Question & Answer: I Built a website, but I am not getting leads. What should I do?

At Oryx Cloud, we help new entrepreneurs and local service business owners optimize their digital marketing strategy to generate leads and revenue from their website. Below is our brief answer to a new business in South Carolina.

Hello Davide, first, congrats on your newly established business. It is awesome and you can get places with it and we hope you can grow it to a big brand. It is a .com domain, which is so amazing. There are two parts to your question:

1. The website
2. The lead generation process

Building a Lead Generation Website

So let's start with the website, You made a good start but so many improvements are needed to generate leads from it:

1. Your profile page, pictures, and credentials are missing. You will generate more trust if you add a profile page with real pictures (your picture) and a brief about you.
2. Your phone number is missing. You are a local service business, not Amazon. Add a phone number for customers to reach you.
3. Prices are missing. It will cost a lot of time (organic) and money (paid) to get customers to your website. You don't want them to drop off because prices are not there.
4. Would be nice to make an offer page.
5. LOCAL, LOCAL, LOCAL, LOCAL. you are a local service business, at least in the beginning. Make it very clear and make it easy for Google to rank you as a local service business. I will add a separate comment below about this alone.
6. You need a blog that will be crucial for SEO, but you don't have to work on it initially, it can wait unless you have time to create valuable content.
7. I would recommend a website template and theme that can support the features above. You can use our platform for that, we have a free version where you don't have to pay for the website or hosting. you can check the dog walker theme here: Dog Walker/Care Taker Website Template

SEO for Local Service Business

For organic reach, please make sure it is clear to your customers and more importantly to google your location. for example, check this website we built for a customer: Bargain Moving Company. The words Nashville and Tennessee are mentioned in the right places like the URL of a few pages, title, H1, body, footer, etc. WARNING: don't overdo it, keep the ratio of any keyword at less than 3%-4% of the overall content so you are not penalized by Google for keywords stuffing. This is extremely important to start your ranking journey. Note: don't expect results immediately. it takes 3-6 months to start ranking and there are many onsite changes to be done along with the blog and then offline backlinks. But start somewhere and build gradually.

Driving Traffic and Generating Leads from Your Website

Even the best website in the world will be like a store in the middle of the desert with no proper marketing strategy. But here are few pieces of advice based on my personal experience:

1. Few digital marketing companies may tell you Offline marketing (traditional marketing) is old and doesn't work, that is ALL BULLSHIT.... it works! My company is a website builder and we advise customers about digital marketing services in Houston. The first thing we tell customers is not to ignore word of mouth and traditional marketing channels. In the first year, 80% of your business will come from local traditional channels and 20% will come from digital channels until you build your digital presence and digital know-how.
2. Some digital marketing companies will advise you to do paid advertisements. That is also BULLSHIT!! Don't spend a penny on digital marketing companies or paid ads. Frankly, with the current state of your website, it will be just a waste of money.
3. Go organic all the way, few have made good advice for your above. But here are a few more: Google for Business, Google for Business, and more Google for Business. I don't mean just create a profile page. Fill it up with services, products, offers, ask for reviews, reviews, and more reviews. Link products and services to landing pages on your website. Keep it active and keep posting to it. Google has decided to take over the business of yelp, home advisor, thumbtack, etc with Google for Business and Google map. Like, check the image attached when I searched for "dog walker Greensboro, North Carolina". Those results come from the health of your Google for Business account, the SEO of your website, and the interlink between both of them.

Once the leads start flowing in, make sure you have a good lead management tool to capture leads and manage interactions with them. That will help increase the conversion rate from leads to business.