Having a website for your business allows you to make a great first impression on your customer base. It helps you look professional, provides a quick and easy way to communicate information, builds credibility and brand identity, and improves lead generation.

Lead generation ensures your business continues to grow, succeed and expand. It helps you find potential customers and ensures they will buy your product or service. In fact, companies with a mature lead generation process generate 133% more revenue than average. Let us go through the essentials of building your website and how you can optimize it to increase lead generation.

Initial Steps You Need to Take

To begin, you’ll have to pick a domain name to establish your website and protect your intellectual property and trademarks. You can register your domain name with a domain registrar or web hosting company (if they serve as domain registrars). You can also purchase a domain through a trusted provider such as GoDaddy or Namecheap.

As you need to store your website on a server connected to the internet, find a web hosting company that provides a secure space to store your content, such as images, texts, and databases. You can use different website builders like WordPress or Shopify to help you create a website if you lack coding experience. They often have a pre-designed layout to help you design your site.

Get an SSL or secure sockets layer certificate from an SSL certificate provider to ensure user information safety and business security. If you sell products or offer services that accept payments and require processing, you must include a POS (Point of Sale) service on your website.

How to Design a Solid Website

Here are a few essentials of the website design:

1. Simplicity and Visual hierarchy

While your website's appearance matters, people visit your site to seek information or perform an action, such as purchasing. This is why simplicity is key; use fewer colors in your design, legible typefaces, and only use graphics if they help your user fulfill a task. Focus on visual hierarchy; organize and structure website elements to direct focus toward the most important element, such as signing up or purchasing.

2. Navigability and Accessibility

You can optimize your website's navigation by including a search bar on top to allow them to search keywords, contain links to jump to specific parts of a page, and use breadcrumbs navigation, enabling users to keep track of their location on your website. Web accessibility is essential so anyone with disabilities or limitations can use it. W3 guidelines include:

• Perceivable: Provide text alternatives, such as speech, symbols, and braille, for non- text content to change it to other forms people need.

• Operable: For example, if one can’t use the mouse, let them use the keyboard.

• Understandable: Content must be readable and understandable.

• Robust: Your content must be easily understood by a variety of user agents and

• different assistive technologies. You can check whether your website conforms to these guidelines using a web accessibility tester.

3. Customize Web Pages

Your website should have the following web pages:

• Home page:Summarize your website to make browsing your site easy. The homepage should ideally lead to the other main sections of the website.

• About page: This page should introduce you and your values, which set you apart from other competitors to visitors.

• Product or Service page: This page should inform users about your product or service and how they can purchase it.

• Blog page: Blogging is brilliant for SEO purposes as it allows you to take up more internet real estate while answering your audience’s queries and developing your authority.

• Contact page: This page should include your phone, email, or social media platforms so your visitors can reach you.

Other pages to consider adding

• FAQ pageto address common questions so users can service themselves easily

• Error 404 Page to allow your users to visit another page

• Testimonials from your previous clients can help with brand loyalty

How to Use Your Website to Increase Lead Generation

Here is how you can increase your leads and sales revenue.

1. Use SEO services

Search engine optimization (SEO) enhances the quality and quantity of your website to increase its visibility and ranking. It drives organic traffic to your website, generating more leads and customers and capturing more sales for your business. It also helps you stand out and rank well. You can enhance your website’s SEO in many ways, such as:

• Updating your content
• Creating a backlink strategy
• Performing keyword research
• Enhancing your website’s speed
• Content marketing
• Building a blog with SEO-optimized content
• Landing page design and development

The most efficient approach is to work with an external SEO company that can help you execute and implement the best strategy that fits your business and your budget. This way, you will not have to invest heavily in SEO tools or build an in-house team of expensive experts.

2. Use CTAs

CTAs or call to action prompt immediate response from visitors or encourage sales. It informs your visitors on what to do next. Your CTAs should stand out and be clear about what you're asking and what users can get in return for completing the action. Different CTA buttons you can implement include:

• Form submission: It's an ideal way to get customer information to help you generate leads.
• Lead generation CTA: Adding CTAs at the end of a blog post or where your website gets new visitors can generate leads.
• Read more: instead of displaying the whole post, be it a case study or a blog post, using a read more button will increase your post's engagement and create traffic.
• Service or product delivery: A simple button directs them to the services or products you offer.
• Social sharing: encourage visitors to share your content with friends by using social sharing buttons.

Endnote

A good website is ideal for building a loyal customer base, and optimizing or redesigning your website will help you generate more and more leads. You can employ numerous ways and strategies to make your business grow and succeed, and it's up to you to find the one that best fits your business model and service.