Being in the professional services industry, you know how difficult it can be to differentiate your business online. Your competitors are talking about the same topics and services you are, whether they truly deliver like you do or not. Your digital footprint is extremely important to your go forward growth strategy, especially in today’s business climate.
Research suggests 9 out of 10 prospects will rule out a firm before even talking to anyone at the business. To avoid this, your website must clearly communicate how you can address a prospects’ challenges and why you are the best firm to work with.
But how do you create a successful site that builds trust, educates your audience, and enhances your overall online presence?
Let’s examine three practices that will help you do just that.
It takes effort to get search visibility, rankings, and traffic, but your content is the foundation to attain this. Content marketing generates almost six times more conversions for businesses that use it. You can’t write and publish content and expect results. You need to write high-quality content optimized to positively impact for search engines.
Your content should offer advice or share industry expertise while keeping your readers interested. This type of content will help improve your rankings and keep clients coming back.
Most are viewing your website using a mobile device, so it’s necessary you prioritize mobile friendliness in your online platforms. Users who have a bad experience accessing your site through their mobile device will leave quickly and likely not revisit.
Google does adjust rankings based on mobile-friendliness and displaying search results with “mobile-friendly” tags, which relates to overall visibility in search results.
How can you ensure that your site is mobile-friendly? The answer lies in a responsive design.
Search your firm using your smartphone, iPad, tablet or other mobile device to experience as many platforms as you can. If your website is not responsive, contact your website provider or feel free to reach out to EMI for further guidance.
Understanding the basics of is difficult concept to grasp. Google is constantly changing the way it indexes and ranks pages in search results. To reach the top of the search page your business needs to create a strategy and stick to it.
Common, yet affective strategies include blogging. This is a challenge for financial firms because of compliance. We recommend that you plan your blogs at least a month in advance. Virtually everything that you communicate online will be subject to some type of approval, review, and surveillance. Since the approval process timeframes range from days to weeks depending on the number of iterations, plan your posts a month in advance so you have sufficient time for the approval process.
When blogging, keep your titles under 60 words – short blog post titles ensures that the entire title appears. Add a meta description to your blog – A meta description is the description under the title. This should be a compelling description of your content. These descriptions are extremely beneficial in improving your click-through rate.
Lastly, make your blog easy to share on social media and post your blog on your channels with a call to action encouraging visitors to your website. This will improve your rankings and attract a much larger audience. See Practical steps to improve your presence & engage your audience on social media for more details how to leverage social media to grow your business.
Most create their website because it’s expected but they don’t consider it a tool for growing their business. It’s your commercial and primary sales tool weather you like it or not. Reviewing your site periodically, updating outdated content and publishing relevant, valuable content to draw your target audience are “must do” activities.
For a fresh perspective or to learn how you can improve your digital footprint, contact me at [email protected] or (513) 309-0719.
