New website increases lead generation for industry body

Network has shown how to increase the lead generation potential for an industry body through taking a marketing and communication-led approach to its own web site.

Our client, the Institute of Patent and Trademark Attorneys of Australia (IPTA), represents more than 800 patent and trade mark attorneys in Australia. They wanted their industry association website to play a bigger role in lead generation by capturing the thousands of searches made on the internet through search engines.

The work we undertook in early 2008, completely rebuilding their website, increased traffic by more than 300 percent in the first three months- showing the power of natural or organic search as a web marketing business tool for lead generation; and the importance that content now plays if your site is to be found by Google or other search engines.

Site statistics from July 2008 - just three months after the new site went live - show the following increases over the previous site’s figures:

Visits                                                                334% increase

Pages Visited                                                    413% increase

No. Search Phrases resulting in visits                  553% increase

The IPTA website was typical of many websites.  Its structure had been developed, and its content written, based around what members saw as the services they provided. Technically it just wasn’t ‘search engine friendly’, with a home page built entirely using Flash.

In a six-months project we revamped the site. We:

o        Rebuilt the site using our our own proprietary search-engine friendly CMS (content management system),

o       Spent weeks analysing the key words that searchers were looking for when using Google and other search engines,

o        Re-structured the site around what searchers were looking for - not how IPTA thought the site should be structured,

o        Ensured that our page titles and other appropriate areas of the site were tagged with the right words and phrases,

o        Completely re-wrote all the content on the site, building the copy around key search phrases,

o        Developed new sections for media releases and statements,

o        Developed a link strategy that resulted in us linking the IPTA site to many authourative sources - and having many external sources link back,

o        Revamped the Members Directory, making it more useable and accessible to search engines,

o        Launched the new website by sending details of it to thousands of potential interested parties, including media,

o        Started a regular publishing program on the new site, ensuring that we write and post fresh copy that will help search engines see the site as being active and relevant.

The results are testimony to the fact that these days it’s the content that counts if you want to be found and increase lead generation. It’s all about writing the copy based on what consumers are searching for - not what you want to tell them!

The new IPTA web site won’t win any awards for design - but it’s an Industry site there to fulfil informational requests from business enquirers. Substance is more important than image.

It’s now a functional content-rich site which is highly optimised so it can be found in natural or organic search. What it is now doing is fulfilling the function its members want it to; and what the new breed of web sites should - play a lead generation role. Too few web sites in Australia do so.