When your website isn’t generating the volume of leads you desire, it’s easy to blame poor performance on bad design, low traffic or lack of video content and to stop improving your website altogether. But that doesn’t mean it’s time to give up or to go through a full redesign, which can be expensive.
Before you do that, take a minute and think of this as an opportunity to do some further digging into the potential causes of the underperforming lead generation. Keep in mind that your website analytics report won’t tell you the complete story. There are additional areas that need to be considered before abandoning or fully rebuilding your website. Let’s look into three areas that can be combined with traditional analytics to help you optimize your website and generate more leads.
1. User Experience (UX)
UX can be thought of as the process of designing websites that are useful, easy to navigate, and delightful for the user to interact with. A quick review can determine whether or not your website will benefit from a UX upgrade. There are several areas to consider during this process:
- Is the website presentable and professional?
- Is the website easy for your customers to use?
- Is the website intuitive, or does the user have to navigate a series of vague steps to complete tasks?
- Is it easy for the user to buy your products?
If any of these items are not optimized, it will hurt your overall conversion rates.
How can you use analytics to determine if your site could use a UX upgrade? Look for:
- Low time on site (average < 1 minute)
- High bounce rate compared to your industry
- Low number of form fills
2. Content
The content on your website is extremely important. Everyone is creating content and if yours is subpar or nonexistent, it’s almost certainly contributing to underperformance. Semrush outlines four ways that content can help your business:
- It helps customers bond with your brand – Customers want to feel like they have a relationship with your brand. Content that tells your story helps to strengthen this relationship.
- Good content builds trust – Buying a product or service can be an emotional decision. By producing good content that answers a customer’s question, trust in the relationship is deepened.
- High-quality content increases ROI – It’s possible to see six times higher ROI than a website with no content or poorly written content.
- Support other types of marketing – You can tailor existing content and use it in social media or email campaigns. Think of it as a marketing multiplier.
Look at your analytics for the following to see if your content is working for your audience:
- Time on site/time on page – if users are taking the time to read your content that’s a good sign that it’s resonating
- Non-spam conversion rates – what % of your website visits are resulting in legitimate conversions?
- Social media and email engagement – Is your audience interacting with your content by clicking, liking, and sharing?
3. Website Traffic
You can have the best content in the world but it doesn’t matter unless people visit your site to consume it, also known as driving website traffic. There are several activities that can help drive more traffic to your site and create more leads:
- Email campaigns
- Organic search (Search Engine Optimization)
- Paid search (buying advertisements)
- Social media campaigns
- Event sponsorships
Low traffic rates can indicate that traffic driving activities are underperforming. Low traffic equates to fewer leads and conversions. If you have a high-traffic site, it’s important to pay attention to conversion and bounce rates. If your conversion rate is low and the bounce rate is high, this could mean you need to improve your UX or enhance the traffic-driving activities.
Here are two suggestions that can help you determine where further investment in your website might be necessary:
- Revisit your marketing plan to see if your website is supporting the goals and strategies that you set.
- Are there initiatives that have not been executed?
- Do your activities need to be re-evaluated?
- Perform a website review for poor content or UX issues.
- Is it easy for your audience to find the most relevant content?
- Does your website provide answers to the most important questions your audience has?
- Which pages have the lowest time on site or the highest bounce rate? Is this what you would expect?
- Is traffic coming to you through the keywords on which you are focusing your SEO efforts?
Final Thoughts
Your website is one of your most important business assets – it’s the face of your company and the place where customers go to learn more about you and what you have to offer. If it’s not generating leads, then three factors could be causing this: your website design, the content on your site, or a lack of traffic-driving activities.
If you aren’t sure which of these are affecting you, click here to get a free website review from the Gladiator team!
