To ensure your website is truly business-oriented, there are five main areas to optimize:
ACQUISITION
Just like a brick-and-mortar store, your website needs to attract crowds, but not just any crowds! Visitors who arrive on your site must be qualified, meaning they must match your commercial targets, of course.
Key success factors
- Thanks to a scalable and effective SEO strategy.
- Using SEA, if necessary, to position yourself on highly competitive queries, for example.
- Thanks to listing on the right directories/marketplaces
- Thanks to relevant backlinks
61% of manufacturers report having implemented an SEO strategy.
UX/DESIGN
Attracting visitors is good, but keeping them is even better! If a lead visits your site but finds it unintuitive and outdated, and the information they are looking for is not easily accessible, there is a good chance they will look elsewhere... User experience and website design are far from secondary considerations.
Key success factors
- Thanks to a carefully crafted visual identity that reflects your industry codes but will be memorable to visitors.
- Thanks to responsive design (i.e., adapting to mobile devices), this is now a mandatory criterion!
- Thanks to a clear menu with different levels of depth
- Thanks to internal linking (links between your different pages) optimized to facilitate navigation
TECHNIQUE
This may ultimately be the first criterion to consider... Indeed, if your pages take too long to load or your site's code is not clean, Google bots (the robots that crawl websites all day long to index them) may not like it! As a result, you may be heavily penalized even if you score well on other criteria.
Key success factors
- Thanks to a good page indexing policy (some pages don't need to end up in the depths of Google, so it's better to leave room for others!).
- Thanks to well-positioned HTML tags (a word of advice: leave it to the web developers...)
- Thanks to visuals (photos, videos, etc.) that are sufficiently compressed to ensure minimal page loading times.
- Thanks to a regularly updated website (which is also recommended for security reasons)
CONTENTS
Content is king! When talking about content, it is essential to differentiate between "static" content (which still needs to be updated regularly), i.e., pages presenting your products, your company, etc., and "dynamic" content. This includes blog posts, news, customer testimonials, etc. These are more ephemeral (for the reader, but not for Google!). They help to feed your site, nurture your prospects, and improve your natural search engine optimization on very specific topics.
Key success factors
- Thanks to pages written with your target audience's issues in mind, rather than just talking about yourself.
- Thanks to fluid, sufficiently simplified, and powerful writing.
- Thanks to SEO logic, we talk about writing for the web (even if the goal is not only to attract Google robots, but also your future customers).
- Thanks to a variety of media (testimonials, blog articles, white papers, expert opinion pieces, etc.), which are updated regularly.
69% of manufacturers post fewer than two blog articles per month.
CONVERSION
Last but not least, to turn your website into a lead-generating machine, you need to optimize conversion (or the rate at which visitors become prospects). As soon as visitors start browsing the excellent pages of your website, the goal is to collect their contact information in one way or another. For example, you can place an incentive to download a white paper on a technical subject in the middle of a product page, or offer a customer case study for download on a "needs" page. The idea is to have calls to action in various areas of your site. But that's not all! You also need to work on your landing pages and forms!
Key success factors
- Thanks to diverse, original, and well-placed CTAs, or calls to action (forget the standard "learn more").
- Thanks to compelling landing pages (the pages to which CTAs link)
- Thanks to forms that are as short as possible (without compromising your downstream business process)
- Thanks to plugins (live chats, end-of-visit CTAs, etc.)
Dear industry player, want to turn your website into a lead generation machine? Contact us!
