Lead generation on the web is as much about the visitor as the website.

If you had a sales meeting, and your prospect walked out half way through the conversation then you’d be doing some pretty deep soul searching.

Pitching the right thing to the right person is obvious isn’t it, when you think about it.

Yet, on your website, we come and go without offending anyone. In fact, most of us leave your website without doing anything. Are you thinking hard about that?

How can I help you?

For most companies, the website is a sales tool. And the place to start with any sales process is to ask “What are you looking for”?

And you can’t sell me anything unless you know what I’m interested in.

Business served up on a plate

What if Google told you what people are looking for….and offered to send them over? Would you then go ahead and build a page specifically addressing those needs?

That would be better wouldn’t it? That way, you’re only selling to people who are already interested, and you don’t need worry about covering a range of subjects, not yet.

Most people just guess when building a website. But you can find out what people are searching for with a very impressive service from Google – cunningly disguised as the Adwords keyword tool.

Before you put words on a website, use the tool to see what words people are using.

We’re always surprised at how many words people use to search for the same thing, and even more surprised at the variations within phrases.

Be Careful out there

The hidden catch, the one nearly everyone misses, is that the terms you look up on the tool, well, they’re like inside out russian dolls. The most important paragraph was that last one above – the one about variations of phrases.

One short phrase includes thousands of others. Intuitively, this is the wrong way round and we would expect that a long phrase includes plenty of short ones, but no, that’s not correct.

Upside Down Marketing

The term “shoes” gets 100 million searches. Only, it doesn’t, because although those searches include the word shoes, there are millions of variations – many of which will have absolutely no chance of converting into relevant business.

Why try and sell to them all?

This is upside down marketing. Get specific first and go for the low numbers.

As an aside, the numbers of people searching for ‘terms’ is amazingly consistent, and without being completely sure why, we think it’s something to do with the law of large numbers. Ironically.

So, although you’ll be pitching to low numbers of people this week. It does mean you’ll be doing that next week, and the week after that.

If you’re worried about the low numbers thing. We would recommend you sell to large quantities of small numbers.

At last, a proper website plan

Knowing that people are looking before you build your page, does motivate and give you great confidence that the effort you put in will be worthwhile. You’d be amazed how much difference this approach makes to everything you do on a website.

With search engines delivering over 90% of traffic to a website, it pays to know how to use them properly.