Is your website inbound marketing ready?

Inbound marketing is a fantastic way to generate new leads and sales. Whether you set up your strategy yourself or use inbound marketing service packages, it’s an effective way to direct a regular stream of targeted traffic to your site that you can convert into new leads without spending time on unreliable cold outreach.

It’s great that you’re on board with your strategy and ready to start directing targeted traffic to your site.

There’s just one thing – is your website inbound marketing ready?

You might have spent a lot of time and energy coming up with content that will send targeted traffic your way, but your website needs to be ready to convert that traffic.

To make sure it is, here are the key factors to review to ensure you’ve ticked every box so you can convert the traffic that you generate.

1. Your homepage must speak to your personas

Does your homepage speak directly to your personas?

Part of inbound marketing service providers involves helping businesses to come up with their personas, and once you’ve done this you will need to make sure your website is geared up to receive them.

The homepage is often the first page new visitors will see, and you need to connect with your personas from the first word.

Don’t focus so much on what you offer. Instead, focus on who you are helping and how you will help them – crucially, how you will solve their challenges and problems

Also, make sure you speak to your personas at each of the buyer stages – those at the top, middle and bottom of the funnel.

Need some help with your personas? We provide a free template to help you get started.

2. Pack it full of valuable content

When prospects land on your website, they should find plenty of useful and valuable content there. A website without content is incapable of keeping visitors on it for long – your bounce rate will soar.

Your content – usually in blog form – should have pride of place on your site. And it should consist of educational, useful, value-packed content that speaks directly to your personas’ problems. Remember, it’s not all about you, visitors don’t just want to read about how large your company is and how many clients you have, whilst this is important for credibility, don’t lose focus on providing help and support for your prospect to get some help solving their business problems through awesome high value content.

Perhaps add a link to your best blog posts from your homepage to encourage visitors to explore your site further and find the answers they need.

And if you need some help getting started creating the type of content your visitors want to see, check out our guide to writing better content.

3. Add calls to action

Make sure visitors know exactly what they should do when they land on your site by adding clear calls to action.

Some people will be ready to contact you or buy from you as soon as they land on your homepage, so create a clear CTA that explains the next step.

You should also incorporate CTAs into your content. For example, at the end of the blog posts, encourage the reader to take an action like signing up to your newsletter or getting in touch.

Here are some examples of effective CTAs that you can use as inspiration for your own.

4. Design intuitive navigation

As mentioned, you ideally want your customers to explore your site further, and for that a simple and clear navigation structure is essential.

Intuitive navigation should be able to direct your visitors to exactly where they want to go within a couple of clicks and take them on a journey.

Avoid too many complicated submenus, and instead focus on creating a simple, straightforward navigation menu that gets visitors where they want to go.

A strong internal linking structure is also important. This helps visitors to discover even more about what you offer – and it also helps with your SEO by letting Google know that what your site is talking about is relevant to what you do.

5. Optimise it for mobiles

This should really go without saying now, but a mobile-optimised site – preferably a responsive site – is essential these days.

Many people will discover your site via mobile search or while browsing social media on a mobile device. If they find a messy and unreadable site that is impossible to navigate, you’ve lost them.

So make sure you provide an amazing experience for visitors no matter which device they are using and don’t lose prospects unnecessarily.

Convert more visitors into customers

These are the steps you need to take to ensure your website is inbound marketing-ready, and they are the same steps we take when providing our clients with inbound marketing services.

Finally, make sure this is all underlined by a robust SEO strategy. Ensure you are using your main keywords in your tags, meta descriptions, URLs, content and alt text. Read our SEO checklist and our beginner’s guide to SEO for more on this.

Still unsure about your inbound strategy? Want to know how you can generate a regular source of inbound leads? Then download our free Inbound Marketing Guide today!

Download it here