Leads

How to generate more leads from your website

You want your business to grow but you need more leads to nurture. So, we’ve gathered our tips to help you generate more leads from your website.

1. Have you identified your target market?

The first thing to do is make sure that the people who are visiting your website are coming back to it intentionally, rather than by accident or through a referral from an online search engine. The more targeted the visitors are, the more leads you will generate. The easiest way to achieve this for local businesses is to use Google Analytics.

Start by analysing your traffic using the website analytics tool built into Google Analytics. You can extract all kinds of useful information about your visitors, including their demographics and the types of pages they are spending time on most. This will help you to identify your target market, both in terms of who they are and what kind of information they are interested in.

Depending on the industry you are operating in, this might be highly specific or more general.

2. Get your message across in the headline

The headline on any page of content is very important, but it’s even more important when you are trying to encourage people to complete a form or download an asset from your website. The headline needs to be engaging and, most importantly, it needs to give people a reason to take action and part with their contact details.

3. Optimise your website for Google's search engine

Once you have identified your target market and created some content that is targeted towards your audience, you will want this information to appear as high up in the search results as possible, giving more opportunity that your website will be clicked through from the search engine.

In order for this to happen, your website needs to be search engine optimised. This is a process whereby you change the coding on certain parts of your website so that it meets Google’s criteria for including in its index and returning in results when people search for information related to your industry.

Some things you can do include:

  • Completing H1 and H2 titles on pages
  • Completing the meta title and description
  • Adding Alt descriptions to images
  • Naming URLs with keywords so it’s really clear for a search engine to know what’s on the webpage

Add internal links throughout your website to ease navigation.

4. Integrate your website with social media

Once you have created the content on your website, you are going to need people to see it. A great way of achieving this is by integrating different social media platforms into your website design. This includes links to Facebook pages or YouTube videos that allow customers to get more information on a particular subject, or to share a piece of content with their friends and followers.

5. Make it easy for customers to find what they need

Your website should be an information resource for your target market, not just a place where people sign up to download assets from you. In order for this to happen, you need to make sure that your website is easy to navigate.

Your homepage should have a clear hierarchy that makes it easy for people to find the information they want – even if they don’t use search engines to navigate from page to page, instead clicking from one part of the website to another.

6. Use imagery to bring your website to life

Finally – we’ve made sure that our content is targeted towards the right people. We now need to make it engaging and interesting. A great way of achieving this is by adding eye-catching imagery to the design of your website, creating a holistic look and feel enhances your brand identity. Your website should make people feel excited about engaging with you, which is why high quality imagery is so important.

Web design Croydon

We create professionally designed websites that offer visitors a simple way of finding out more about your business and how you can help them. 

Find out more about our web design services in Croydon

Digital marketing for accountants

Tips to maintain online presence

With the end of the third lockdown, our local High Streets will start to welcome more people as shops, beauty and hospitality (with outside space!) are opening.

It will certainly be different for a while, as we all find our feet again after such time away from family, friends and colleagues. But what’s key is that our local businesses will be opening their doors again to welcome people through their open doors.

What has changed is that many businesses realise the importance of online presence with many creating websites to sell products and services as well as utilising social media and email marketing. 

If you’re still finding your feet with building your online presence, here’s a few marketing tips to help you maintain and build online visibility.

Develop your content marketing plan

Wow your customers and prospects with your knowledge and expertise to help increase brand awareness and position you as a thought leader.

A great way to make news timely is by tapping into international days of relevance to your business. Create a calendar and then each month check to see what blogs you can write or social media posts you can share tapping into that day.

This fresh content added to your website also helps with search engine optimisation (SEO) which helps improve your ranking in search engine results pages. Whilst SEO is a long-term strategy, a regular blog with keywords (those words and phrases you want to be found for in search engines) will help in the long run.

We recommend that you compile a content marketing plan adding key dates so you know when you can write a blog post about a particular topic or product to send out timely communication.

This ongoing sharing of information helps to build trust with your customers and potential clients. If you’re offering advice that is helping, then you have more chance of getting a call for a consultation.  

Regular and new content on your website with keywords that you want to be found for forms part of a search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. Including this in your plan will really help give your website a boost in search results pages.  

Do you know your target audience?

Over this period have you may have discovered that you’ve been working in one or two sectors of industry more than others? Or perhaps you have had more enquiries about a certain service or product.

Now is the time to review these frequent enquiries and really understand who your target audience is. This will help so much with engagement and attracting quality leads because you can tailor your marketing communication specifically to their concerns. This positions you as the thought leaders in your area of expertise.  

Here’s our advice on creating up an online persona (an imaginary person that is your typical target audience).  

Are you listed on Google My Business?

If you have already discovered the virtues of Google My Business that’s great. If not then now is the time to make sure that your business is listed on it.

We’ve got a few videos from how to set up your Google My Business page through to getting reviews. So, whatever level of Google My Business you’re at we have a video to help beginners through to GMB old timers. Take a look at the Google My Business videos here.

Digital marketing Croydon

We are digital marketing agency in Croydon. Why not take advantage of our free website audit so you can understand whether you need to make any updates to your website so that it is optimised for lead generation.  

