Is Your Website Producing the Leads It Should?
You need a good-looking website. That’s a no-brainer. It’s a virtual introduction between your business and your clients, and it needs to be eye-catching and informative right off the bat. But your site needs to do more than just look good — it needs to attract high-value customers.
Your website isn’t just a standalone product that potential clients can visit to learn more about you. In fact, most people will never do that. The primary purpose of your website should be to bring in new customers. Think of your website as the first tool in your digital marketing toolkit.
The best websites serve not only as brand awareness, but they convert people into leads. Then, your sales and marketing efforts will convert the right leads into customers.
Over the past couple of years, Google has updated its algorithm to favor websites that:
- Have high quality content
- Are easy to use
- Offer a great page experience
Our team here at Baker Labs stays up to date with the latest changes made by search engines partly because we’re nerds and we like reading about these things, but mostly because we want the websites we build to be effective for you.
In June of this year, that’s going to come down to user experience, or UX for short.
Attract Your Ideal Customer With Your Website
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of Google updates though, let’s talk about ways your website can help you grow your business. An effective website identifies and targets your ideal high-value customer. Our team works with you to understand specific user behaviors in order to craft an amazing experience for them.
The goal is to increase your brand’s momentum. We want to get people talking about you, and your website is one of the ways to do that. Our team geeks out over web copy that tells your story in a way that converts users into patients. We help you identify what makes you unique, and we turn those things into an offer that patients won’t want to refuse.
Tell your story in a way that resonates with your patients, and highlight ways your software simplifies, streamlines, and adds value to what they’re already doing. Then, hook them.
We want to create an irresistible offer that your website visitor just can’t say no to. Whether that’s taking a quiz, a survey, or signing up for a free trial, we want to create compelling content that encourages them to dive deeper and learn more.
As you’re creating your website copy and offers, remember to think of it as a story. What’s your favorite book? What is it about it that kept you turning the page and staying up well past bedtime? You probably wanted to know what happened next. The same is true for your customers, except they want to know what will happen next in their own story. Provide solutions to their problems and create excitement about the next step in your customer journey. Be clear about what you have to offer and why your ideal customer should be interested.
Consider adding brief explainer videos that show off what you do, so that it’s easy to grasp how to use your product or service.
Even if they don’t commit to your solution immediately, if they download a form or respond to any of your offers, you can continue to reach out to them through an email marketing campaign. By offering valuable information, you create leads. Once we’ve got those things nailed down, it’s time to focus on the design and the technical side of things.
OK, ready to talk about UX?
What in the World is UX?
Why should you care? Let’s say that you have the most user-friendly patient management system on the market. You’ve got all the bells and whistles and more than enough features to satisfy your customers. Your website has been around a while, and all the pages on your website are SEO-optimized.
Your main competitor also has a great website, and also ranks high for the keywords they want to target. The difference is that you offer customers the opportunity to sign up right there on your website, and your competitor requires a phone call to complete the process. Your website leads to a much better experience for your customer, and so you will rank higher on Google. That’s UX in a nutshell.
(Don’t offer online signup? Get in touch and we’ll help you set it all up.)
UX covers every element of your website that involves interactions between your patients and your service. It’s a pretty vast concept, and includes things like:
- How your site makes potential clients feel
- How easy it is to access the information they’re looking for
- How pleasant it is to use
Essentially, Google is looking for ridiculously amazing websites. Luckily, that’s what our team here at Baker Labs has been doing for years.
A ridiculously amazing website is both well designed and informative, while also set up on the backend to rank high on Google. Most people can identify whether a website is well designed, but the technical side of things can seem a little mysterious. When we talk about making sure your website is SEO optimized, we mean things like:
- Using the right keywords
- Using keywords in the right places
- Checking on your load speed
- Creating descriptions for photos that Google bots can “crawl”
- And hundreds of other things
UX goes further, though. Providing an exceptional user experience will move your pages to the first page of Google faster than anything else.
Google’s June 2021 Core Update and What it Means for You
Why should you care? Anytime Google updates its algorithm, our team at Baker Labs sees changes in the number of website visitors, keyword rankings, and sometimes even calls to our clients’ businesses.
That’s not always the case, but occasionally it’s a pretty big deal. We stay on top of these changes so that we’re prepared for them, and so that we can tweak our clients’ websites if they need it to prevent any revenue loss.
Google is making a core update now, and changes will continue to roll out over the summer. Most of these, again, deal with UX. The more helpful and enjoyable your website is, the higher you will rank on Google. Some key things to make sure your site is excelling at includes:
- Mobile friendliness
- Safe browsing
- HTTPs-security
- Following intrusive interstitial guidelines (e.g. avoid unnecessary pop-ups that show before your main page or pages that have to be dismissed before the actual page is revealed)
- Load time
- Visual stability
- Interactivity
To learn more about those things in detail, you can read all about it here.
The cool thing is that we will be able to track these metrics through tools provided by Google. Together, we will know exactly what’s working and what isn’t.
Forecasting the Future
Beyond the items listed above, there are a few other areas your website can excel in that are commonly overlooked. These are factors that we predict will be used more and more in the future. (Some of it’s obvious. Some of it’s not.)
- Voice recognition: Do you use voice to text? Do you use it when you’re searching for things on your phone? Yeah, so does everybody else. You want to be sure your website is optimized for voice recognition.
- Artificial intelligence: AI doesn’t mean iRobot. AI is basically any software that can automatically do things that typically require human intelligence. A few examples are facial recognition, pattern identification, chatbots, and even autocorrect. This field will advance rapidly, and there will be more uses for it in website design.
- Dark mode and low-light websites for mobile: Dark mode websites are able to conserve power and are better for OLED phone screens. Many people use dark mode on their phones and even desktops in order to reduce eye strain.
By understanding what’s coming, you can align your website with the trends that resonate with potential customers and turn them into real leads.
Trends change quickly. Algorithms do too. In order to grow your business and reach new customers, your website should be tailored around the user experience and give them what they’re looking for. It’s a lot to keep up with, and what to do can seem really overwhelming, but you don’t have to go it alone. We know the ropes and can help you land on the right approach that gets you attention and brings you the leads you want.
If you’re ready to turn your website visitors into leads, schedule a call with us here. We’ll be in touch soon!
