How Turn Your Visitors Into Quality Leads
 by: Jeremy Futch

Converting "Traffic" to "Leads"

There are many different factors that must be considered when developing a successful website and online marketing campaign. A few of the factors that need to be considered are the following- Graphical Layout, Web Design, Relative Content, Logical Layout, Exposure, and Non-Intrusive Lead Generation.

Below is a brief description of each of these factors and what to look for to determine if you have all these factors working for you.

Graphical Layout-

The graphical layout of your site would be the graphical details of your site working together to create the right mood and visual appeal. Photos displayed on your site should be crisp high quality images. Web surfers in general respond better to uncluttered sites with readily available information that they are looking for.

Did you know that the colors of your website have a huge affect on how your website visitors perceive your site and services?

Careful consideration must be taken when selecting the color schemes for your site. The color combinations that you use invoke mood. If you set the proper "mood" for your website you will increase the click through rates, visit durations, and ultimately the amount of inquiries you get from your site.

Web Design-

How your site is "put-together" is another important aspect of your website. The way your site is programmed effects site load times, picture load times, cross-browser compatibility, search engine optimization, and the flexibility that you have to update your website.

Did you know that websites with a load time of 8 seconds or more lose 1/3 of their visitors?

Sites with slow load times can cause you to loose your visitors as quickly as they found you. If you are selecting a website provider, ask for examples of other clients sites, take note of how fast their website and pages load.

Cross-browser compatibility-

Another way you can loose visitors, through poor programming, is due to browser compatibility issues. Having a site that is not cross-compatible means that some of the visitors that come to your site will not be able to view it if they are using some other browser such as Firefox, Netscape, Opera. Not considering details such as this can cost you a lot of lost traffic and revenue.

Search engine optimization-

Many of today's real estate websites lack in this area. Designers are creating elaborate visually appealing sites that will never rank in the search engines because they are just one big image, slapped together in Photoshop and placed on the web. In order to compete in the search engines, your web designer better have some knowledge of how to optimize your site. Your site should use actual text whenever possible, keep the text images to minimum. Images will increase your sites load times and search engines cannot not "read" the text contained within an image. Proper meta-tags should always be used, even though all search engines do not place as high importance on them, as in the past.

Flexibility-

The simple fact is, most people who are interested in developing a website are not web designers, nor do they want to put forth the extreme time and effort necessary to learn. With that being said, it is important that every site owner have flexibility to access and easily make changes or additions to their website. Keeping current information on your website is the best way to keep visitors checking back to your website. Going through overloaded web designers to get the simplest changes made can become cumbersome and aggravating, as well as quite costly. Select a site provider that will give you simple tools to make changes to your website.

Relative Content-

We have discussed the visual and technical aspects of web design. The next big factor in generating leads from your website's traffic, would be "content relevance". One of the quickest ways to loose a visitor is to not have the information they are looking for readily available. The biggest thing you can do to increase the "viewing value" of your website, is to add detailed pages with multiple properly optimized photos. Content relevant to your sites theme will hold your visitors longer, as well as help you in the search engines for a wider range of keywords. If you are unable to easily develop a lot of your own content, RSS feeds are a great way to supplement fresh, new, constantly changing content to your site.

Logical Layout-

You can have tons of relative content, visual appeal, good ranking and still have horrible results because of a poor navigational layout. An overly complex site may make it difficult for your visitors to find the information they are looking for. Remember to K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple stupid). As a general rule it should not take more than 2-3 clicks to get to any bit of information on your website, from the homepage. If your information is hard to find, it is almost as bad as not offering it at all.

Exposure-

Simply put "no exposure=no leads". You can have the most elaborate and beautifully laid out website in the world, but if it cannot be found in the search engines- it's worthless. Always remember "visually appealing does not always = leads". A successful website is a delicate balance of all the factors mentioned in this article. Here are a few different methods of getting exposure for your website, to start generating revenue- natural search engine ranking, driving outside traffic to your website via marketing materials, pay-per-click.

Natural ranking is the most preferable method of exposure (and should be the main goal of every website). This is achieved through a website with proper on-page and off-page optimization.

Another way to expose your site is to drive outside traffic to your site thru marketing materials such as business cards, flyers, newspaper ads, billboards, commercials, and signs. This can be somewhat effective, but is only suggested to supplement the visitors you should be getting from your natural search engine results.

Pay-per-click is a good way to drive immediate traffic to your website, supplement your natural search engine rankings, as well as target smaller keywords and less popular searches that your site may not be optimized for. Always start off slow with your pay-per-click program, so that you can "fine tune" your cost-per-click, as well as make sure your generating enough revenue from your site to justify paying for clicks.

Lead Generation-

You can supply the information, generate traffic, hold the traffics' attention, but that does NOT create a lead for you. The simple fact is, generating leads is more than just supplying a phone number or e-mail address on the home page of your website.

Websites can be the perfect platform for generating information requests, offering free value services, and offering a variety of other information requests where your visitors expect you to contact them. Slapping your visitors in the face with an "insert your e-mail here" form on every page is a poor way to generate leads. Well developed lead generation tools are non-threatening devices, and will not run off your visitors. They are simply another page of your site that allow your visitors to request services or information.

It is important that you make an informed decision when choosing a website company. Choose a company that will get all the factors working for you.

Jeremy Futch
VP/Marketing Director
RapidListings
Real Estate Websites
www.rapidlistings.com

About The Author

Jeremy Futch VP/Marketing Director, JCOM Designs LLC - Director of Development and Marketing for two major web communities- www.terrificpets.com top ranked dog site, and www.rapidlistings.com a major real estate marketing website provider, servicing over 9,000 real estate agents and rapidly growing.

Visit- http://www.rapidlistings.com, http://www.terrificpets.com, [email protected].