Increase Site Lead Conversion Rate First

I wonder what the conversion rate is of this i...
Image by Adrian Eden via Flickr

Earlier today I was talking with a SEO expert about online lead generation, marketing automation, and other topics. One of the points he made was that there are two major levers for website leads: traffic to your site and the conversion rate of visitors on your site into leads. Pretty simple, right? Now here’s the kicker – most people focus on driving more traffic to their site as opposed to increasing their conversion rate.

If you double your conversion rate that’s the equivalent of doubling your traffic with the previous conversion rate.

Most entrepreneurs should work on their conversion rate before working on increasing site traffic. Here are a few quick tips for increasing conversion rates:

  • Don’t assume the homepage is the starting point for most visitors (search engines make it so that all pages are entry points)
  • Incorporate a call to action on every page (e.g. a link to download a white paper, sign up for a free trial, or join a newsletter list)
  • Think through site personas for your different types of visitors (e.g. technical buyer, executive decision maker, junior researcher, etc)

My recommendation is to look at your conversion rate and work to improve it first before other web marketing activities.

What else? What are some other tips to increase site lead conversion rates?

Comments

3 responses to “Increase Site Lead Conversion Rate First”

  1. Wade Sonenberg Avatar

    Maybe it goes without saying, using a quality analytics program is key. Whether it is registrations or digital downloads you can set up Google Analytics and others to track which pages are producing, where the bottlenecks are, and better yet do some A/B testing on calls to action to find out what works best.

    Thanks for the post, I couldn’t agree more that we should go for the bird in the hand before setting our sites on more traffic.

    1. David Cummings Avatar
      David Cummings

      Thanks Wade. Great points.

Leave a reply to John Cason Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.