The driving force behind your online presence is to create more quality leads for your business. Right?

Sometimes new clients come to us saying that while their old website has always gotten a steady stream of traffic, it never delivered them very many leads. So how do you convert traffic into leads?

Traffic is the first ingredient.

Online traffic is just a measure of the number of visitors your website receives.

Analytics software provides many ways to measure and analyze that traffic. You can learn a lot about your business by assessing which pages receive the most views, how many of your visitors are unique vs. return visitors, and where they came from – whether they found you on Google, social media, paid ads, or another channel. Monitoring your traffic will definitely help you focus your marketing efforts and hone your content creation.

But traffic does not equal leads.

Leads are the visitors that show active interest in your business. They're people who have taken the initiative to provide you with their email address, phone number, or other contact info so you can follow up with them and begin the sales process. 

How does your website turn traffic into leads? A full discussion is a topic for another day. But at its most essential:

Your website needs to clearly convey the competitive value of what your business offers in a way that’s compelling to your ideal customers.

And it needs to guide them to your contact information or a form where they can easily get in touch.

Focus on conversions

In some lines of business, website traffic will relatively quickly see the value of an offering, and click on a “Call now!” button to get in touch. A relatively easy conversion process. 

In some industries, we work a little harder to build trust and confidence and win visitors over.

That first interaction with your website may not be enough to create trust. But you still want to capture the lead – basic contact information or a social "Like". Anything that takes a moment of interest and makes it sticky – so you can follow up. 

Lower the Barrier to Conversion

One great way to capture leads from visitors who are not ready to click on a “Call now!” button is to provide some content of value in exchange for their contact information.

When your website offers a quality white-paper, webinar, contest, e-book, checklist, or helpful video, you don’t have to just give it away free. If you’ve created something of value, use it to capture not just the visitor’s attention, but their basic contact information, too. 

Make it as easy and as enticing as possible for someone to give you their information. Cerate content that appeals to your ideal customers. Make that content highly visible and promote it to a targeted audience (more about that in our previous blog).

In the end, if you are targeting the right people, and you have an effective, conversion-optimized website, you will generate quality leads.