You’ve spent a lot of money, time and effort to get a website up and running for your business, so why aren’t leads flying in through the door from it?
Let’s do some quick tests
Unfortunately, there’s a host of reasons why your website may not be generating sales leads, so lets look at a few simple steps to identify possible reasons and even some ideas on how you could get your website on a path to generating some sales leads for you.
Does Google know about your site?
Google has to be ‘introduced’ to your website to know about it. If Google doesn’t know your website exists, then your website certainly won’t appear in Google’s search results, hence prospective clients wont find you.
As a quick test, try searching in Google for your business name.
Your website should in the top 5 or so Google results. If not, then something is diabolically wrong.
This is a must-fix issue.
The best way to submit your website to Google is with Google Search Console. Read on to find out more about Google’s Search Console and how to connect it to your website.
Bing also has a similar toolset called Microsoft Bing Webmasters Tools.
Are sales prospects even coming to your website?
Let’s fix that with a Sitemap!
We need to introduce website to Google, and the best way to do that is with a ‘Sitemap‘. This isn’t a page in your site, but a specially formatted file using XML coding that lists all of your wetsuit’s page.
Finding your sitemap
A sitemap has a typical location and filename, but its not mandated. There are some unofficial conventions for a sitemaps filename :
- sitemap.xml
- sitemap_index.xml ( used by Yoast etc)
Try each to locate your sitemap – assuming one exists of course.
NB Replace websiteconcierge.com.au with your website’s address
websiteconcierge.com.au/sitemap_index.xml
Has Google ‘digested’ your website?
Use this special Google search syntax to see if Google is aware of your website. NB Replace websiteconcierge.com.au below with your website’s address.
site:websiteconcierge.com.au
The ‘site:’ operator tells Google to search for all pages from that website. Check to see that most of your website’s pages appear in the search results.
If Google doesn’t know about many pages in your website, then it’s likely to not appear strongly in Google searches.
Image: https://www.thebrandonagency.com/
Robots.txt
This is another special file not intended for people but for search engines. Your robots.txt can optionally point to your sitemap – In fact its a good SEO discipline if it does making it easier to find your sitemap file, especially if its in an non-conventional location or filename.
Robots.txt typically tells search engines which pages in your site to *not* index.
View your robots.txt by typing the following into your browser:
NB Replace websiteconcierge.com.au with your website’s address
websiteconcierge.com.au/robots.txt
Here is what my robots.txt looks like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php
Sitemap: /sitemap_index.xml
The sitemap line indicates that my sitemap is at websiteconcierge.com.au/sitemap_index.xml
You can visit my sitemap using my browser, but please check to make sure you can see your own.
If you cant find one in your site, it may not have been created and so you need to make one.
I’d suggest you advise your web developer or tech support and have them create an sitemap for your site. If yours is a WordPress site then install and configure the Yoast SEO plugin and check it creates a sitemap.
Google Search Console
The cheapest and most accurate way to check your website’s ranking performance is with Google’s Search Console (GSC).
Connecting GSC
It can be a little tricky to connect GSC to your website but the results make it worthwhile, so I suggest you persist &/or reach out to your tech friends or your website support specialists 😉
There are several ways that you can ‘authenticate’ your website with GSC so choose the method that is the most convenient for you.
My favourite method is by adding a TXT record into your DNS as you get to see data from both the www and the non-www versions of your site. Yep. They are different, and data can flow into both.
Refer: https://search.google.com/search-console/welcome
When you initially connect to GSC, you will probably find there’s no performance data displayed. Don’t panic! You’ll just have to wait for GoogleBot (Google’s indexing software) to re-visit your site and populate this data.
This might take anywhere from a few days to a week or so.
Once you have GCS in place, you can view a variety of your site’s performance characteristics as reported by Google. The sample GSC performance chart below shows:
- Impressions: Number of times your website featured in a Google search
- Clicks: Number of people who clicked on a search and entered your website
- Average Click-Through Rate: The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click
- Average Position: Average position (ie rank) in a Google search
Google Search Console also provides query and page performance data which is really important to us in this context. This lists the search queries, the number of click-throughs as well as your site’s average ranking for those searches.
Reviewing this data will confirm if your site is ranking in Google and help identify the searches it is and isn’t successful for, and hence how well your website is performing.
Keyword Research
This is the process of drilling into the multitude of searches people make and selecting the ones that best represent a prospective client for you business.
There are a variety of keyword research tools, but I find the Keyword Tool in Google Ads gives good results. When researching keywords, consider:
- Target keywords that have a moderate to high search frequency
- Resist the temptation to immediately target high competition keywords
- Select keywords that resonate with your client’s needs and your site’s current Google performance
- Keywords often change across locales
- Don’t select too many targets initially (I suggest 3 to start)
- Ensure your target keywords are used by your clients. Not you.
- Avoid jargon if its not popular with your clients
How do you measure leads?
Well, the answer is obvious isn’t it? They contact me and we do business. Happy days!
That’s lovely but if we really want to track leads, especially those from your website we’ll need to implement ‘conversion tracking’ to do a serious job on tracking and reporting leads.
This doesn’t have to be as an arduous a task that it might sound. Let’s assume your leads mainly come via phone calls, and some via website form fills. That’s fairly typical.
Analytics will tell you how many people are arriving into your website, and what they do when they arrive. Analytics will also tell you how your visitors found your website which is another helpful statistic.
If you’ve covered all of these steps your website is well prepared to capture sales leads for your business.
Analytics. The website measurement tool
If you aren’t using Google Analytics already, get it installed on your website.
- Setup your Analytics account
Analytics will tell you how many people are arriving into your website, and what they do when they arrive. Analytics will also tell you how your visitors found your website. - Install an Analytics plugin, like MonsterInsights or similar
This will send data collected from your website to Analytics.
Alternatively you can commission Google Tag Manager, and configure it to send your website data to Analytics. - Setup Conversions
Tell Analytics what activities in your website represent a ‘conversion’ for your business. eg - Form submits
Record a ‘conversion’ when someone submits your contact form - Click to Call
Record a ‘conversion’ when someone clicks on the phone number displayed on your website.
An online marketer with deep experience in Sales & Marketing as well as technical skills accumulated over the many years of working in this industry. He has been knee-deep in websites and online marketing since the mid 80’s.
Peter is a lateral thinker who sees solutions where many don’t.
Website Concierge is a reincarnate of Succinct Ideas, providing quality website support and online marketing for small businesses.
If you found something in my site useful, I’d really appreciate if you could link to the page and maybe Google will help other people who need the same info find the page as well 😉
