Five years ago, I set up a typical pet service, business-centric website. It was beautifully designed by my IT specialist daughter, and was made up of a few pages of business related content. I loved it! It felt shiny and appealing, and it certainly show cased Custom Canine Care; who we were and what we did. If you go ahead and click on that link, you’ll see a very different site; a dog related info-blog, where messages about the services we offer are no longer the focus.
Why your website might be causing you to miss out on clients
The years between when I started off and today, have seen the internet explode into an ethereal world of well over a billion websites. Only a tiny fraction of these are ever seen by any one person. The “sorting mechanism” for all those sites are the search engines; the unchallenged giant among them, being Google.
Google’s mission statement is:
to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
In other words, Google exists to put useful information in the hands of those who search the web. Their ways of measuring and achieving this, have led to huge changes in the way that Google rates a website. These changes are reflected in the shift we see online, towards many websites – in all kinds of industries and interests – becoming information or info-blog based. Sites with new, trustworthy and useful information are rated highly. Sites that are stagnant, inaccurate, unimportant (to users – measured by things like time spent on the site and links back to the site, especially from social media), become irrelevant.
So what do you want from your business website?
I imagine the one word answer to this, from most business owners, would be:
CLIENTS!
So let’s dig a little deeper. Perhaps we want clients to stay on our page and read about us and our services? Why? Presumably, so that they will find us attractive, a good fit or good value. But what determines value to a client?What is attractive to a motivated, invested prospective client? What keeps them on your page? What tells them most about who you are and what you can offer them? Believe me when I say, it’s not a monologue you wrote yourself about how caring and professional you are! Believe me also, when I admit that I did that too.
What do your clients (current and future) want from your site?
Information, yes, but still not your self-review. They want diverse, rich information about dogs in general, about the way your day looks and why you think home boarding, or group walks, are a good idea. They are looking for information about products they would benefit from, training methods (writing about these goes a long way to matching you up with “good fit” clients) and local dog friendly pubs.
They also want someone else to tell them that you are great! This could be auto-generated reviews that you can link to or testimonials by real people, who are willing to be contacted to back up the virtual stuff. Clients’ pets’ pictures with stories go a long way to adding authenticity and interest, but be sure to get the client’s approval first.
Providing answers to their questions, will often be the thing that first draws a prospective client to your site. Do you sound like you care? Do you seem to understand the issues clients often need help with, regarding their animals? Do you come across as confident and calm? Generous and helpful? Will their pet be in safe hands?
Value! Clients want value – and I don’t mean just “for money“. All the things listed add value for the client. The more they can get from you as their primary pet care-giver, the more value you are adding, and the more attractive you will become.
Happily the things that make you attractive (via your website) to a new client, are the same things that make you “sticky” to an established client. Never stop looking for ways to make your website work for you in developing client relationship and trust.
Making the leap
So throw out the old 5-pages-of-info-about-me-and-my-business and make it your mission to start creating a rich, interesting, ever changing, growing, online space, for you and your clients to enjoy.
The majority of pet care related searches involve either Google or Facebook, so ideally you want to have both covered. In the next blog entry, I will address how to develop a blogging site without writing content yourself, for those of you who don’t want to create original content by writing. Following that we will look at what Facebook has to offer, and how you can best promote your business there.
