5 Steps To More Website Leads For Your Small Service Business
Contents
As a small service business, having a website that generates new leads is invaluable. Despite this, many small business websites fail to generate any new leads. I don’t think it is as hard as people think to turn a website into a lead generation machine. There are five key steps to creating a successful lead generation website.
Clarify your service offerings
Get in front of your target client
Create landing pages for your services
Optimise your pages for conversion
Iterate and improve on the other four steps
I know it sounds glib to say it only takes five steps to achieve what so many people see as unachievable, but I stand by it. As we go deeper into each step, I hope you start to see how achievable it is.
Step 1: Clarify your service offerings
Whatever industry you’re in, there will always be several services you can offer within it. You don’t have to offer them all, but the ones you do offer, you must be good at. Before thinking about your website, take the time to refine your services. You need a well-rounded package where the value is easily communicated.
Ask yourself, ‘Who is my dream client?’. Build a profile of who they are and what they do. Embody this person and consider the problems they face and the solutions they seek.
Next, examine your skillset. How can your skills help solve your dream client's problem? What is it about you, your skills, and your experience that make you a better option than your competitors?
Now, consider your competitors. Look at their websites. Review their service offerings. What do they do? What can you do better?
Consider all these things and use your findings to help craft your service packages. Your services should play to your strengths. They should be valuable to the clients you’re targeting. And, they must bring better results than your competitors. Once you’ve clarified your service offerings, it’s time to make sure the right people see them.
Step 2: Get in front of your target client
Revisit your ideal client profile. Step back into their shoes.
If they have a problem, where are they looking for solutions? Are they going to social media? Are they going to Google or YouTube? Are they reading blogs and books to find solutions? Wherever they look, that’s where you need to show up.
Once you know where to show up, you can focus on finding the best way to do so. If your client is looking for answers on social media, you need to be there, creating content and running ads. If your client is using Google, you need to show up in the search results.
Once you know where you’re positioning yourself, it's time to focus on building trust. Creating content is a great way to build trust.
Give away your knowledge and expertise. Tell your client exactly how to solve their problems themself. It may seem counterintuitive. But giving people the answer makes them more likely to buy from you. Think about it. Firstly, it shows that you have the answer. It also shows that you are honest and don’t hide information for your own gain. Both these things build trust.
As you build trust, you can start to plug your services. That's when you direct people to your website. Your site needs to be ready to receive the new traffic, and you need a place to send it.
Step 3: Create landing pages for each of your services
When sending people to your website, you have two options. Either send them to your home page or to dedicated sales landing pages. If you want more leads, the landing page option makes more sense. It allows you to be more "salesy" and helps you optimise for a single kind of visitor.
Successful landing pages follow a similar structure. Try to match your pages to the following structure.
Heading: Introduce your service and what it promises.
Subheading: Provide more context to your heading by expanding on your service promise.
Explanation: Use either a video or text to describe exactly what your service does, who it is for, and why it's needed.
Call-to-action: Add links for purchasing, booking a call, or signing up for a mailing list. You can include pricing, but it may deter some people from engaging. You always need two CTA options. One is for people who want to buy now. The other is for people with an interest in your services, but who don’t have an immediate need. Capturing these cooler leads' emails means you can warm them up through your mailing list.
As your landing pages start getting more traffic, it's time to optimise them. Through iteration and optimisation, we make conversions more likely.
Step 4: Track your website traffic and user behaviour to optimise for lead generation
If you’re getting traffic to your landing pages, it’s time to optimise them. Even if they are already delivering leads. It’s unlikely you made them perfect the first time.
Using analytics tools, we track how users are interacting with our pages. These insights show us where they might be getting stuck or abandoning the process. This knowledge shows where we need to improve.
CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) is a huge topic in and of itself. We won’t go into the finer details of it here. To sum up, it analyses user behaviour and makes changes to increase conversions. The process is scientific. It uses A/B tests to compare two versions and discover which works best. It is a perpetual process of trial and improvement. Over time, you can expect a natural increase in your conversion rate.
Step 5: Iterate until you hit your target, then keep going
If the previous four steps are bringing the results you want, great. Keep going. You can’t rest on your laurels. After all the work you put in to get on top, don’t let yourself down by not doing the work to stay on top.