How I Tripled My Leads and Simultaneously Created a New Problem For Myself

Back when I was running hay-Wire.com, we were experiencing an unusually slow first quarter in 2015. There were several leads in the pipeline but none were signing contracts. We were wrapping up several projects so we had time on our hands. We needed to move up on Google.

From Page 3 to the 1st Page of Google

During that time, we had plenty of time to blog and so that’s what we did to increase our SEO. I actually wrote a blog that outlined exactly “What We Do on Our Downtime (Psst, And You Should Too)“. We were releasing about 2 blog posts per week for 6 weeks and that act alone took us from the 3rd page of a Google search all the way to the top of the 1st page. WOOHOO! So now we were getting much more visitors to our site than usual, but that was only half of the battle. Once they were on there we had to work on getting them to contact us.

Many people hold this belief that getting to the top of a Google search will solve all their business problems. What they don’t realize is that arriving on your site is not the same as becoming a paying customer.

That’s the equivalent of putting your book at the front of a bookstore, but having a boring title and uninteresting content. Sure, people might pick up your book and browse around it, but they may never buy it. You want them to buy it.

How We Got People To Call Us

Once we settled in a comfy spot on Google, I needed to turn my attention back to the website. In this blog, I cover exactly “The One Change That Tripled My Leads” and talk through how we re-worked the content on the site, specifically the hero image content (that first thing that everyone sees).

If you get a chance to read through hay-Wire.com, you’ll see the how each headline included keywords (web design, web designer, etc.) but also segued into engaging body text. This was all done intentionally with the goal is appealing both human users and search engine robots. *breaks into robot dance*

But, now I created another problem for myself…

Is There Such A Thing as Too Many Leads?

Yessiree, you bet there is. When you get too many leads, specifically unqualified leads, then you’re wasting your/their time. We wanted to be sure that the people filling out our contact forms and calling us were qualified from both a budgetary standpoint and a personality standpoint.

Every business knows that there is a certain type of customer that they prefer. We wanted to find a subtle way to create that filter within our site. So what did we do?

I went back to the drawing board to write content that would help narrow down that process- this gave the prospect to the ability to decide on their own if we would be a good fit. If you go visit the homepage, you’ll first see that the “No Regrets” line is linked up to our Google reviews which we proudly hold the most 5-star reviews of any web design firm. Secondly, if you use the drop-down options, you’ll see all the quirky responses that lend insight into our personality.

For those people who found that fun and clever, we wanted them to be amused and hopefully find us to be a potentially good fit for their project. For others who considered that immature or unprofessional, it likely would not have worked out so they never filled out the form.

Once people got to the contact page, I incorporated the line “Want a cookie cutter website built yesterday? Then we’re probably not the company for you.” which would disqualify people who had unrealistic expectations for the turnaround of a custom site and the “cookie cutter” line was to disqualify the people who had a budget of $500 or less.

TL;DR

So in conclusion, we worked on ramping up our SEO through blogging, changed the internal messaging to motivate people to contact us, and then changed the messaging again to filter the right prospects. It was through very intentional efforts and strategy that were able to bring in a steady stream of the right clients.