In today’s increasingly connected world, you no longer compete with businesses located down the street exclusively. You now compete with businesses located all over the globe. While connectivity makes things more competitive, it also enables you to generate leads from just about any location on earth.

While you may have visions of an ever-increasing balance in your company’s bank account, it doesn’t matter that you have a global consumer base if you can’t get the leads you need to make sales. One reason you may be failing to attract leads might be your web design.

Unfortunately, web development often neglects how a website will ultimately attract and convert leads as a final product. If your web design isn’t optimized to attract leads, your business won’t be as successful as it can be even if you’re already posting a lot of sales. The goal of any business should be to maximize its success and your web design should help you achieve that objective.

If you want your website to be even more effective at generating leads, keep reading to learn five web development tips that can help.

Search Engine Optimization

While it may not produce immediate results, search engine optimization is one of the smartest things you can do to generate leads consistently over the long-haul. With a sustained SEO campaign, your website won’t just generate leads. It will generate qualified leads.

SEO involves identifying the keywords consumers use to find the products or services you sell and incorporating these words into the content on your website. This is important because how you rank for certain keywords determines where your website appears in search engine results pages.

Even if you don’t do web development yourself, you’ve probably heard how important position is when it comes to SERPs. While it’s critical to be on the first page, it’s equally important to be in the top one or two positions in SERPs to gain the largest share of clicks from those pages.

Implementing a solid SEO strategy, updating your current content with relevant keywords and creating new content with appropriate keywords can help you improve where your site lands in SERPs and generate leads as a result. Although it might take six months or even longer to see results from your SEO, it’s still worth the investment of time and resources.

Optimize for Mobile

In the late spring of 2015, Google shared the news that more online searches were performed on mobile devices than desktops in ten countries. In November, 2016, StatCounter reported that over 50 percent of the world’s Internet usage was performed on mobile devices for the first time.

The trend of using mobile devices to conduct online searches isn’t expected to reverse course anytime soon, if it ever does. Since that’s the case, Google plans to change to a mobile-first index sometime in 2018.

Right now, Google assumes the point of view of desktop users when it catalogs websites. Although having a mobile-friendly website can help improve a given website’s SEO, the content on a mobile site currently does nothing to improve a desktop website’s rankings in SERPs.

That will change when Google switches to a mobile-first index. Once the change is fully implemented, Google will crawl the Internet from the point of view of people using mobile devices. Google will then rank websites based on their mobile web development instead of their desktop web design.

If your website is already truly mobile-friendly, you have very little to worry about. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly website, where your site lands in SERPs may change dramatically after Google changes over to a mobile-friendly index. To make sure your website will produce leads throughout 2018 and beyond, switch to a mobile-friendly web design now.

Incorporate Calls to Action on Your Pages

While some people may visit your website with an end goal in mind, such as making a purchase, others will visit without a specific purpose. You can turn these casual visitors into leads by incorporating calls to action into your webpages.

If you want someone to click for more information, provide a big button on your page. Just be sure users can click anywhere on the button to get to where they want to go, meaning don’t require them to click a certain portion of the button or the text inside to navigate to another page.

If you want someone to share their contact information, put a contact form on the webpage. Putting the form on a page isn’t enough, however. You should invite your visitors to fill it out. Offering an incentive of some sort may motivate more visitors to take the time to fill out your contact form.

Increase the Number of Landing Pages on Your Website

Your landing pages are often what gives your website’s visitors their first impression of your company. This makes it crucial for your landing pages to be expertly designed, user-friendly, attractive and enticing.

While it’s important for your landing pages to be well done, having great landing pages isn’t always enough to generate leads. Instead, having more of them can help your website generate a greater number of leads. Research shows that sites that have at least 40 landing pages generate 1,200 percent more leads than websites that only have five or fewer landing pages.

Have a Prominently Displayed Phone Number

Having a phone number on your website lends credibility to your company as well as the products or services you sell. Even if your site’s visitors never contact your organization using the phone, the fact that they can will put them at ease, especially if they’ve never purchased anything from your company before.

To establish an even deeper level of trust with your visitors, consider using a vanity toll-free number. Doing this shows visitors that you’re willing to spend money on the means they can use to contact you. Because vanity numbers often consist of words instead of numbers, this kind of phone number is much easier for your website’s visitors to remember.

Work with a Web Design Expert

While the tips provided above can certainly help increase the number of leads your website generates, there’s no reason to go it alone. GoingClear provides a long list of web development services that can help your website produce more leads. To learn more about our comprehensive suite of web design services, contact GoingClear now.