:

Poor : Average : Good 

19 : 20 : 5

So even if the ads were getting clicks, the websites would be converting visits into enquiries poorly.

How to make your Yellow Pages® Online platinum ads effective:

Make your ads customer focused

• Write your ad text with customer in mind
• Address their common needs and problems
• Use a question if possible
• Make claims that are specific and that show how you can help

Avoid banner blindness

• Design your ad to look like content, not an ad
• Don’t dominate the ad with your logo
• Use pictures sparingly and carefully
• Test different ad designs.

Make sure your website is converting effectively

• Make sure your contact details are easily available
• Ensure the contacting you is easy through the website
• Use contact forms effectively
• Test and measure your website and Yellow Pages® Online platinum ad results weekly
• Most importantly, measure your conversion rates!

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too ;-)!

Contact us on 1300 248 362 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Yellow Pages®is an Australian registered trade mark of Telstra Corporation Ltd. This company has requested and has been granted permission from Telstra Corporation Ltd to use the Yellow Pages® trade mark. This company is not otherwise associated with Telstra Corporation or any of it’s subsidiaries.

We recently conducted a conversion rate review on a website for a company that creates metal finishes for non metal objects such as doors, signs and other building elements. To introduce our readers to how a conversion rate review works, we thought we’d publish a brief summary of our conversion rate review.

Client: Metalcote Pty Ltd

Website Objectives: 

Metal finishing is a niche business with appeal to the construction and shopfitting industries. This is B2B and, due to the nature of the work that they do, Metalcote is looking to generate leads. Since metal finishing is a relatively new idea Metalcote also sees the need to educate their prospects on the possibilities of the work that they can do.

This is a really nice looking clean and simple website. Kudos to the web designer who chose a nice readable contrasting font for the text rather than the super light grey on white that many web designers seem to choose.

For the purposes of this summary, we’ve chosen to review the following four elements of the lead generation conversion process.

1. Usability
2. Content
3. Conversion
4. Traffic.

Usability -  How easy is the website to get around?

Opportunity: The home page of the website is usually the first place that a visitor will land. This is your best opportunity to say what you do and position your company. Having a basic splash page misses this opportunity and will likely create a quick exit. Remember that people come to your website for information.

Action: Use the home page to quickly and simply describe what you do and position your company’s expertise.

Opportunity: The Metalcote Logo is perfectly placed in the top left corner of the website (apart from the splash page). This is perfect to reinforce your branding, and it’s great for usability since users can immediately see that they’re in the right place. There is an unwritten law of website usability that the logo should click through to the home page.

Action: Make logo click through to home page.

Content - How useful is the website’s content?

Opportunity: This is a really interesting product with lots of uses. The only way to educate prospects about the possibilities is with content.

Action: Have a copywriter create a web page for each target use of the product.

Opportunity: Metalcote has worked on many large projects for some well recognised brands. There is an opportunity to make your prospects comfortable with you before they contact you by building rapport with them through your website.

Action: You need to trade off the trust that working for companies like Toyota, Nando’s and Chrysler can create by ensuring that those names are clearly seen. You’re already doing this in your gallery to some extent, but make sure you get their branding in the shot.

Conversion - How easy is it to get to the goal?

Opportunity: This site has a good contact page with a simple contact form. Having a contact form on each content page will give you the context of what the prospect is interested in and increase your visits to leads conversion rate significantly.

Action: Include a simple contact form wherever there is a call to action in your website copy.

Building traffic - How will visitors find this site?

Opportunity: There are many searches conducted each month using search engine keywords that are related to your field. Content is the key to getting good search engine results.

Action: Create new website copy and ensure that your search engine keywords are in the right places to make sure that you get found in Google.

So that’s a basic conversion rate review. Implementing these simple suggestions will significantly increase the number of leads generated from this website.

From the author: If you regularly advertise for leads in the Yellow Pages®, in the newspaper or on the radio, then there’s a good chance that your website could be generating more leads for you than it is. The key is in your website’s conversion rates.

We know that to achieve high conversion rates and sales from your web marketing you need a team that includes seasoned marketers, web designers, web programmers, copywriters, editors, bloggers and search engine gurus. That’s why we created Bitemark.

And yes, we can get your website to number one in Google too!

Contact us on 1300 248 362 for a free conversion rate review of your website.

Ask any company that is successful at web marketing and they will confirm the proclamation, “Content is king! All hail the content!”

Although it’s specifically written about website video advertising, this post from SiteProNews “How To Make Web-Advertising Worth Watching” contains some important points that relate to all web content.

“It has become an article of faith that the Web is all about content;

content is King on the Web as opposed to television where commercials are king.”

So when it comes to your web marketing, what is this king that we hail called Content? I think we can boil it all down to this:

“Useful Information”

Effectively dealing with the infinite choice of consumers on the web involves a mind-shift from old marketing where commercial messages are thrust on people. The messages that work best on the web are chosen by them. There’s a huge benefit to making this mindshift - it’s easy to create the content that your customers are looking for.

 On the web, “useful information” could be as simple as things like:

• A relevant picture
• A useful or entertaining video
• An informative well-written web page
• A blog
• A flash product demonstration
• An intelligent product description
• A customer review.

The beauty of “useful information” is that it:

• Is always at the heart of high conversion rates 
• Only takes time to create
• Can create reciprocity with your customers
• Gives your customers an experience with your brand
• Can directly generate sales.

If you’re not generating leads from your marketing well, then this question is a no brainer. If your marketing is working well, you may be comfortable that you’re generating enough leads.

However, if you are getting lots of leads but you’re experiencing problems with customers and profits, then you might want to think about this. There is an argument that you can never have enough leads. I’ve considered the question in this page.

About the author: As the owner of a web marketing business, I’ve spent the last 7 years studying ways to boost the conversion rates of my clients’ websites. Today, our best websites convert up to 20% of visits into leads and 50% of leads to sales. The target for our clients is a minimum 5% conversion rate on visits to leads which is staggeringly more than the typical website at 0.1%.

Bitemark specialises in designing, building, writing, managing and marketing websites with high conversion rates.