Many of our website and SEO consultations begin with the client saying, "There's an issue with my website." Sometimes the customer has analytics monitoring clicks and traffic, or they are looking at their page ranking - but more often than not, they do not see leads produced from their site. Here are three ways to help you determine if it’s a website or marketing strategy problem:
1. Where are You Getting Leads?
Leads come from different sources, depending on your business. If you have a higher-priced product or service and have a great brand, you are going to be generating leads from inbound marketing and direct sales efforts, for example. If you have a lower-cost product or service, you may be generating leads from many online efforts – from paid search and social media ads to driving people to your site and landing pages.
If you are only seeing a handful of leads, the first place to look is going to be at how you are getting people to visit your site in the first place. One way to do that is to look at traffic sources. What are the top five sources of traffic to your site? If they are sources that you are paying to get traffic, you should expect to see a conversion. If they are organic traffic sources, you probably don't need as many leads because word of mouth or organic traffic is usually a better conversion.
But if you are getting traffic from paid sources, and not generating leads, then the next question should be “why?”. If this is the case you need to carefully examine your ads and messaging because something is capturing the attention of visitors but when they arrive, they don’t convert. This would likely be an example of a website problem. The fact that you’re gaining people’s attention is a huge first step but now you need to understand why they are falling off. Using tools like Microsoft Clarity to capture recordings of your visitors on your website and heat maps to show where they are focusing can inform you and your team about what needs to be done to increase conversions.
2. How Ready is Your Site for Mobile?
Mobile has gone from zero to 60 MPH in a matter of fewer than five years. It's a massive part of the marketing world now since most people are browsing on their phones and therefore can no longer be considered an afterthought when it comes to how your website is built and designed.
Many, many websites are still not optimized for mobile, and that doesn’t just mean it looks okay on a small screen, it means it has been designed for mobile users. Depending on your product, service, and target customer, you may need to consider building your website with a “mobile-first” mentality which means you are focusing on mobile over desktop when it comes to how the site functions and how it is designed. It may very well make sense for you to completely overhaul the mobile version of your website especially since it was built for desktop a number of years ago. Again, go back to your data and see what the majority of users are using to view your site to make this decision.
3. Tracking Down Your Lead Generation with Website Analytics
If you are having these issues with your website and aren't looking at your site analytics, we're guessing you're not using it very well. Google Analytics is a great tool, but the problem is that many people set it up and only use it to check on keywords or see if their site has stopped getting traffic because of a search engine update.
To solve your website problems, we recommend that you get a little more in-depth with your analytics tracking. We mentioned Microsoft Clarity earlier but we’re focusing on it again here because, for a free tool, you can gain so much more insight into what your users are doing on each page of your website. Combining these screen recordings with your bounce rate data can be a fantastic way to make decisions about design.
For example, if you find users are landing on a page and spending a lot of time there but moving on without converting, review your content to make sure it has a clear call to action. They took the time to read and consume the information, was it followed by a form, a button, or an email intake field? Perhaps they would have converted if the content was more clear as to what they should do next?
Conclusion
Remember, your website is just one of many marketing assets that are deployed based on your marketing strategy so getting to the root cause of why you are not meeting your marketing goals may mean it’s your website, or may mean it’s your overall strategy.
In the mobile-optimized website example, it’s easy to point to the site and call that a website problem, but if the data points to your customers being on mobile more, you likely have broader marketing strategy issues. At the end of the day, collecting and reviewing your data is the best way to determine what needs to be fixed in order to meet your marketing objectives so make sure you are:
Collecting you data
The data is easy to access and understand
You are routinely reviewing the data
You are making decisions about your marketing strategy based on that data combined with industry best practices.
If you follow these steps and stay diligent, you’ll see improved results.
Trying to find a web design consultancy? Reach out to Torch Digital Labs today. We're on a mission to help businesses achieve their digital goals by leveraging amazing tools.
