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Chapter 2 How to Use Your Website to Attract High-Quality Leads

      There is a good chance that you have heard (possibly even a nauseating number of times) that “content is king.” What isn't talked about enough, though, is who the queen is. Design is queen.

      If you want to attract high-quality leads that are easy to convert, obsess about design.

      A design-first mindset is a must when building your website and landing pages (or improving the ones you already have). Why is design so important? Great design builds trust. Trust is why people choose you. Trust is why people send you referrals. Zig Ziglar once said, “If people like you, they'll listen to you. But if they trust you, they'll do business with you.”

      Here's what the research tells us about the importance of web design:

      Years ago, I experienced the immediate impact of better design firsthand. I had spent hours and hours obsessing and working on a website called Tech Savvy Agent. There were many sleepless nights designing, building, and customizing it.

      It was terrible. My idea of being creative was going completely against common sense and web standards, like using a black background with teal text. Thank God my content was great, and the web design bar was still so low back then, or no one would have put up with the gaudiness.

Things exploded when I finally swallowed my pride and hired a professional website designer. I paid for a custom WordPress site that cost $5,000. I launched my first professionally designed site in May 2010. Up to that point, I'd never achieved more than 1,000 page views in one day.

      The site was beautiful, and the results were instant and dramatic.

      On the first day, the new site got three times as many page views as I had ever gotten in a single day. As soon as I saw that 3,000 page views in a day were possible, I immediately set my sights on a bigger goal: 100,000 page views in one month. I knew I had a real shot at it, and I believed I could do it in the first 12 months with the new, professionally designed site.

      Imagine my surprise when I achieved that goal in the first 30 days. Once I surrounded my great content with great design, I was on track for over a million page views a year. The ugly duckling had become a swan.

      Don't underestimate the value of hiring a professional who does excellent design when building your website and landing pages. When my company (Curaytor) made the Inc. list as the 303rd fastest-growing company in America, I wrote about the seven reasons we made it. Design was on the list.

      So, in this chapter I cover the best ways to design websites to capture high-quality leads. In the real world, before you invite family or friends over for a get-together, you clean your house vigorously. Do the same for your website. Before we can send traffic to our website, we need to make sure it will convert.

      Sadly, I still see far too many companies that have a website so poorly designed that they are willing to admit they wouldn't even hire themselves based on it.

      Almost every business already has a website, so I will start with that. But not before I mention, a critical component of cracking the conversion code is to understand that landing pages perform much better than websites for lead generation.

      Ideally, a company will be using both. But if you are reading this and need leads as quickly as possible, landing pages are the better choice. That's why I will cover them in detail in the next chapter.

HOW TO KNOW IF YOUR WEBSITE IS WORKING

      Design is admittedly subjective. So I want you to add a heat map and an A/B testing tool to your website right now. That way, you will be able to see exactly how people are using your site and so that you can run ongoing design and copy experiments.

Hotjar is an excellent heat-mapping software that can also record screen sessions of real users as they browse your site. They show you how far down (or not) people are scrolling on each page. Imagine if your primary call-to-action is at the bottom of a page that no one ever even scrolls far enough to see.

Considering that, on average, 57% of the page-viewing time is above the fold, and 74% is spent on the first two screenfuls,⁵ using Hotjar to see those numbers for your website (and then adjusting the design accordingly) is critical.

      You can play with an interactive example of a heat map on Hotjar's website, and (for now) they have a solid free option. Be sure to also add it to any landing pages you build.

Heat maps and eye-tracking studies have found that one thing is clear regarding website design. We are drawn to people's faces. Look at where the eyes went during this eye-tracking example from Baby.com (Figure 2.1).

The baby's face demands nearly all of your eyes' attention. But we don't just want the visitor to focus on the face; we want them to read our headline, too. Notice how changing the baby's focus (Figure 2.2) to looking at the headline draws your eyes there as well. Checking your heat maps and running A/B tests help you uncover nuggets like this. An A/B test is when you create two versions of the same page to see which one performs better.

Figure 2.1 Baby.com Eye-Tracking Test

      Source: Baby.com

Figure 2.2 Our Eyes Follow the Babies' Eyes

      Source:

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