Your website is more than a storefront. Use it to attract precisely the business you want.
Photo by Mo3ath photos on Pexels.com
When you launched your business, you put up a website. Creating a landing page online is the modern equivalent of hanging out your shingle. Maybe you paid someone to set it up. Maybe you are technical enough to do it yourself. Maybe you think you can get away with posting to Instagram. (You can’t.)
However you approach this, it’s important to understand that a website is more than a storefront sign. It can also be a lure that reaches out to people, hooks them, and reels them in to you.
SEO is the fishing lure you need to use here. When you use SEO to attract precisely the business you want, you are curating clientele, rather than reacting to the people who call you. When done well, it captures people at the moment when they are thinking they need the service you want to offer.
This is not as hard as it sounds.
Here’s an example
I built a website for a client who runs a tree business. There is a vast range of work that falls under the category of tree work, and a lot of competition for that work. But he wanted only a very specific slice of that pie. The slice that matches his advanced skills and lean team.
Photo by Czapp Árpád on Pexels.com
Some of the work he wanted is seasonal. There are times of the year when you prune or feed certain trees. Clients have no idea when this is. But he does. Getting customers to call at the right time of year is always a challenge for tree companies.
Here’s what we did.
I built an engaging and easy-to-navigate website, and he advertised it on Google and in local outlets.
I created a section that he could easily navigate to write blog posts, even though he knows nothing about building websites or SEO.
Then we brainstormed the kind of work he wanted and when he wanted to get it. He knows his topic well, but he’s busy running his business. He didn’t have time to write hundreds of posts. So we narrowed his list of topics down to one: How to deal with a specific pest that plagues a popular tree in his region.
That was the most important step in this process. To attract precisely the business you want, you have to focus your content on something specific.
Attract precisely the business you want
He didn’t spend hours or days posting slick videos of his team climbing trees, talking about his day, or posting stunning tree photos. There is a place for that sort of content. It can raise awareness, keep your company name fresh in people’s minds, and create a brand. But that’s not what he was trying to do.
Photo by Tatiana on Pexels.com
The goal here was to narrow the topic to something very specific that would pull in a specific type of work. This pest plagues this popular non-native tree. He knew it was a problem that a lot of people needed to solve. He wanted to help them solve it — and become their go-to source for tree services.
He wrote a post about the pest, why it targets this tree, and what he does to eliminate it. I edited the post, making sure to include the keywords – the tree, the region, and a description of the problem pest causes – and we set it to go live.
Within days, he was inundated with exactly the work he wanted: treating that tree for that pest. We chose that topic, in part because of the season, so he got these calls at exactly the right time, too.
He wrote that post over a year ago. He is still getting work from it. Sometimes people call at the wrong time of year so they can get on his schedule for next year. That post is what we call in the content business, a chestnut. A single piece of content — that took us only a couple of hours from idea to going live — turned a season that is typically slow for him into one of his busiest, most profitable times and it is still out there working.
- My 10 Favorite Tools for Organizing Desk Drawers
- I Found the Best Aeron Chair Alternative
- 7 Essential Inexpensive Ergonomic Office Tools That Prevent Wrist & Hand Injury
When you purchase anything through links on this site, GeekGirlfriends.com sometimes earns a little money. It doesn’t cost you any extra, but you are making this content possible. We only recommend products that we own, have tried through the company’s review program, or covet. Thanks for your support.