How To Book More Clients with Your Website: Two Strategies You Can Implement Today
Sep 01, 2020
You walk by a store you haven’t noticed before. There’s gorgeous lettering on the windows. The window displays make your steps slow. Before you know it, you’ve stepped into the store. Once inside, you’re almost guaranteed to become a customer.
Think of your website like the storefront above. It’s supposed to be working for you, both to bring in more viewers and to convert those viewers into customers or clients. The value of a beautifully-branded, organized website is that it’s answering questions and convincing your audience of your incredible worth as a creative business, without you even opening your mouth to address them individually. You want to invite them in, just as you would in a brick-and-mortar store.
They’re On Your Site, Now What?
Your website has brought them in, but what do you do now? There are many strategies you can employ to encourage people to book your services using your website. Many of them promote some sort of call to action—like telling your audience to get in touch with you and showing them exactly how. This is something missing from social media, a great tool in itself to help you engage with your audience as a community, but not effective at helping you single yourself out so they can focus only on you.
In my opinion, the real goal is to get people from your social channels to your website, where you have more control. Today I’m going to be talking about two strategies I like to focus on: first, getting people to your website, and second, converting that traffic into paying clients.
1. Getting People to Your Website
This can be done through SEO, content marketing, or word-of-mouth. The idea is you need to get enough people actually VISITING your website before you worry about whether those visitors are buying from you. Sometimes this is called lead generation or organic traffic/marketing.
One of my favorite client projects this year came as the result of a simple Google search. They searched “website designer for influencers,” my name came up (probably because I have so much content on my site geared towards creative entrepreneurs and lifestyle bloggers, and Google was able to pick up on the relevance to this client’s search query)! After they found my website and hired me to redo theirs, it was easy for me to see the value of search engine optimization (SEO) as an online marketing strategy.
To some extent, marketing is a numbers game—the more people that visit your site, the more chances you have of booking clients. For that reason, I focus a significant amount of my time on driving traffic to my website so that I can pull in potential customers without having to reach out to people individually. Website traffic is also super easy to track so you can see exactly what’s working and what isn’t!
Note: While SEO isn’t part of my official website services, I do recognize its value in growing your business’ reach online. When you hire me to design your website, I do provide basic on-page SEO in the sense that I’m designing your site with SEO best practices in mind, and preparing the set-up for more optimization in the future.
2. Conversion-Based Design
The second strategy I’d recommend you employ is conversion-based design, which is the idea that you want to maximize the probability of the people who are coming to your website actually doing what you want them to do (in this case, book you or purchase from you).
Your website should be laid out like a map, with a clear path for all website traffic to travel. You first need something specific for them to do, like book a consultation or add products to their cart and purchase, and then you can build the roadmap or channels for them to follow to complete their conversion.
A quick note about your goals for your website: you should be aiming for something specific and measurable to happen when traffic lands on your website. For example, a goal like, “I want people to know what my services are” is not beneficial to you. There isn’t any way to measure what someone knows, only what someone does as an action. Instead, you should focus on something action-based so you have some measurable results.
The best way to create a high-converting website is to first figure out your conversion rate. Do you know how your website is currently performing? Here’s a simple, three-step process to help you understand how you can make it more effective:
- Determine how many unique visitors you’ve had in the past 30 days.
- Figure out how many sales/transactions/leads you recorded for the same time frame.
- Divide the second number by the first number. This is your conversion rate, which recognizes the percentage of people who come to your website and turn into a client or customer. The goal is to continually increase this!
Benefits of My Website Design
One of my goals as your website designer is to work hard at increasing your conversion rates because that is the most efficient way to increase your income. Here are some of the things I do to improve those numbers:
- Use high contrast colors
- Include the same call to action in multiple places
- Put the call to action "above the fold"
- Create A/B pages to test what's working and what isn't
- Using conversion-based copywriting
Overall, search engine optimization should be used hand-in-hand with conversion-based design. You bring in more website traffic through an SEO strategy, and then turn that traffic into leads and customers once they arrive on your site. It’s the ultimate way to get more bang for your buck when it comes to time spent developing an online marketing strategy.
How do you feel you rank in these two areas/strategies? I’d love to hear what other strategies you employ to book more clients and customers on your site. Comment below!
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