You need a website for your company—that’s a given. But if you want your site to perform, you can’t just throw together a few sloppy pages and call it a day. A poorly designed website negatively affects your sales and your credibility. Your site is a visual representation of your brand—if it looks like a time capsule from 15 years ago, users might assume your business is behind the times.
Even the most modern, beautifully designed sites can fail as a lead generation method if they don’t show up in search results. Every element of your site—design, functionality, and content—must work together seamlessly to generate inbound leads. If your current website is disjointed, it’s time for an overhaul.
Use these four must-have features to transform your unimpressive company website into a powerful sales tool.
1. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization, or SEO, isn’t just a marketing buzzword—it’s the best way to drive organic traffic to your website. Search engines use web crawlers to evaluate and index each page of your site before displaying those pages in relevant search results. Crawlers look for particular features that they use to rank your site. If they find features they like, such as links to credible sites or high-quality content, web crawlers propel your page to the top of a user’s search results.
These are some of the most essential SEO features for your website:
Keywords
When you search for a question or term on Google, the search engine pulls pages that are most relevant to your search. One of the critical factors in determining relevance is keywords. If your content incorporates the words a user searched in titles, headers, and body text, your page is likely to rank highly in their results. As a result, keywords help you reach your target audience.
No matter what industry your business falls under, you have a specific demographic you want to reach. For example, if you’re a commercial roofing company in St. Louis, you might want to attract business owners who need full roof replacements in and around the metro area. Those business owners tend to Google specific phrases when looking for a service provider, such as “commercial roof replacements St. Louis” or “roofing company near me.” You can capture more site traffic by integrating those keywords into your webpages.
Links
There are two types of links you can include in your site content: internal and external. Internal links route users to other related pages on your site, whereas external links direct users to other credible sources outside of your site. Web crawlers look for internal links because they demonstrate how users navigate through your site. External links add credibility to your content because they show your data is backed by trustworthy sources.
Speed and Navigation
Site speed may not seem like an essential SEO component, but it is. Users are 32% more likely to leave your site, or “bounce,” if your page load time increases from one to three seconds, and pages with a high bounce rate don’t rank well in search results. Your pages also won’t rank well if your overall site navigation isn’t intuitive.
Web crawlers use your site’s flow to determine which pages are important, and a bad flow can hinder the process. Plus, a confusing website design makes it hard for visitors to navigate through your site, and search engines prefer user-friendly websites. If your site contains great links and keywords but still isn’t ranking as well as you’d like, see if your load speed and structure need some work.
2. Blog
Publishing ongoing blog content requires a lot of work, but it’s completely worth it if you’re trying to generate more leads with your website. The more content you publish, the more users you’ll attract to your site—especially if your content is informative, well-written, and compelling. Every additional visitor you bring to your site has the potential to convert into a customer.
These are the main benefits of including a blog on your company website:
Blog Content Adds SEO Value
Your core site pages generate keyword volume for specific terms, such as industries you serve or services you provide. Blog posts can generate keyword volume for more specific terms and questions your audience may have. Using keywords, ample links, and professionally written content, you can publish blog content that drives more traffic to your site.
Before you start publishing blog content to your site, you should research the terms or phrases that are most relevant to your ideal customer. These may be targeted topics, like “storm roof repairs” during summer months, or entire questions. For example, your potential customers might search questions like, “How do I file a commercial property insurance claim?” You can reel in those visitors by posting a detailed blog centered around the topic and using their commonly searched question as your blog title. Add a few strategic internal and external links, and your blog posts can become a lead generation tool for your website.
Informative Content Builds Credibility
Customers want to work with businesses that they trust, and blog content can help you position your business as a trustworthy, credible source of information. Blogs demonstrate subject matter expertise and show site visitors that you care about solving their problems, not just selling them a product.
If you want to increase your credibility through blogs, it’s important to use concrete examples and statistics from trusted sources. For example, saying “Most commercial roofing claims are resolved quickly” doesn’t demonstrate your expertise as well as saying, “X% of our customers’ hail-related roofing claims are resolved within five days.” Your readers will trust your content more if it’s backed by experience and research.
Blogs Address Topical Subjects and Trends
Your core site pages typically don’t address current events. Instead, they contain information that’s relevant regardless of season or year. However, your visitors may want solutions to problems they’re experiencing right now, and blog posts give you the opportunity to home in on current trends and subjects.
When developing a blog strategy for your company, you can brainstorm topics that will be most relevant at different times of the year. Your roofing company could post blogs about handling ice dams and preventing snow-related leaks in the winter months. During the spring and summer months, you might switch your focus to rainstorms, impact damage, and hail. You can drive more traffic to your site throughout the year, and your target customers will appreciate the pertinent information.
3. Videos and Images
High-quality videos and images do more than make your website look visually appealing. They also improve user experiences, create a cohesive brand identity, and keep visitors on your site. By adding visual elements to your written content, you can appeal to a broader audience and improve your chances of leaving an impression on site visitors.
The Importance of Images
Images add context to your words, and they often showcase ideas more effectively than a written description. For example, you can say that hail causes significant damage to roofs, but an image gives visitors a better idea of the type and extent of the damage. Adding high-quality photos that closely align with your written content keeps users engaged.
Images also add SEO value to your website. If you accurately and thoroughly describe your pictures in their alt attributes, search engines will display them in search engine results, which can drive traffic to your site.
The Importance of Video
When Google chooses which sites to display in its results, it looks for high-quality content, including videos. Professionally produced videos supplement your written content, help users understand complicated subjects, and allow visual learners to absorb information about your brand.
Videos also keep visitors on your site for longer, which can improve your bounce rate. A better bounce rate translates to better search engine rankings. Mixing in a few videos as you build your website can set you up for future lead generation success.
4. Call-to-Action Statements
If you want website users to convert into customers, you need them to get in touch at the end of their visit. To do so, you need to make your contact information readily available and incorporate call-to-action (CTA) statements throughout your site. CTAs are a powerful marketing tool that prompt users to submit their information, schedule a demo, or request a service from your business.
Depending on your end goal for each site page or blog, you can create a custom CTA for each that prompts users to take a different action. For example, you might add “learn more” buttons to your parent pages that encourage users to explore particular services. Once users get into your most specific pages, you can prompt them to request a quote, download a free white paper, visit your online store, or learn more about your company history. By the end of their visit, each user should have had many chances to interact with your business.
Without CTA statements, your website acts as a static brochure that shares information but gets little in return. By adding CTAs to various spots as you create a website and publish blog posts, you can turn your site into an inbound lead generator.
Join Forces With the Top Website Development Company in St. Louis
Your online presence can have a substantial impact on your company. Potential customers use your website, social media presence, and online reviews to make buying decisions. If you want to generate more leads and grow your business, your website needs to show up in search results, keep users engaged, and ultimately turn them into customers.
Need a team of talented web designers, video producers, and copywriters to overhaul your website? You’re in the right place—Abstrakt is the best web development company in St. Louis. We don’t just add content to generic website templates—we create custom design and content elements for every client. Our websites combine compelling copy with images, professional videos, effective CTAs, carefully crafted blog posts, and SEO features that boost your search engine rankings.
Get in touch to learn more about our custom website development services.
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