Attract more clients

Imagine it’s the 80s.

You’ve got a new business. You’ve been to an actual bookshop and bought actual business books, and every single one tells you that you need business cards. Fair enough. You pay a graphic designer to make you something beautiful. You order a massive box from the printer. Thousands of them. You’re going to be a huge success. You collect the box, put it in the boot of your car and drive home. You carry it inside, put it on the top shelf of the wardrobe in your shiny new home office, and close the door.

Then you stay inside. You don’t go anywhere. You don’t meet anyone. You don’t hand out a single card. They’re still in the box. Still in the shrink wrap. Still in your house. Terrible business card, hey?

Aren’t you glad your website doesn’t work like that?

Your website is properly structured for search engines. It’s accurate, up to date, technically sound and quietly working like a little magnet, drawing potential customers towards your business. Even when you’re not looking at it. Isn’t it? Oh. You don’t actually know. Someone sold you something stylish, and now you’ve got no real way of knowing how many people are finding it, where they’re coming from or whether any of them are becoming customers. You get very few enquiries from it. Sometimes you visit it yourself, just to make sure it’s still there. It is.

Lovely.

There are people out there who need what you sell.

They just need to find you. And once they find you, they need a reason to choose you over everybody else. There are a few ways we can help that happen. Get found. Search engine optimisation (SEO) helps search engines understand what your business does, where you do it and which searches your website might be useful for. That includes your website’s structure, its content, local business listings, relevant links from other websites and all sorts of technical bits and pieces.

Get trusted. Reviews, testimonials, photographs of your actual work, awards, credentials and useful information all help people decide whether you’re worth their money. Your reputation also travels beyond your website, and some of those signals can help your visibility in search. Get recommended. Happy customers, complementary businesses, industry contacts and relevant directories can introduce you to people who might never have found you otherwise. These aren’t three separate worlds. They overlap.

A guest article might introduce you to a new audience and earn you a useful link. A review might help someone choose you and strengthen your local presence. A good directory listing might send you customers directly. We’re building lots of little magnets, in lots of useful places, all pointing towards your business.

Go on. See if anyone’s finding you.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Ahrefs has a free Website Traffic Checker that can give you an idea of how much traffic your website might be getting from search engines.

Is it what you expected? Before you get too excited — or horrified — let’s talk about what that number actually means. Ahrefs isn’t sitting inside your website counting visitors. It looks at the search terms your website appears to rank for, estimates how many people search for those terms, and calculates roughly how many might click through to your website based on where you appear in the results.

Imagine you appear fifth for a phrase that gets 1,000 searches a month. Ahrefs makes an educated guess about how many of those searchers might click the fifth result. It does that across the keywords it knows about and adds up the estimates. It’s an educated guess, not a headcount. It can miss searches, particularly for small businesses, local services and unusual search terms. It doesn’t necessarily know about visitors arriving through referrals, social media, direct links or other sources. And a very small estimate doesn’t mean nobody is finding you.

But it’s a starting point. A little peek outside the wardrobe.

I prefer to know what’s actually happening.

That’s why I like setting up proper measurement. With tools such as Google Search Console, we can see how often your website appears in Google search results, which searches are bringing it up, and how many people click through. With website analytics, we can get a better picture of how many people visit, where they arrive from and what they do once they’re there. And if we connect the right enquiry, booking, sales or customer systems, we can start answering the questions that really matter.

How many people found you? How many became enquiries? How many became paying customers? How many came back? Not every website can answer all of those questions straight away. Sometimes we need to improve the forms, booking process or customer records before we can follow the whole journey. And we won’t always know exactly which bit of marketing persuaded someone to buy. But we can get a much better picture than ‘Well, the website’s still there.’ Then we use what we’re learning.

We find the pages people are discovering, the searches we’re missing, the enquiries that turn into good customers and the places people seem to lose interest. We improve things. We measure again. Over time, we build more of those little magnets and get better at attracting the right people. Because we’re not trying to make a graph look pretty. We’re trying to get you more customers.

There’s a bit I’ll need from you.

You shouldn’t have to learn the ins and outs of web development or SEO to attract customers. You can hire someone like me to handle that. The algorithms, metadata, page structure, technical problems, speed scores and other assorted wiffle-waffle? I’ll take care of those. But you know your business better than I do. So I might ask you questions about your customers, give you direction on the copy you supply or suggest topics worth writing about.

I might ask you to approach a complementary business about working together, contribute your expertise to an article, or ask a few happy customers for reviews. I’ll explain what I’m asking for, why it matters and how to do it if you need instructions. You don’t have to become an SEO expert. You just need to keep being an expert in whatever it is you actually do.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Maitland…

There’s a person with a dirty house, money in their pocket and a desperate need for a cleaner. They Google cleaner Maitland. And now they’re eating chocolate to console themselves because they’ve found yet another article about the cleaning routine that changed the lives of Dutch women with ADHD. They don’t need another cleaning routine. They need a cleaner. And somewhere nearby is a perfectly good cleaning business with a perfectly good website that they haven’t found. We should probably introduce them.

Let’s get your website out of the wardrobe.

You don’t need to know which technical fix, service or strategy you need before you get in touch. Tell me what you sell, where you sell it and what’s happening with your enquiries. We’ll work out where to start.

Ask me something ↗