I have been doing a lot of digital marketing and lead generation for local businesses lately. A majority of the time, the business website I am working with is not optimized to capture leads.
I normally just see brochure type sites with general information about the business products/services with a contact page.
This doesn’t really do much for the business. They always wonder why their website isn’t generating any new business…
After looking over the website and analytics it is easy to see why.
Here are some problems I normally see with local business websites:
- old website with poor design choices
- thin content
- not optimized for Google or search engines in general
- no clear call to action
- slow to load
- not mobile-friendly
After a website audit, it is clear the business needs a new web presence. We repurpose some of the content/imagery and implement a new design and toolslike the paraphrase tool – seotoolscentre, to increase your business in no time.
The all-in-one themes that you find in the theme marketplaces are great. They have hundreds of layouts, all kinds of plugins, functionality and sometimes even lock you in with shortcodes..
After years of using these types of multi-purpose themes, I stay AWAY.
Why?
Bloated
They are bloated. Cool, the theme has 500 million layouts and every piece of functionality I have ever seen on the web.
I am sure my client will use everything included!
NO.
A majority of the time, a businesses uses about 3-5 different layouts. One for the homepage, one for the services, a general page layout and a contact page.
I am not even going to get into all the sliders, carousels and elements flying in from every angle as you scroll down the page.
Updates?
Hopefully those custom changes you made survive a theme or plugin update. Fingers crossed.
Drag and Drop Page Builders
I don’t like them.
If I have a long term relationship with a client, I am normally doing paid search campaigns (PPC) with search engine optimization to drive leads. This means I am the one edited and adding content to the website. A business owner wants to work on his/her business not a website, that’s why they look for easy website solutions like wordpress and hosting as web hosting Canada which is a great solution for this.
The times I have used drag and drop builders for clients a few things happen:
- There is a learning curve where they are destroying and messing up page designs. Even after training and documentation videos for their website. This means regular phone calls or emails asking to fix something.
- A client doesn’t normally know about SEO best-practices. Even after explaining why they shouldn’t have five h1 tags on a page, they don’t understand why the page builder keeps adding them. Again, learning curve.
- Some page builders output everything in shortcodes. This means they are locked in.
I get it! Page builders are AMAZING for people that don’t know HTML/CSS.
I still don’t recommend them for any of my clients.
Page Speed and Load Times
With all the amazing page templates, features, plugin and page builders you run into optimization issues.
To fix these issues you have to install more plugins to minimize and move scripts. Disable features and rethink those 15 image sliders throughout the website.
It turns into a mess.
You start hacking one thing here to fix an issue there.
What is the Solution?
For me, it was using wordpress hosting plans to build my own theme.
If you look around Brag Interactive you will notice I have been building WordPress related projects for awhile.
A lot of these projects serve one purpose and it is no different with LeadGenerationWP.com.
LeadGenerationWP
I have always used a base theme for my personal and client projects. This gives me complete control of the design and how it should be optimized.
When the goal of a website is lead generation, the theme design always includes the same elements:
- A clear call to action
- Social proof and testimonials
- Features, benefits, and FAQs
- Visual simplicity with a clear goal
All of these elements are included in the themes on LeadGenerationWP. If you are looking to setup a PPL site or have a client that wants to generation more lead online, check out the themes on LeadGenerationWP.com.
Update:
People are really defensive over their all-in-one themes and plugins. Yes, I am sure you have achieved page 1 rankings and have a X% conversion rate with your solution.
Great! You do you.