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Marketing tips for Croydon businesses

As we wait with fingers crossed for non-essential shops to open and sectors such as hair & beauty, hospitality and leisure to resume, we thought we’d offer our local Croydon businesses some marketing tips to help increase online presence.  

Google My Business  

First things first, is your company on Google My Business? If not, get one set up – it’s free to do!

If you do have a page already then make sure all details are up to date and add as many ways for people to get in touch with you as they can.

Add any special offers you have running. Remember to add imagery to your business page, this is a great resource for the hospitality sector to showcase popular dishes.

Remind customers to leave a review. Testimonials are a great way to encourage potential and returning customers.

How to set up Google My Business watch our video.

Social media

Start increasing the amount of social posts you share. This will remind people about your offering. Encourage people to follow you for updates on when you will be opening but make sure you always remind people that they can buy virtually. Or for hair & beauty, get your bookings up and running by spreading the word on social media.

For our wonderful Croydon hospitality businesses, we can’t wait for the restaurants, pubs and bars to breathe life into the town again. Remind Croydon folk what they’ve been missing with fantastic images of your amazing dishes.

Instagram and Facebook are great for foodie places. With Instagram it’s all about the look and there’s nothing more appealing than a plate of tasty food. Give details of anything new, your most popular dishes and your specials. Be descriptive within your post though.

Re-confirm your opening times and update your profile with any new details.

Run teaser campaigns with a countdown to when you will open (although we’re aware that it is all tentative dates right now).

Extend reach of your social post by adding hashtags. Here’s some general Croydon foodie hashtags you might want to consider as well as some standard Croydon ones you should always think about:

#Croydon #EastCroydonCool #Croydonbar #Croydonpub #Shoplocal #Supportlocal #Croydonrestaurants #Croydonfoodies #Croydonfood #Croydonrestaurantquarter #Instafood #lovefood #foodstagram #foodpic #foodie

Don’t forget to utilise the Story function on Instagram and Facebook. This is another way to be seen by your followers as it stands out at the top of the feed.

Encourage customers and prospects to share posts on social media.

When someone shares a post and tags you in, you can use the little arrow function just below the image. This allows you to share this to your stories and you can thank the customer for their visit.

Or a simple way to create a story is once you have added a post to your Instagram feed, just click the arrow below your post and you can share to you story.

Website updates

If you have a website, make sure that all your contact details, products and services are up to date. For hospitality get your menus and booking forms sorted. If your website still says Christmas 2020, get that removed, potential customers will think you are not opening.

If you have a blog, make sure you add content to that and do so regularly. This really helps with search engine optimisation (SEO) and your business being found in search engines. Fresh content is great for ongoing organic rankings.

We’ve recently created a blog on 8 ways to refresh your website, here’s an overview of what you’ll find on that. These are great SEO tactics that you can implement yourself.

  • Check your website navigation, it should be easy
  • Review content, contact details and check links aren’t broken
  • Add new imagery to refresh the look
  • Complete any missing meta descriptions
  • Update and add new calls to action
  • Get a free website review from us!

Email marketing

If you have an email distribution list, then now is a great time to start an email marketing campaign. Remember to be clear in your message, include a call to action and ensure you have your contact details visible.

Look at our checklist in our blog on what to check before you send your next email marketing campaign. You must also ensure you are GDPR compliant.

PPC Croydon

What is PPC and why use it? All you need is in that blog. But, in a nutshell, Pay Per Click or PPC is online paid advertising which gets its name from the fact that advertisers pay when someone clicks on an advert that they have running. It’s a great way of appearing at the top of search results pages to give your website a boost.

Digital marketing Croydon

We’re a digital marketing agency in Croydon providing digital marketing for accountants and other local businesses. Download our eBook with additional marketing resources and ideas for getting your business seen online – The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing.

Contact us for a free consultation to chat further about the different digital options.

Alternatives to Google My Business

Alternatives to Google My Business

As you may have guessed from our previous Marketing Minute videos, Google My Business is our favourite business listing tool. However, this doesn’t mean it has to be yours.

There’s no shortage of free online business listing tools, so why not have a look at some alternatives to Google My Business in our video.

Free listing websites

A good alternative that we recommend is Bing Places for Business. We also recommend a Facebook Business page, making sure that all the details on this page match the information on your Google My Business page.

Additionally, for those of you in the UK, here are some additional free listing sites to take a look at:

  • The Sun
  • The Independent
  • Yell
  • TomTom
  • Amazon Alexa
  • FourSquare
  • Here
  • Opendi UK
  • The Mirror
  • The Evening Standard
  • NextDoor

Although these are the main ones, there are still many more that you can get onto.

There are also directories for specific trades, such as Checkatrade for tradesman. 

If you would like more information on Google My Business, you can view the rest of our videos and blogs about the listing tool here.

SEO agency Croydon 

If you need help then give us a call at Smart Cow on 020 3137 1826 or book a free consultation to discuss our SEO services and other digital marketing tools such as social media managementPay Per Click (PPC)email marketing and CRM – read more about our marketing services.