Why Your Lead-Gen Site Isn’t Generating Calls

I received a question from a local marketing consultant that I thought you might be experiencing too.

In short, he creates lead-gen sites for local service based businesses. He is currently renting this sites for a low monthly fee. No idea what that fee is as he did not elaborate. And while he has these sites ranked high in the search engines they are not generating a lot of phone calls. He wanted to know if I had any advice for him. This is my response:

Hi Tim, I’ll give you my two cents worth. There are many reasons why there are few calls coming in. These are general thoughts and nothing specific to your situation since I don’t know anything about it. Hope that makes sense. Here goes:

• Simply not enough traffic searching for those keywords.
• The landing page has too much stuff on it and the visitor doesn’t know what to do. Its best to keep it simple and use a “less is more” approach. At least for the landing page. It shouldn’t have an abundance of links, text or graphics.
• It should have a lead capture form with some type of freemium giveaway like a report, coupon or something. So over time they are building their email list
• A lead-gen site should be one-piece of an overall marketing strategy not the end-all, be-all. Meaning there should be other strategies included as part of the lead-gen site including a Youtube channel, Facebook Page, Facebook Ads Pinterest Boards of their past work, etc.

It could also be the market you’re targeting and your area. Some service based businesses are very tough to make work because they are cheap skates and refuse to see the value. They want tons of calls and leads immediately and don’t realize that even if they get and extra 60 calls per year and convert 20% of them that’s 12 new clients. That’s one new client per month. And if the lifetime value of that client is $5,000 that’s a total of $60,000 in new revenue. All generated by them doing pretty much nothing! That’s a huge amount of revenue to many service based businesses. But its up to you to show them the value.

Then after you add in your other marketing services, that’s when the snowball starts rolling.

Hope this helps!

Of course every situation is different and not all advice is good for all people. But I hope you can gain a little benefit from what I told Tim.