1 – Clear Value Proposition
The core of any profitable website is a clear message or value proposition. Whether in just a single sentence or a few paragraphs, you need to describe precisely what you offer to whom. Focus on the benefits for your clients when working with you. Show your website visitors what it feels like to hire you as a consultant.
Clarity is the essence here. The clarity in your messaging, in the descriptions of your services, in the benefits for your prospects. People buy what they understand best. This piece of marketing advice should be applied to a consultant’s website too! Be absolutely clear about what you offer.
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2 – Personal Connection
As a consultant, you are the product. Therefore, people need to connect with you before trusting you and buying. However, you can only connect with your audience when you truly understand who your website visitors are and what they are looking for.
- What are the emotions they feel when they arrive at your website?
- What are their pain points?
- What are their hopes?
- What problems can you solve for them?
- What solutions do you offer for their specific situations?
Working with a particular colour palette, adding attractive pictures, professional videos, and well-designed graphics can also help you create a positive first impression and communicate the value of your services.
3 – Credibility
From a consultant, people expect a high level of knowledge and experience. But they want proof of it. Therefore, you must build credibility. That is why I always recommend that consultants provide thorough background information, showcase their accomplishments, display logos of companies they’ve worked with, and include best practices or case studies.
Social proof is equally important, so add testimonials from previous or ongoing clients (ideally, they provide their real names, employer and current job title), describing the positive experience that came from working with you. Testimonials can do the trick when alleviating any hesitation website visitors may have over booking a service with you. So ask your most loyal clients to jot down some text lines and place them on every service page of your consultant’s website.
Another idea is to show pictures of your office environment and display a physical address to tell website visitors that you are a fully established and trustworthy company.
4 – Content
If you want to connect with people, refer to their pain points and attract more visitors to your website, blog posts or free content resources are necessary. This allows you, again and again, to showcase your personality as a consultant and your innovative approach to solving your clients’ problems.
Very important: Never just advertise the services you offer. Believe me, prospective clients won’t become interested in your consulting services until they are convinced you have the expertise to help them. Of course, it is without saying that writing high-quality content that provides helpful information or shooting videos that show your authority or thought leadership for your consultant’s website is one of the best ways to accomplish this.
5 – Call-to-Actions
A website can do many things for you. But, for most consultants, the crucial thing is that website visitors sign up for a personal consultation. This is their primary call-to-action; this is how and when they sell their services.
For that reason, it has to be as easy as possible to get in touch with you. (By the way, most bookings are made outside of business hours, so having a scheduling tool take care of this for you 24/7 means that you can catch clients without being tied to your phone.) And the design of your website will help with that.
Choose a modern, sleek design for your consultant’s website. Make sure you consider how your visitors can follow your call to action when using your website. For example, keep the top navigation bar straightforward so that people find what they need: Home, About Me, Services, and Blog are the most used navigation tabs. Then add a prominent contact button (e.g. in a bold colour and with an inviting text line like “Let’s Talk” or “Book A Free Consultation”) so that people can click on that from any page of your consultant’s website. Further call-to-action elements in the form of other buttons or contact forms on every page, where people can take the next step, are helpful.
6 – Ongoing Relationships
Quite often, it is the second, third or fourth visit to your website when people finally trust you and book your services. So, what you want from your consultant’s website is that people are happy to come back for more.
Use email sequences, newsletters, webinars (pre-recorded or live events), videos and other web tools to nurture a relationship. For example, you may want to offer a free webinar on your consultant’s website to capture the email addresses of your first-time website visitors. Then send them more content and steadily create a deeper connection. Or add a contact form to your blog posts to have visitors sign up for regular updates. And notifying your client list when you have a new service on your website is how you can reactivate past client relationships.Â
However, never be too pushy or sleazy. Firing sales pitches at people can soon lead to a loss of interest. Unsubscribing from a newsletter or email series takes only one quick click. And then people will never return to your website. Instead, make sure you always send out high-value content leading back to your consultant’s website, where you can win people over because you simply have what it takes to help them.
7 – SEO Strategies
Nothing of the above will work if your consultant’s website isn’t found on the world wide web. Therefore, your content needs to be optimised with the latest SEO strategies to achieve the highest possible ranking in Google and other search engines. Choose strong long-tail keywords that closely relate to your specific consulting services and integrate them evenly throughout your consultant’s website.
Keeping your content up to date, publishing new articles, adding the latest testimonials, and more and more helpful free resources will not only keep website visitors, prospects and clients happy but also Google! Google gradually increases your search engine rankings if you regularly update your consultant’s website. It also measures how long people spend on your website engaging with your content. The more you publish and the more this gets read, the higher is your google ranking next time someone searches for one of your consulting topics. This is how you expand your reach and get more traffic onto your consultant’s website.
