You might think that when a client gets in touch via email or a contact form, the eventual meeting you arrange will be the first interaction between your business and a potential client. This is incorrect! The first meeting your business has with any potential client is when they first look through your website.

A website is the perfect place to lay out your business ideals, vision, mission, and reassurances. It is a way for a potential client to get to know you before even talking to you. As such, it is a huge opportunity to generate a lead.

A lot of businesses still believe that a website alone won’t be enough to generate sales or leads. As a result, they don’t invest any effort into their website, seeing it simply as a placeholder to ensure they keep their domain name. However, with the right amount of planning and careful curation of content, brand, style, and structure, you can turn your website into one of the most valuable tools in your toolbox.

Content

When a potential client is looking for, let’s say, a financial planner in Nottingham, having a website with unique Nottingham-related content can help your site rank highly in the search results – already a great boon.

Once on your website, a client will likely want to see not only what you can do for them, but also the people who make your business work. Having a team section on a website and populating it with the credentials and day-to-day roles of each team member is incredibly helpful. So is including a look into what each team member does outside of work – what they do for fun. This gives a potential client a chance to get to know the people they could be working with, and it can help to set them at ease.

As well as giving prospects a peek through the looking glass at what your team get up to in and out of work, pages detailing key information about the business itself are also critical. These will likely include:

• Service pages explaining the exact services you offer, with one dedicated page per service
• A process page, detailing the journey a new client can expect to be led on
• FAQs, answering common questions before any physical meeting happens.

Now you need to ensure that information is easy to access, intuitive to navigate, and visually appealing.

Style

The style of a website can also go a long way to working in your favour, or against you. If a potential client visits your website and is greeted with a design that looks dated, perhaps by several years, what does that say about your business?

Potential clients may even wonder if the outdated site is still in use – this has happened before!

Keeping your website regularly updated in terms of style and content – maybe even giving it a fresh coat of paint every few years – will keep it ticking over, looking great, and inviting engagement.

Use brand colours that you are happy with and that potential clients can resonate with, create an easy-to-follow content structure, and include calls to action to move users between content and contact forms quickly.

Ideally, you want someone to land on your website and say to themselves: “Yes, this is exactly who I want to work with – they get me.”

If your site can do that without you even having to lift a finger, then congratulations, you have an incredible tool at your disposal. A website is more than just window shopping; it’s the entity that greets right-fit clients and lets them know you are there, you get them, and you are happy to guide them on their journey.

And if a client has submitted that form or called the office after looking at your website, the hard part is done; they’ve had their first meeting with you.

Get in touch

If you want to get the ball rolling on a website that ticks all the boxes for your business, contact The Yardstick Agency today. Our team will take your ideas and turn them into reality, helping potential clients find and connect with you.

Call 0115 8965 300 or email hi@theyardstickagency.co.uk to get started.