What Makes A Great Website Sticky

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When we talk about “the web,” we usually mean the entirety of all that is out there in cyberspace—billions of individual sites and pages and connections. But what if we took a more micro view, and compared your business website to the original “web”—the sticky filaments patterned by our arachnid friends as the ultimate way of capturing prey.

Think of your own web(site) as having the same goal as that of a spider: providing the resources your company needs to survive. Use your web to catch customers.

How Your Web Attracts Leads

Many spider webs work by simply catching whatever insects happen to fly by and stumble into the sticky strings. And your website does the same at times. Haven’t we all at some point wandered through the ‘net moving from one site to another on random links and ended up somewhere really never intended to be?

But there are also spiders who don’t leave things to chance. South America’s bolas spiders intentionally draw in their prey, scenting their web with something their intended targets are looking for: mates. Or at least mimicking the desirable scent of pheromones from two different moth species. (Really, check it out.)

Now, I’m not going to suggest that you pretend to be something you aren’t, but I do suggest that you fill your “web” with what your target audience is looking for. If they are looking for a mate, they’ll need to go somewhere else. But if your prospects are looking for information about a business solution that you can provide, your web should be sending out the signal that you have the answers.

Those signals trigger the algorithms of search engines to guide your prospects to your web. And the signals come from content such as:

Your website attracts leads by being filled with the signals that you have what your prospects are looking for.

How Your Web Captures Leads

While not all spiders have webs (the bolas spider “ropes” its prey), those who do use webs make good use of the trick of making them sticky. Whatever touches those sticky strands—and isn’t big enough to break away—is there for good.

Your website isn’t going to be quite that aggressive, but what makes it “sticky” is the continuation of the content signals that originally lured your prospect in.

Once they are on your website, you capture leads by using calls-to-action to connect your prospects with the landing pages and offers that do what your earlier signals promised: providing information and solutions.

Need ideas for the kinds of offers you can gate behind landing pages?

When your prospect accesses an offer by filling out the form on a landing page and providing some level of contact information in exchange for your offer, they get “stuck.” So what’s next?

How Your Web Pulls Leads Toward A Sale

When an insect finds itself trapped in a sticky web, the more it moves around, the more points of contact it creates, catching more tightly each time. And sometimes, the spider even wraps the insect tightly with web to keep for later. (Ok, this is sounding a little gruesome, but I promise we aren’t planning to suck our leads dry.)

We need to wrap our leads up, too, increasing the points of contact as we go. But we wrap them up in information through dynamic content and lead nurturing.

Dynamic content uses their past interaction with your website to determine what content to show each individual lead. For instance, if someone converted into a lead by downloading a case study about how a company used your billing software, your website would stop showing them CTAs for that case study. Instead, it would show them CTAs offering a demonstration of the billing software.

Lead nurturing also focuses on providing leads with deeper information and understanding of the topic that originated each individual’s interaction with your website, this time through an automated series of emails. Each email offers related information, downloads, trials or other ways of helping your lead learn more about your business and your solutions, moving them closer to a sale.

Lead nurturing, and the information your marketing automation system, such as HubSpot, collects through that process about each lead, enhances the likelihood of closing a sale.

Putting all of these pieces of a “sticky web” together is key to creating an effective website, optimized for online lead generation, lead nurturing and sales enablement. In fact, these components mesh well with the characteristics we use in our JONES Website Design Solutions to define a successful website: