How many of you are currently chugging along in business wondering what is eluding you when it comes to attracting great business leads? And how many of you have paused, while pondering how to attract more and/or better leads, and looked at your website?
Now, how many of you have thought, “Huh, if I want better business leads I need a better website.”
I’m betting you’re split relatively evenly between those of you who are aware that your site needs improvement and those of you who don’t really consider your website to be that important. Not in the grand scheme of things.
For those who do grasp the need for a killer site, you’re again likely split between the ones who are happy to invest and have the capital to do it, the ones happy to invest but reluctant to get the ball rolling due to a low budget, and the ones who think it’s pointless trying because you have next to nothing to spend on it.
There are two things you need to understand as a business owner. The first is that whether you like it or not, whether you realise it or not, your website is critical to the generation and conversion of leads. A shitty site is not going to help you. In fact, it will actively harm you. While a great site will work tirelessly on your behalf.
Here are three reasons why great business leads start with a killer website. PLUS, why you don’t need a ton of money to create one that boosts your lead generation…
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#1 Leads Coming To You Through SEO Have A 14% Close Rate
You may not be familiar with what is a reasonable conversion rate. Or you may have been around the marketing block long enough to understand that traditional means of lead generation have about a 1.7% close rate. In digital marketing, a landing page that converts PPC traffic at 2% is generally considered successful. So while marketeers obviously aim for more, your campaign is working if you’re converting between 1 and 3% of your leads.
If your conversion rate is 5%, it’s working phenomenally well.
As a professional SEO expert, I have been perplexed by this for over a decade. Why bother when you can run an SEO campaign that will cost you less overall and convert at 14% on average?
That’s not to say SEO campaigns are cheap. To create a steady stream of organic traffic to your website, you will need to consistently invest in onsite and (usually) offsite work each month. This will cost hundreds, potentially thousands depending on your industry and goals.
Let’s Do The Maths On That…
A PPC campaign also involves a regular investment and will cost you hundreds if not hundreds of thousands, depending on your industry and goals. This is particularly true if you look at a GoogleAds campaign with expensive keywords.
Sure, many will cost you pennies per click, but others will cost you pounds. If you’re in an expensive industry with high competition like insurance, gas and electric, mortgages or legal services, you’re looking at paying £40-50 per click. I’ve seen some costing as much as £800 per click.
That’s £800 for every single click, and you’re only converting 2% of clicks (if you’re doing well!). For those who hate maths, you’re spending around £40K to make one sale.
Granted, it’s not the norm for prices to be so high, but you take my point. With PPC, you’re driving traffic at a clear expense per click. SEO costs money, but it costs a fixed amount of money. You set a budget, create a plan that balances your objectives and what you can afford, and you only pay more if you decide to invest more in your strategy.
You don’t pay for every individual visitor to your website.
And you’re converting around 14% of leads that land on your website.
Getting your website’s SEO strategy in place will take time and consistent investment, and many businesses hate this. They hate paying out month after month and being told they need to be patient and wait for results. They don’t want to wait. They’re spending thousands and need to see that money return.
That’s why around a third of businesses still aren’t bothering with SEO; they don’t have the patience.
And it’s costing them a fortune.
The Bonus For Local Businesses:
Investing in your website’s SEO is even more pivotal when you’re a local business. If you have a product or service that people are searching for ‘near me’ you’ll be pleased to hear that 80% of local searches convert.
That stat alone should convince you that your lead generation efforts must focus on your website. 80% is a ridiculously high conversion rate. Even if you have a ton of local competition, you’re likely to find that many of them aren’t investing in their SEO and they are actually fairly easy to outrank. The exception to this is when you’re working in the city centre. Still, even there, you’d be surprised how many businesses rely on foot traffic, real-world visibility, word of mouth and traditional marketing instead of SEO.
You may not even consider yourself a local business looking to attract local search traffic.
You’re missing out.
Whatever you do, from ecommerce to tiling, law firms to training companies, unless your offering is incredibly niche, there are people searching for it locally. Even if they don’t run a ‘near me’ search, your proximity will mean search results naturally favour you. So you have a leg up against giant competitors there before doing any work at all.
#2 It’s The Only Marketing Investment With Exponential ROI Potential
In business, one of the key metrics to track is ROI. How much money you generate compared to how much it costs you to generate it is key. All marketing costs. There’s no avoiding it. In either time or money, you’re going to have to pay. Most businesses have a marketing budget and expect to receive a minimum ROI for that investment.
The greater your ROI, the better. That’s just a no-brainer. If you can spend £100 and earn £900, is was well worth the effort. As we’ve seen, PPC campaigns hinge on spending an amount per click and have a conversion rate that tells us how many sales we can expect to generate due to that cost. In the example I gave earlier, I pointed out that in the extreme case of a keyword costing £800 per click, with a 2% conversion rate, you’d need to spend around £40K to make one sale.
