14-point checklist to increase leads from your Economic Development website

Ok, so you finally got the Board to include funding in the budget for a new website and it looks GREAT! Everyone who sees it says they love it. There's just one problem – you're getting very few or no leads and that stinks.

Of course the Board wants to know why you're not getting miraculous results since they ponied up the dough. They probably don't have any experience with online marketing and don't understand that a new website doesn't create instant results all on its own, but that doesn't matter. They're making noises and you've got to start getting some traction.

Plus, you work long hours. It would be nice if you didn't have to waste a lot of time communicating with prospects who aren't good matches for the community. If only those leads were already qualified so you could concentrate on the ones that you have a shot at...

Well, that's doable. Let's figure out how to get things going!

First of all, there's probably nothing “wrong” with your website.

It probably looks great and is mobile friendly. It probably has all the information anyone could ever need if they're considering your locality. Your web designer is probably talented and has all the technical and design skills you could ever need.

The problem isn't the website itself.

The problem is that it can't do any more than you've given it the tools to do, and most websites are the product of no goals or strategic planning.

Here are some things to look at, to find ways to help your site help you.

We're going to start out pretty easy, but it starts getting harder at #9.

To be most successful, you need to try to divorce yourself from the site and look at it objectively. This is hard, but try to put yourself in the shoes of a Site Locator or a prospect.

1. When you visit the home page, would you have any idea of what your community's unique selling point is if you didn't already know it? Assuming you do ;) There has to be something that makes it different, something that makes it THE place for certain types of business or certain types of business owners to be. Find that difference and make sure everyone knows it. It should become part of your elevator speech and should carry through every bit of marketing you do.
2. Do you have clear calls to action (CTA's) that tell visitors what you want them to do next? Is it worded in a way that lets them know what's next if they click a link? For example, “Download our community profile” or “Learn more about our workforce” instead of “Click here.” People like to know what's next, and clear CTA's will prompt them to do what you want.
3. Are your CTA's highly visible? Any important call to action should be easy to see and hard to miss, even if a visitor isn't looking for it.
4. Does your site have a clear navigational flow that moves visitors through the important content you want them to see? Visitors shouldn't always have to use the menu to get to content. Ideally, you should guide them to what you want them to see next by providing a link within the content of each page.
5. Is content broken up into small scannable blocks? Website visitors typically quickly scan a page to see if something grabs their eye. If it does, they'll stay and read it. If not, they click the Back button and are gone. Smaller blocks of content make your pages much easier to scan so you have more of a chance to get their attention.
6. Do you have headlines and sub-headlines within your pages, to help break it up into sections? That also helps make the page more easily scannable.
7. Do your images or graphics work well with the page content? Make sure that they're relevant, interesting, fast loading, and have good alternate text. Every image should have a reason for being on the page, not just be there to fill up space. And if you have outdated or amateurish images, they need to go.
8. Do you have your most important content at the top of the page, or is it buried at the bottom? Website content shouldn't be written like a novel where you build the suspense up for the climax at the end; it needs to be written more like a news article. You've got to grab attention with compelling introductory content at the beginning, and then provide supporting details and background.
9. Ok – everything up until now has been pretty straightforward, but this is where it starts getting harder. It's where you really need to engage your brain, but you can do it. Do you know exactly what your site should achieve for you and how you'll measure success?
10. Who are your target markets and how is content geared to interact with each target?
11. Are you creating regular, fresh content to help drive targeted traffic to the site, fuel your traffic funnels, and help search engine optimization? I'm sure you've heard it before, but this really is the #1 way to get traffic to your site.
12. We already talked about this in #2, but now that you're thinking more deeply about your actual online strategy and goals, what calls to action are really needed to drive traffic through your funnels, and where they should be located within content to help entice and nurture visitors?
13. Do you have a way of identifying site visitors and knowing what they actually do on your site? I'm not talking about how many clicks you get from an email, or how many people visited a certain page. I'm talking about what each of those people actually do on your site – things like the pages a specific user visited, the order they visited them in, the forms they completed, and the amount of time they spent on each page.
14. Do you have traffic funnels to help move each of these visitors from awareness to consideration to conversion? Conversion can be anything from downloading a PDF to emailing or calling you. Funnels should have a progressive series of conversions that move each type of visitors closer to contacting you after they've qualified themselves with your brilliant content.

If you can truthfully say that your website meets the requirements in the questions above, then you're going to have a tougher time because that means there's a mismatch between what you have to offer and who you're offering it to.

If you're getting good website traffic, have effective traffic funnels and visitors are still dropping out of the funnels, it may be that your community just isn't competitive in the target markets you (or the powers that be) have chosen. If so, then you're probably in for a difficult meeting with your Board about the realities of what they're trying to achieve.

Most likely, though, your answers to the questions above have uncovered a lot you can do to improve your site and help turn it into a lead generation machine.

The list you generated in answering the questions above probably seems overwhelming, but think of how less stressed you'll be when your site is qualifying leads while you're relaxing in the backyard.

Also, if you need help figuring out what changes you should make to your website, we do a limited number of Website Audits to help people like you.

Find out what a Website Audit is.

See how I used that call to action to guide you to content that might be helpful to you? :)