5 Ways To Make Your Website Stand Out To Prospective Clients
It might be that your site is missing one or two things that make it visible to your searching clients. We’ve got a list of five ways you can help your online presence stand out. So let’s talk about the basic SEO elements you need for your website, shall we?
A Word On Search Engines
Before we jump into the list, there’s something we need to clarify. Once, a Yellow Pages listing was enough for bringing in business. Now, when your clients have a sneaking suspicion they need help, they’ll plug their problem into a search engine. Which of us haven’t used Google to find the nearest post office, remove a stain, or look up the name of some obscure actor?
Point is, if we’ve got a question now, we’ll go to Google to find the answer. If Google reckons that your website is most able to answer the question the prospective client is asking, then they’ll prioritise you in the search engine results.
So how do we reassure the search engines that our website is able to answer our clients’ questions?
1 - Regularly update the content on your website
Your clients are going to have a lot of questions.
They’ll want to understand what their problems actually are.
They’re going to want to understand the solutions you provide, and how those solutions work.
They’ll need to be reassured that your solutions are the best fit for their needs.
All of this adds up to two big things. One, a single-page website isn’t going to cut it anymore. Not if you want to answer all those questions, build trust and reassurance with your clients, and encourage them to make contact with you.
Two - the questions your prospective clients ask are going to keep coming. They’re going to change over time as your profession does, and they’re going to change in response to current happenings.
In order to convince the search engines and confirm to potential clients that you have expertise in your area of profession, you’ll need to regularly update your website with content that answers questions your clients will have.
The most common way that these updates are expressed is in the blog format.
Plan a blog - plan topics that answer questions your clients will have, and plan to update it regularly. It’ll provide more surface area to catch your clients on, and will give an increasing number of reasons for your regulars to stick around.
2 - Research your keywords and use them well
Keywords are the phrases that your potential clients plug into search engines. Sometimes they’ll be a single word (e.g. Kinesiologist), sometimes they’ll be a string of words (e.g. ‘local Kinesiologist Emerald’).
There are two things to keep in mind when you use keywords.
First, you’ll want to know the kind of language styles your ideal clients use, and the words they’re likely to search on and pick, so that the keywords you use are ones they’re searching for.
Second, you should naturally include these keywords.
You don’t become more visible in search engines by overusing your keywords, so don’t use them more than you need.
3 - Use your H1 and meta descriptions well
H1 stands for ‘Heading 1’. They’re the largest types of headings you can have on a web page, and search engines take what is said in H1 to work out what your pages are about.
This means that in order to use them effectively, you want to include only the most important information in them (like your blog post title), and you don’t want to use too many of them (ever see what happens to the emphasis in a paragraph when you italicise everything?).
For sub-headings in your pages (and particularly your blog posts), H2 and H3 are fine.
Your meta descriptions are what turn up under your page title in the search engine results page.
While they don’t play a large role now in making your website more amicable to search engines, they do describe to searching clients what your page is about.
When you write meta descriptions, write them like good movie taglines. Summarise what the page is about, and make it sound appealing enough to warrant investigation.
4 - Get your pages indexed
When your website goes live, or you publish more content, you have the option of getting the pages indexed by Google or other search engines.
This is something that most search engines will get around to, eventually, but you stand a better chance to get noticed if you get on it sooner rather than later.
Getting a page indexed is in a lot of ways similar to submitting your number to the Yellow Pages - it’s a way of telling the main directory that everyone uses
‘hey, I’m here, and I know a lot about this subject. If people come asking about this subject, please tell them about me.’
5 - Link your social media channels to your content, and vice versa
Lifestyle and business meet on social media. For practitioners of Natural Therapies, it’s an ideal place to reach out from.
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Youtube are all about presenting the reader with ways to become more like their ideal self - the best person they can be, whether that’s for improvement or for treatment of longstanding issues.
Social media is a key way that many clients find their solutions provider now, so if your business doesn’t yet have a page on these platforms, you should consider building one, and linking your content to it.
Doing so will allow you more ways to attract potential clients back to your site and it’ll let you set up a relationship with them, first with content and then later a partnership, as they move from being potential clients to very real, very enjoyable clients.
You should also leave space on your website for links to your social media accounts, giving first-time visitors the opportunity to connect with you on other platforms where they already are.
If you haven’t got social media platforms set up yet, then just pick one or two - the ones you think your clients will most likely already be on - and start small.
You’ll see results, and be able to tailor to those.
Basic SEO Elements for Your Website
You’ve probably heard the acronym ‘SEO’ thrown around before. It sounds like some kind of mystical term that only a few can understand and even fewer can use properly. Thing is, what we’ve just walked through are some basic methods of Search Engine Optimisation.
The exact rules on how to optimise keep changing, which can be a little frustrating. However, the way in which they are changing is to favour a website that is about helping the client, as opposed to creating websites that trick the search engine for the sake of a few extra clicks.
So, you’ll see the most responses from your Natural Therapy website if you work to understand the needs of your clients, and you write content that answers their questions and helps them understand how you can help them better. They’re out there, looking for someone. Your content’s job is helping them understand that that someone is you.