Yet if that one sale is worth £1 million in revenue, it’s money well spent. Of course, it would be better if you made more than how much you’ve spent, but the only way to do that is to increase your conversion rate.
Unless, of course, you can improve your ROI.
With PPC, one click only has the potential to land you one sale, and you pay for every click. With a website, you will pay for creating a page or place and optimising your content, but the number of clicks you can receive is unlimited.
There’s no cap on it.
A click will cost you X amount for every individual finding your site. A blog post will cost you X amount and can attract hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of visitors.
And it will never cost you more than the amount spent creating and periodically updating it.
Not only that, the SEO power of your content compounds over time. So while the PPC ads you ran last month no longer have any chance to send traffic your way, the blog you published at the same time is sending even more traffic this month than it did last month.
It will send more next month than it achieves this month.
Provided you have a killer site with an ongoing strategy in place, your domain authority should continue to improve. Your content should attract more and more traffic. And the ROI you receive for your investment in your website’s build, maintenance, and ongoing optimisation should get better and better.
I once landed a £100K contract off the back of a blog post I’d written five years previously and hadn’t updated in two years. In all my years of running campaigns for myself and clients, the greatest ROI has always come from their SEO, even when they’ve invested hundreds of thousands in paid advertising and a fraction of that amount in their website.
#3 All Your Leads Will Check Out Your Website
Let’s be realistic for a moment. When was the last time you bought anything online without first checking out the company? You might snoop at reviews on third-party sites, but the odds are if you’re considering buying from a company, you’re going to head straight to their website.
There’s a reason all the social platforms give you space to add your website URL; users want to scope out your website. If you’ve attracted leads on social media, at some point, they will have a look at your site for more information. If they’ve passed a billboard, heard a radio ad, or received a flyer through the post, odds are their first port of call will be your website.
So you see, even if you’re employing traditional marketing methods, social media strategies, PR, whatever, in the modern world, all roads eventually take prospects to your website.
This means that even if you don’t want the 14% conversion rate, you can gain from an SEO strategy, even if you’re completely uninterested in converting 80% of local searchers. Even if you care nothing for your ROI and ensuring you make as much profit as possible, you still need a killer website.
Because whether you want them to or not, whether you drive them to it or not, whether you have one or not, leads are still going to look at it.
And if it’s not up to snuff, they will look elsewhere.
Because the other hard truth of the online world is that when a website lets you down, all you have to do is go back to Google and search for another one that does the same thing but better.
It’s Not Just About Leads
A few years ago, I got a call from a recruiter about a position at a local agency. I wasn’t looking to hire them or buy from them I was considering working for them, and still, the first thing I did was check out their website.
Honestly, I almost didn’t bother taking the interview. It was a landing page, nothing more, and I felt a digital agency should have…you know…a digital presence. But on asking a few questions, I determined they had just recently formed after two other companies merged, and one of the things they needed from me was the creation of their website.
But imagine I’d not be a writer, content creator, or website developer. Imagine they had been looking to hire a hotshot new sales manager. Or that they weren’t a digital agency but a law firm, and I was a lawyer.
It’s not just leads and sales that are affected by a poor website. Every aspect of your business, from its ability to recruit top talent to its capacity to attract investors, will require you to have a killer website.
Great Business Leads Don’t Require A Super Expensive Site
It doesn’t have to be a highly complicated, uber-expensive one. Not at all. It can be a simple, cost-effective, one-page site, like this one I recently designed for a local Reiki therapist. Or it can be a larger, more expensive site like this one I did for a local law firm a few years ago.
It doesn’t matter.
The point isn’t to spend a fortune on a website. The point is to ensure that your website has been well designed and thoughtfully crafted, fully optimised for search and developed to enable potential leads to find you, understand you, and trust that you know what you’re doing.
Having the budget for bespoke photo shoots and a developed brand (as was the case with the law firm) is obviously going to work in your favour. But equally, you may be just starting out and need a solid foundation to build on as you grow (as is the case with the Reiki therapist).
Creating a killer website is essential, but if you’re holding yourself back from doing it because of the expense, don’t worry about it.
One Last Thing…
When you’re working with the right people, they can create a site that meets your needs, is capable of achieving your objectives, and fits within your budget.
They may advise you that to achieve all your goals, you will need to expand further down the line. And if they know anything about SEO they’ll tell you to ensure you’re doing ongoing work to maintain and improve your rankings. But again, this can all be done according to your needs and budget.
If you have thousands to invest in ongoing website development and SEO, fantastic. But if you have nothing and can only afford to get a basic site up and running, you can learn how to do much of the ongoing work yourself. All you need is time.
Whatever your business, wherever you’re currently at with it, the one thing you can be certain of is this: if you are serious about attracting great business leads, you need to begin by ensuring you have a killer website.
Book a discovery call with me, and we can talk about the best way to create a killer website capable of attracting great business leads that convert…
