Let me know if this has happened to you.
Your site redesign is beautiful. It is an achievement of modern styling and layout design and uses the latest in SEO methodologies. You may have even seen an increase in traffic since you went live with the new design. You gave a congratulations and pat on the back to everyone involved in the work.
The problems are that you are getting few page views relative to your number of unique visitors and almost no sales leads. At this rate, your targeted ROI is way out of reach. This happens more than you might think but don¡¯t fret. The leads are in the details.
True Story
I recently worked on redesign for a site that initially suffered from low sales leads. The site is for a small niche-focused company and only draws about 5,000 unique visitors per month, or roughly 165 per day, which is excellent for the size of the niche the company serves. It is probably the most beautiful redesign I have ever worked on but was getting almost no leads after two months. It averaged about 1 sales lead per day from its contact form (just over half of 1% of page views) and incoming calls from the site were weak. I poured over the pages of the site from the first to the last word and looked at every picture, line, and angle. I tried a few small changes but nothing improved the leads.
The Turnaround
During the third month of the new site¡¯s life I sat back for a wider view and had an epiphany. The color scheme of the site is based on beautiful earth tones because the site needs a warm but strong eco-friendly ¡°green¡± feel about it. My hunch was that the links were not acting effectively as calls to action because they did not stand out from the overall layout and design. The links were a light olive green to match the warm greens and browns in the rest of the site and did not attract attention and incite action from the site¡¯s visitors. The links matched the site too well.
During the middle of that month we changed the links to a warm but bold red/maroon hue. The site is still beautiful and the effectiveness shot through the roof. During the last half of that month, with no change in traffic volumes, the daily leads from the site¡¯s contact form nearly tripled to almost 2% of unique visitors and incoming calls increased greatly as well. That level has sustained since the change. The site went from being somewhat disappointing to a huge success.
The Sales Leads are in the Details
Do the basic math. This tiny detail (and free change) increased the number of sales leads that company receives from its contact forms from about 30 per month to about 80 per month. That makes a giant difference not only in the ROI of the redesign but in the company¡¯s sales and profits, which was the goal of the redesign.
If you feel like your site is missing something or like visitors are leaving when they should have contacted you, take another look at it. Your site should be a lead generating machine.
If you like assistance lead optimizing your site send me an email at chris@leadoptimize.com. I am happy to help.
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