When we hear the word “optimisation”, it’s natural to immediately think someone is referring to SEO (search engine optimisation). However, it doesn’t always have to be the case. You can optimise your website for a variety of things – for speed, to generate more leads etc., although these things also probably do help with SEO too!

With this confusion, a question we often get asked is: “What’s the difference between SEO and inbound marketing?” In general, inbound marketing refers to the content you create in order to generate leads and opportunities, but SEO is how you optimise your website so that it ranks higher in search engines such as Google and Bing.

In this article, we take a look at how you can optimise your website to improve lead generation and boost the results of your inbound marketing campaign.

Check analytics first

The first place to look is in your analytics – which pages are currently performing the best and which ones are letting you down? You may be surprised by the results you find! For the ones not performing so well – what is it about those pages? Perhaps try some A/B testing to see which changes may help.

Also, where are your referrals coming from? Search engines? Social media? Email marketing campaigns? Live chat?

If you understand where your visitors are coming from, you want to make sure that the landing pages they get to are enticing enough for your visitors to want to take further action.  

Get your CTAs right

CTA is short for call-to-action and refers to buttons that you place on your site that gets your reader to take action of some kind. Something so small could create such a dramatic difference in results.

Your CTAs need to be of a contrasting colour to the bulk of your site. Canva has a great colour wheel which allows you to pick a colour and it will show you what the complementary colour is. If you pick the accent colour of your site, then it will pick a great colour you can use for your CTAs!

Try to also personalise CTAs; “read more” isn’t too enticing and doesn’t whet their appetite about what’s on the next page.

Homepage CTAs are hugely important as this is often the first place people land and they want to be sent to somewhere where they immediate get value. Therefore, have CTAs to free trials or discount codes on the homepage.

Create specific landing pages

Once you’ve checked your analytics and know where your visitors come from, you need to make sure there’s a dedicated landing page for each type of visitor. They won’t all be interested in the same thing, so you need to have a landing page that’s tailored to their journey.

Have a clear CTA on each of these pages guiding your visitors to what you want them to do next!

Test everything!

A/B testing is one of the keys to success in inbound marketing. A very subtle change can dramatically improve results. For example, maybe the complementary colour you chose of your CTA wasn’t great for some of your target audience. You can try a different colour in an A/B test and find out.

What about the hero image on your landing page? Make a quick switch there and see what difference in makes to the result!

If you’re consistently testing, you know that you can continually put out the right content that’s going to give you the best results for your inbound marketing campaign.