If you have a business, you are familiar with lead generation. Leads become prospective clients or customers who (hopefully) become paying clients or customers. Most businesses ultimately get leads by referral – word of mouth – but there are ways to optimize your website so that it can be a powerful tool for lead generation.

Even if a referral is made, visitors come to your website, read a blog post or your main website content, click on a call-to-action, and enter their information into a form on a landing page. Since they have already expressed an interest in the topic they came to your site to learn about, it’s a simple matter of engaging them, providing them with information, and making them aware of the solutions you have for them. Here are several steps you can take to optimize your website for lead generation.

Optimize your content.

This should be obvious but I will say it anyway. You need to create content that’s relevant and valuable for your visitors. Without great content, it’s hard to turn visits into leads. Next, you will want to optimize the content so that users can easily find you in search engine results. Ranking for a highly competitive keyword is extremely difficult. Therefore, focus your efforts on finding long-tail keywords that you can realistically rank for.

Optimize your calls to action.

Once you optimize your content, the next step is to create calls to action that persuade visitors to provide you with their contact information.

The first thing to think about is what copy to use. Words and phrases such as “free”, “trial”, “try”, “exclusive”, and “download” are commonly used to attract visitor eyeballs.

Make sure the offers are relevant. “Limited time offer” is not good if visitors can download something anytime.

You also need to make sure that your buttons or banners are used strategically to draw attention. A plain text link can sometimes work, but you want to make sure that it grabs attention.

Optimize your offers.

Even if your content and calls to action are optimized, you want to make sure that your offer is good enough to entice someone to sign up. You need to think about what your visitors are getting at every stage of the process. What did they learn from your blog post? What is the next logical thing they would like to learn next? What content could help you nurture leads? How do you convert those leads?

Applicable content upgrades can boost signups. Make sure that your offers are matched to your visitors and the information they want.

Optimize your landing pages.

Whether to have landing pages or not is an important decision in and of itself. You could have visitors click on a “call to action” button and instantly have a form pop up so they will be able to enter their information and claim the offer without ever viewing another page.

If you want to collect more information than just a name and email address, then you probably need a landing page. Your landing pages should include a brief summary of the offer your visitors will be getting when they sign up. The copy needs to be optimized to ensure good performance. The page should also have a signup form. The exact information to collect at this point depends on your strategy, and is another item to optimize. Collecting too much information could be a deterrent to potential leads. On the other hand, those that provide you with more information might turn out to be better quality leads. You will need to test and experiment to figure out what information your target customers are comfortable giving.

One more piece that’s worth your attention is the “Thank you” page, the one visitors see when they sign up for your offer. You can use this page to thank visitors and provide a download link to an ebook, template, report or white paper. You can also serve links to relevant pages on your site for additional reading.

Final thoughts

The exact steps you take to generate leads depend on your target audience and niche, as different audiences exhibit different behaviors. However, by tailoring the items discussed above for your specific audience, you’ll be able to boost performance significantly.