Ingredient: Website

A website can be a powerful tool for filling the pipeline, following up, or both. Many professional services sites are primarily online brochures. Their content focuses on describing the features and benefits of the services being offered and provides supporting details such as biographies or client lists. If your website matches this description, you will probably find that your site is primarily a follow-up tool. Most of your site visitors will not find you on their own, but will instead be people you direct to your site by way of other pipeline-filling strategies such as direct contact, networking, public speaking, writing, or advertising. The elements of a basic website like this typically include:

Description of the services you offer

Details about your target market and/or professional specialty (e.g., “I work with artists and designers” or “We specialize in qualitative market research”)

Features and benefits of your services

Tag line, positioning statement, or competitive advantage

Biography of you, your company, or both

Client list, testimonials, or endorsement quotes

Photographs or illustrations of you or about your work

Contact information: address, phone, e-mail, and social media profiles

There’s nothing wrong with having a website that follows this online brochure model. For many professionals, this may be all the Web presence you need. However, if you wish to use your site not just to follow up with prospects by directing them there, but also to fill the pipeline by attracting new visitors—without paid advertising—you will need more. To accomplish this aim, you will need to build a site that offers more value beyond just marketing copy and employs additional tactics to draw traffic.

Adding fresh, informative content to your site increases its value as a resource, which will bring you a higher ranking in the search engines, build your professional credibility, encourage other sites to link to yours, and cause more people to refer others to your site via social media, e-mail, and the like. These added information pages will also provide multiple links to your site in the search engines, because each one will be indexed separately. Posting new content frequently will also improve your search engine ranking.

Adding value to your site can take the form of:

Educational articles about your area of expertise

A blog or back issues of your e-zine or print newsletter

Quizzes or assessments your visitors can use to score themselves

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about your field

Resource guides or links to other useful sites

White papers, case studies, or surveys relevant to your industry

Tutorials or how-to guides that showcase your expertise

Videos or audio recordings that educate, entertain, or inspire visitors

You can also improve the ranking of your site in search engine results when prospects search for specific keywords or keyword phrases. The higher your site ranks in the results, the more likely it is that a searcher will visit. This type of search engine optimization (SEO) is based on identifying what search terms your best prospects are most likely to use, then featuring these terms prominently in your website’s copy. The best terms to focus on are those directly relevant to what you offer, but not so highly competitive that getting a high rank will be difficult.

Here’s an example: A massage therapist in Tampa, Florida, found that typing “Tampa massage” into Google returned 7,900,000 results. Instead of trying to get a high ranking under that keyword phrase, she chose “Tampa deep tissue massage” for which there were only 180,000 results. In designing her site, she used the keyword phrase “Tampa deep tissue massage” in the page title on her home page. In the text on her page, she used the heading “deep tissue massage” when describing her work, and made sure to include that phrase and the word “Tampa” again elsewhere on the page. As a result of this keyword optimization, combined with other tactics she used to increase traffic to her site, when her home page was indexed by Google, it was listed in the top ten under “Tampa deep tissue massage.” If she had resisted naming a specialty and focused her site around the more competitive phrase “Tampa massage” instead, it’s unlikely she could have achieved a rank high enough for prospects to find her through a Google search.

SEO techniques can be sophisticated and change frequently. You may not wish to spend time learning enough to use them on your own. SEO experts and some (but not all) Web designers can provide you with professional help.

Regarding design and construction of your site, hiring a Web designer will save you a great deal of frustration and produce a higher quality result than you are likely to produce on your own. Web technology changes frequently, and a good designer can help you take advantage of the newest possibilities, as well as make sure your site is accessible to visitors using smartphones or tablets to browse the Web. Be sure to ask about the range of the designer’s knowledge. If you are working with someone whose skills are mainly artistic or primarily technical, you may want to also hire a marketing pro to help with copywriting or search engine optimization.

Before you start building a site, spend some time surfing. Search for keywords you think prospective clients would use to find you, and explore what content your competitors’ sites contain. Make a list of features you like and dislike, as well as what you think the competitive advantages featured on your site should be.

There are many ways to attract traffic to your website beyond those discussed above, and you’ll find additional suggestions in this chapter under the recipes given for individual marketing strategies. Whichever methods you choose, however, beware of spending more time and money on building a site and attracting traffic to it than those visitors will ultimately be worth to you. In most cases, you will still need to have personal contact with prospects who find you on the Web before they decide to hire you. A well-designed website can be a significant source of new leads as well as a credibility booster, but it’s not a complete sales and marketing strategy all by itself.