Should I Update My Website Consistently To Generate Leads
The short answer is yes.
Do Website Updates Matter For Lead Gen?
One of our clients asked me a question:
Should we constantly update our website to match what is working marketing wise?
It’s a good question. Many business owners create a website when they start the business. And then they never look at their website again.
In many cases, it’s okay to ignore your website, never update it and let things go stale. But not if you wish to generate leads and acquire customers online.
Why does this matter?
Because the way people use the internet changes overtime. Methods for generating customers and new revenue from your website also change.
For example, back in 2014, websites that had popup-boxes appearing immediately after visiting were revolutionary. If you had traffic, and one of these boxes, you could grow your email list (and business) at an immense rate.
But today, if I go to a website and immediately get met with a sign up box… I am pressing the x-button on that website. It’s annoying.
The technical term for this is conversion rate optimization. Conversion Rate Optimisation (or CRO) is the science behind “doing things to your website to increase the amount of people who will become leads or customers”.
CRO is a profitable exercise.
The question, of course, is what do you change and when?
At The Backend Engineer we like to focus on three foundational things:
Stop doing what has become widespread
Once everyone is doing the same thing online, that thing either becomes ineffective or annoying.
Earlier, I gave the example of going to a website and immediately being met with a “sign up box”. This strategy was good a decade ago.
Now, it’s annoying and you will lose more visitors who become annoyed by it.
One thing we do at BEE is that we watch the “trends” and do the opposite.
Page speed is the most important visitor metric
CRO is important. Change things on your site and see your conversions (from visitor to lead) increase.
This is essential: nobody will ever see any of your good work if your page is slow.
A research report conducted by Google revealed that if your site load speed is 3 seconds, instead of 1 second, over 30% of visitors to your site would leave before it loads.
The probability of bounce increases 32% as page load time goes from 1 second to 3 second – Google/SOASTA Research, 2017.
This is why we always build lightning fast web pages for our clients.
But as it relates to changes, do not add “junk and bloated code” to your website. It slows it down massively.
Anyone who uses website builders has this issue.
Always make sure that when people come to your site, they leave with value.
At the end of the day, the purpose of your website is to generate new business. The best way to do that is to keep people coming back to your site.
Think about your own behavior and the websites that you continually visit; aren’t they great in some way?
Maybe it’s entertaining content (infotainment), or maybe it’s a how-to guide. Maybe it’s free downloadables. Or maybe it’s a special offer. The answer will be different for every market.
Your job, as the website owner, is to discover what your audience finds valuable, and provide it.