It is bad news for a business owner to say, “My website doesn’t drive leads.” It is critical to get your website back in business, generating leads. Lead generation is very important part of online business operations. As a small business owner, you want interested buyers to visit your site, understand and learn about your services. This process begins with attracting traffic to your website. It’s not a complicated task and depends on the product or service. You will need to invest some of your time and resources.

Optimizing your website to generate good leads can be easy if you know what you are doing. But, it is not as simple as placing a “Read More” button on your web pages and watching the leads come in. You marketing and designers should have a working strategic approach to optimize your website for lead generation. Search engine optimization (SEO) mainly involves knowing the intent of your intended visitor. What words do they use? What questions do they ask?

Start by conducting an audit of where most of your website traffic is coming from, this are your lead generators. Common places a business might get visitors include:

• Email Marketing: Traffic coming from users who click through to your website from one of your emails sent weekly or monthly.
• Social Media: Traffic coming from users who engage in a campaign through one of your social media profiles, these could be Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.
• Blog Posts: Traffic coming from your one of your blog posts.

On identifying where the leads are coming from, you have to make sure that the landing pages are doing everything they can to encourage a visitor’s interest. You can compare landing pages that are performing well with landing pages that are not doing well. For example, a landing page X with 1000 visits to Landing Page Z, and 10 of the visitors clicked on call to action button or filled out the form and converted into leads. For Landing Page Z, you would have a 1% conversion rate.

For example, if you realize most of your potential leads are clicking on inbound links (In coming Links) to your website from your Facebook or Twitter or YouTube page, you then, update the pages they are visiting with content that keeps them focused and engaged with your website. Also on your most visited pages, add high quality content that visitors can access through (call to action ) could be buttons or forms that ask their contact information.

• Optimizing your website’s performance is crucial to increasing traffic, improving conversion rates, generating more leads, and increasing revenue.
• Traffic from mobile devices is growing fast. Optimize your website for mobile or you’ll miss out on valuable traffic, leads, and revenue.
• Make sure your website is easy for users to discover and easy for search bots such as Google and Bing to understand, include better page titles, headings and meta descriptions.
• Use SSL (Secure Sockets Layer, is an encryption-based Internet security protocol). SSL certificates protect website from attacks and give visitors confidence that your website is authentic and trustworthy.