Every business should know by now that their website can be a lead generation honeypot – well, it could be, at least. If they knew how to optimise it to generate more leads. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses don’t know how to do this. The result is hundreds of website with more “Click Here” buttons than relevant, useful information. These websites aren’t doing anyone any favours.

There are a few steps you can take to get real results instead, getting as many leads as possible. We’ve pulled a bunch of them together to give you a definitive list of starting points for you to work from.

Before beginning, work out where you are.

If you don’t know where you are, how can you possibly know where you’re supposed to be going? The first step is to work out where your website fits currently. Whether it’s working pretty well or not working at all, we here at CommuniGator can help you get a good idea – but you can use your current website analytics to find out, too. Run reports and pay close attention to landing page visits and clicks. Find out what your best converters are, and then replicate them across the board.

So now, let’s get started on the real tips.

Focus on your buyer journey from start to finish.

Your client’s buyer journey is important. If you’re not effectively directing your leads you won’t see the results you want. It can be tricky and time-consuming, but make sure that you always link to your offers and service pages from relevant content. If your blog is where most of your traffic comes from, but you’re linking to your homepage from every post and hoping your leads find their own way around, you’re not making the website buyer journey easy.

By thinking about your visitors from the start of the process through to the finish, you can see what pathways are bringing success and where you’re losing leads. If your traffic isn’t ending up at your desired goal – you’ll know.

Personalise your calls to action

Do you know how many more visits convert on a website with personalised calls to action? 42%. This means that the time, effort and investment you put into creating a dynamic CTA is likely to be rewarded tenfold.

Adding dynamic content to your website will also help you improve your visitor’s experience on your website. For example, based on their previous browsing history and the pages they’ve looked at on your website, you can show visitors different buttons, offers, promotions and images to engage those more visually-invested leads.

With personalisation, you do need to sit and think about what you need to show to which visitors, and when. Do you have a membership database that should see a different homepage to non-members? Do you have different levels of your paid service that could be upsold to those on the lower tier? Think about your important sales, and your important visitors, and match them up with personalised web pages and dynamic calls to action.

Don’t act blindly – test everything.

Optimisation can’t be done effectively without relevant and rigorous testing. Just like your email campaigns, your website needs to be tested using the wonders of the A/B split test to improve your lead generation click-through rates and conversions.

Test different calls to action, buttons, images and copy. Test different page layouts – left aligned contact form vs right – and experiment with colours. The more you test, the more you know that you’ll be creating perfect pages every time.

Don’t forget that those leads need to be nurtured

A lot of businesses put massive effort into capturing data and then don’t do anything with it. Don’t put all your effort into lead generation, and then forget to follow up. Leads won’t turn into customers on their own, and often need to be nurtured into a sales position to result in any significant purchase for your business. Manage your website leads in a simple workflow, then use your analytics to make sure you’re delivering the relevant content. If you do it right, your lead generation will start with an email containing interesting content, and end with direct contact from your team.