The Importance of User Satisfaction in Lead Generation
Do prospects like your website? The question is simple enough, but if you don’t know the answer, chances are your website is not doing a good job of getting visitors to call you or submit an inquiry form.
The most direct way to find out if prospects like your website is to ask them, although this approach is usually anecdotal, since prospects that don’t convert can’t be easily tracked and comprehensively surveyed. Nevertheless, sales and customer service personnel should make a habit of asking prospects how they feel about your firm’s website — and then reporting the answer to the marketing and web development teams. The best, highest-impact website improvements often come from a prospect’s feedback.
Other ways to size up prospect satisfaction with your website:
- Bounce rate. If visitors leave the site on the same page they enter, without viewing any other pages, your website is not reeling them in.
- Time on page. If visitors are spending only a few seconds on a page, they are not engaged. This defect is particularly bad for lead generation on product and service pages.
- Search versus navigation. If visitors are relying on your internal search rather than navigation, it’s a good sign your navigation is confusing or inadequate.
- Page loading speed. Nothing upsets visitors more than slow-loading web pages. If yours test poorly, you can infer users are not having a pleasant time.
- Heatmap tracking. Heatmapping tools enable you to see how visitors are moving around your website with their mouse. User heatmaps are very revealing — and sometimes quite embarrassing, as for example when a user clearly cannot find a link.
Why Your SEO or PPC Hinges on User Satisfaction
If you’re investing, or planning to invest, in SEO, PPC or other forms of online lead generation marketing, your website needs to be in tip-top shape. There’s little value in driving new traffic to your website if it does a poor job of satisfying users and turning them into sales leads.
Many companies lose sight of this and instead focus on traffic rather than lead generation, especially in SEO campaigns. Mistake! The true test of any lead generation campaign is leads.
If you have questions about the usability of your website, please contact us. We welcome an opportunity to review your site and discuss ways to ramp up its conversion power.