Sometimes on most websites the home page and the creative design get the most attention. And the focus is not always focused on lead generation. However that is your website’s primary purpose.  Usually where to put everything and make it easy to find, or maybe just making sure everything is covered takes precedence.  In a lot of cases even more so where a content management system (CMS) is used to update your website. Because you may even forget to remember about your sub pages (second and third level pages in your navigation).

The convenience of using CMS systems and the speed of publishing updates means you can post new content and have it look like the rest of your website. But at the same time it could also mean that you never take the time to look at the new content pages you are creating and how they fit into the rest of your website. Much less your lead generation program.

Here are a few points to keep in mind when reviewing these sub-pages:

• Is your contact information easily available on all home pages? Home Page, Blog Post, About Us, special promotion pages, etc.

• When trying to generate leads you need to have different click through paths for your different website visitors (Ex. existing customers vs. someone who just read about your company in the newspaper). Everyone digests information differently and in different cycles such as ready to buy or people who are looking for credibility and trust before they consider purchasing. Remember we talked about effective web persuasion in an early post.

• Use keywords on deeper sub-pages, since you never know which pages search engines will favor. This point is important enough to repeat the first tip. Consider if the sub-page is the first page the visitor sees. Do they have an easy way to contact sales or customer service. Using a keyword in the first paragraph will also help search engines weight that page higher.

• Do you have links from other sites? If yes then that will help with your “link authority” and help your search engine rankings which could lead to higher qualified leads that come from relevant industry websites. Or that match keywords that your buyers ask about.

• Keep content fresh and updated. Put another way new content generally shows up higher in the search engine search results. Since recency is a factor in determining a content’s relevancy.

Capturing new leads is an ongoing process to ensure your sales pipeline is filling with new prospects. Sometimes improving existing pages can help too by perhaps looking at keywords that helped find those deeper and in some cases hidden gems. Using your web analytics tools you might realize that the majority of your search engine website visitors are being directed to one landing page or blog post topic. If that is the case, and these keywords are key to your business. You may want to highlight this page content on the home page. Or at the very least mention these same keywords on your home page.

Photo credit: pneumatic_transport

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Key findings from a recent January 09,  HubSpot survey on Inbound Marketing found Small businesses are most aggressively allocating lead generation budgets to blogging, social media and search engine optimization.

“Realizing that inbound marketing techniques ‘level the playing field’ with the bigger budgets of larger competitors, small businesses are spending a 180% greater portion of their budgets on blogging/social media and 36% greater portion of their budgets on search engine optimization than businesses with 50 employees or more.”

Online techniques allow for cost efficiencies to compete against much larger marketing budgets. But why?

“Outbound marketing customer acquisition depends largely on the size of a company’s budget, whereas inbound marketing more heavily slants towards those businesses with the best products and services and ability to create great content.”

In the HubSpot survey they found, small businesses reported spending nearly 3X higher percentage of their lead generation budget on blogs and social media than medium-to-large businesses (14% and 5%, respectively).

On the lead generation side, small businesses spending more than 50% on inbound marketing reported a lower cost per lead, compared with medium and larger business.

What does this tell us?

If you haven’t already allocated budgets to online lead generation campaigns it is not too late to take advantage.

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• Using Online Video for Marketing
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• Content Marketing is key for Small Business in 2010
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