4 Small Website Changes That Generate More Leads

You don’t have to do a complete website overhaul to dramatically increase your leads. Just as minor changes at a brick-and-mortar location—like displaying sale items at the front of a store or advertising a loyalty program—can bring in more customers, so can some minor tweaks to your website.

First, take a look at the current state of your website and ask yourself the following questions:

1. Is it obvious what I’m selling?
2. Is it obvious why people would need/want to buy what I’m selling?
3. Will site visitors find the answers that they’re looking for?
4. If I sell products online, do I make it easy for customers to find my Add to Cart and Checkout buttons?
5. Does making a purchase or performing any kind of action require a minimal number of clicks?
6. Are site visitors easily able to figure out how to contact my business?

If you answered no to any of those questions, then you’re making things harder than they need to be for the people who visit your site. And if these potential customers can’t quickly find what they’re looking for or complete the action they want to complete, they’ll turn to a competitor whose website is easier to use.

If your convoluted website is currently driving your leads straight to the competition, try these easy fixes.

Add click-to-call

Click-to-call is a feature that has become popular for businesses as more and more people are conducting searches on their smartphones. If you’re not familiar with click-to-call, you’ve probably at least seen the icon before; when you search for something like a business, hotel, or restaurant on your phone, Google will show you a list of results with icons indicating that you can visit the business’ website, get directions to their physical location, or call them directly.

The advantage of having a click-to-call button is clear: consumers don’t have to search your website for your phone number, write it down, then enter it into their phone. Instead, they can reach you by clicking just one button. Click-to-call is so popular that 70% of mobile searchers say they have used it before. 59% of those people said they were motivated by ease and speed, 57% wanted to talk to a real person, and 54% were looking for information that wasn’t on the website.

If you already use Google AdWords, you can easily add a phone number to encourage leads to call you directly.

Create call to action buttons

If you sell products or services online, you hopefully already have some call to action buttons on your website (if not, you’re probably not having too many customers purchasing things directly from your website). However, if business on your website seems slow, you might not have made your call to action buttons as visible as they should be.

If web users have to scroll all the way to the bottom of your home page just to find a tiny button saying, “Buy Now,” they’re probably not going to do much buying. People who browse your website on their smartphone might be deterred especially quickly, as they’re working with a smaller screen.

To see more people taking action on your sites, create buttons that stand out from the rest of the page so that your viewer’s eyes will quickly be drawn to them. Consider placing your CTA buttons towards the top of the page, using bold colors, or creating a minimalist design that’s centered on your CTAs. Popular websites like Facebook and Groupon provide good examples of CTA buttons that draw viewers’ attention.

Add a call to action on every page

Some business owners may wonder why they need to include a call to action on every page—can’t you just prominently display a CTA on your home page and be done with it?

Actually, no. To understand why, put yourself in the position of someone visiting your website. When they first land on your site, they may want to learn more about your company and your products before actually making a purchase. To do this, they’ll click around to different areas of your site. If they like what they see and do decide to make a purchase, they shouldn’t have to go through the process of clicking multiple times to find their way back to the original call to action. Remember, you want to make it as easy as possible for your site visitors to take action, and the fewer clicks they have to make, the better.

You can alter the wording and include some secondary CTAs on different pages (for example, your contact page should probably have a “Contact Us” button) but your goal should be to remind site visitors what they should be doing on every page.

Add a contact form

If the contact page of your website simply lists your phone number, email, and physical address, then this is another area of your site that you can clean up and make more accessible to site visitors. Displaying your contact information is obviously important, but you can also add a contact form directly to the page in order to make it easier for people to reach you.

Contact forms vary from business to business, but they’ll typically include a few text boxes for information like a customer’s name, email address, and reason for contacting you. The advantage of having a contact form is that it allows site visitors to contact you while staying on the same page, rather than opening another tab with their email. Again, it’s another way for you to cut down on the steps that your site visitors have to go through.

Contact forms are incredibly easy to add, and there are plenty of free form generators available online. If you have some web design experience or know someone who does, it’s also relatively easy to create your own customized contact form.