Building a website for your company is great, but building a website that doesn’t generate any leads online is, well, not so great.  Fortunately designing a site that brings in leads doesn’t have to be too hard or overwhelming. Follow our web design tips below on how to design a user-friendly website that will draw people in and convert them on the spot.

Web Design Tips for More Leads

1. Know Your Audience

The first step before designing your site is to know your audience. You’ll want to create a persona that is a fictitious person that encompasses the characteristic of your typical customer. You can include demographics like age, gender, interests, purchasing habits, online behavior, job positions, hobbies or any other characteristics that you think will influence your target audience’s purchasing decisions. Once you have your personas developed you will be able to create your content based on what would be interesting to them.

This will save you a lot of time and effort that would have been wasted going after people that have little to no interest in what you have to offer. You wan to provide value with your content so it should be centered on how you solve the challenges and problems of your persona so that when they’re looking for solutions they find you.

According to HubSpot, using marketing personas can make your website 2-5 times more effective.

2. Make sure your website is well optimized

That last part brings us to our next tip – optimizing your website. Your audience is researching solutions to their challenges online way before they ever contact you. Website optimization or SEO is how they find your website when conducting their research.

To get the most out of your SEO you’ll want to design your content around your audience and not around search engines.  Publishing content without value to your audience is not going to get you anywhere.  Look for your target audience’s pain points, what they are searching for, and what terms or keywords are they interested then match the keywords in your content to the same terms. You’ll want to look for:

• Keywords with a high number of searches
• Keywords with a low competition

Download our guide for more on website optimization techniques.

3. Have compelling CTAs

Driving leads online to your site that don’t convert is essentially useless so you’ll want to capture their contact information.  In order to push your website traffic to the sales funnel you’ll want to have compelling CTAs on pages that cause users to take a specific action. Your call to action must offer your user something they would want in exchange for their information.  This will allow you to follow up and nurture the site traffic into customers long after they have left your site pages. The most compelling CTAs that cause users to convert include:

• A visible position
• A clear offering
• An image or other visible component to grab attention
• A link to a landing page where they will fill in their information to receive offer
• A landing page that matches what the CTA had to offer
• A simple form on the following landing page
• A strong follow-up email

4. Add Testimonials and Case Studies To Your Website- Video is Best

Testimonials are a great way to attract and convert more leads. People love to see success stories and would be more compelled to contact you if they see that you helped solve problems for companies that were facing the same challenges they’re facing. Video testimonials are the best way to convey your success stories as they put a face and voice behind your success and instantly become more believable. Seeing the face of a happy smiling customer will make you seem trustworthy in the eyes of your potential customers compelling them to want to work with you to achieve the same results.

5. Measure and Test, Test, Test

This is a simple step but sadly often overlooked. Be sure to test everything on your site for bugs as nothing can make your audience flee faster than a broken link or bad user experience. A/b test different website page or content offers to see which one is more of interest to your visitors and consistently add new content to your site to improve your site.

Keep these tips in mind when designing your site and you’ll have an online “salesperson” that drives in qualified online leads ready to convert.