Why doesn’t a website generate leads?

Are you asking about your own website, or websites in general? I’ll assume it’s one of the two. Lead generation is important because it increases the chances of conversion of website visitors into customers by collecting their basic information, and in the case of subscriptions, like to an email list, it allows for regular contact.

At first sight, it seems that either the website is not getting the required number of visitors that would contribute to lead generation, a.k.a. Insufficient traffic, or the website content is not engaging enough, a.k.a. a conversion problem. Let’s discuss more!

Coming straight to the point, here are five possible reasons that a website isn’t generating leads:

1) Lead capture form is complex:

Web leads come from the lead capture form that is available on a website. A website visitor fills in that form by providing their contact information. Adding many fields to get more details of the visitor makes that form complex; to the point where it might feel like a hassle, or too invasive. A solution for that could be just getting the email addresses of the visitors. One survey showed that more than 60% of people do not like to share their contact details online. Try designing the lead capture form in as simple a format as you can. Rest assured, email marketing alone could give you more than 35% of the sales in your business if you do that properly. But you’ve got to keep the lead capture simple and not complicate things.

2) The website needs more content:

For lead generation, the website content ought to be engaging, and visitors should have a good reason to stay on your website for as long as possible. Often people do not understand the value of content for lead generation completely. For example, let’s say your website displays blog posts on it. Every single blog post is a piece of content that can be SEO optimized, among other things, to attract organic traffic. If the blog is minimal and offers little of value to a visitor, it shouldn’t be a surprise that few people visit the site. I won’t give specific numbers here, because it depends. In short, more web content gets more leads. At the same time, keep the quality high.

3) SEO is not enough:

Search engine optimization of web content helps in listing your website in search results, which further assists in getting traffic to the website. We cannot rule out the possibility of a website that isn’t generating enough leads due to a lack of SEO measures on its content. If that’s the case with your website, look for better optimization measures.

4) CTA is not clear:

A call to action button is a button or a graphic, or even just a hyperlink, that tells the visitors to do something, such as click, buy, etc.. It can be added onto lead magnets such as a free trial, ebook, subscriptions, etc. A website that doesn’t use CTAs is shooting themselves in the foot with their copywriting. To improve on that, make clear, eye-catchy, highlighted CTAs in everything on the site. Don’t perform a common mistake of using it only on the bottom either, such as at the end of an article. Multiple CTAs spread naturally throughout the content is ideal.

5) The social media presence of the website is not adequate:

Social media is a proven technique for generating leads. Most online cold leads nowadays are generated from social media, as people spend most of their time there. If the website isn’t using social media appropriately and seriously, that would be my first guess for why it’s not generating leads. You can look for more creative ways of getting the maximum output from social media on your own time, as it’s too huge a topic to dive into here. 

There can be many more explanations for why a website isn’t generating enough leads. I hope the above possibilities and their solutions would work for anyone who is facing the same problem.

In addition to the solutions to this issue, I would like to suggest a method that improves lead generation massively, if applied properly with a site that follows the basic tenets from above. List Warrior is the method which I am also applying these days, in order to get email subscribers, but also social media followers, which feed into each other naturally.

In conclusion, a website does not generate leads mostly due to the discussed possibilities in the answer.

If you want more information on any point discussed in this answer, or some other possibilities, then please feel free to reply to me.

Good Luck!

Thanks,

Cleo