10 Ways to Avoid Your Consulting Clients Deflecting to Your Competition

Consulting | Tim Dodd | October 28, 2009 at 5:33 pm

In today’s world, a consultant’s website is unquestionably one of their core business critical marketing tools. Provided that it is structured correctly it can act as a multi-faceted resource for you that will attract, capture and convert leads from all around the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year without you ever needing to speak with a prospect unless you choose to.

And, unless you are a large organisation, the key to attracting and converting more clients through your website is to keep the structure as simple as possible.

Basically the most effective and profitable business websites just offer something that entices individuals to visit the website, a form that allows them to leave their name and email address in exchange for something of perceived value to the visitor, some more marketing material that sells the benefit of the products and services on offer and a system that enables those to be delivered in the most cost effective way possible.

Is your website selling your products and services as effectively as it could be? Here are some critical factors that could be adversely affecting the results you are seeing from your site, if you are not doing them correctly. And as you read through the list, think about how you might be able to make some significant improvements to your business today.

1.Firstly, is your URL, or website address (www.YourWebSite.com) easy to remember and spell? Keeping it simple often makes it look more professional, catches your prospects’ eye more easily and also converts offline advertising into online traffic much more effectively.

2.Does your URL appear on ALL of your marketing material? Ifnot, then you’re definitely leaving a lot of potential business revenue on the table.

3.Is your home page visually pleasing and easy to read? By that I mean it shouldn’t beover cluttered by too much text, flashing images and loud, hypey headlines shouting at you.

4.Is all of your most important information contained above the fold (i.e. in the area of the screen immediately visible to your visitors when they first arrive at your site)? You need to ensure that you create the biggest impression you can bygrabbing your visitor’s attention with what they first see when entering your site.

5.How fast does your home page load? Flash animation can be very effective, however a big flash presentation on your home page will turn visitors off if it loads slowly. Keep your flash presentation to a bare minimum and don’t use them to convey your most essential information.

6.Do you allow visitors to subscribe to your newsletter on every page of your website? The more times you invite people to opt-in to receive information from you, the more subscribers you will get!

7.How educational is your website? Your website should provide as much valuable information to your visitors as possible. Regularly post news about upcoming events involving your business, and provide educational articles to relate how your products or services can be of benefit to your readers.

8.How regularly are you providing new information for your visitors? Frequent posting of new content will not only keep the search engine robots happy, but will also ensure that your prospects have an excellent, worthwhile reason to keep coming back time and time again!

9.Is your content keyword-rich without being over the top? By this I mean make sure that you do include terms that you would expect customers of your products and services to use when searching for them on the internet without overloading your postings with such terms. Excessive use of keywords within your content is known as keyword stuffing and can, if you’re not very careful, lead to your website being excluded by the search engines.

10.Above all else, is your website user-friendly? Check out your website using different screen resolutions and different browsers to make sure that the text and images display properly. Also check that all your links and navigation controls work on a regular basis and, if you want to increase sales revenue, make sure that every page on your site also includes a link or redirect to a page that promotes one of your products or services.

Beware! Keep in mind that there are millions and millions of websites on the internet and if you do not attract your prospects’ attention effectively, then they will quite simply look elsewhere and in all likelihood end up giving their business to one of your competitors. You now need to ask yourself, can you afford for that to happen?

Author: Tim Dodd
Article Source: EzineArticles.com

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