Websites for Service Professionals/Consultants - Part 3

Websites for Service Professionals/Consultants - Part 3

Becoming Net Savvy

 It is not that difficult to become net savvy as all you really need is to be more knowledgeable than your competitors and that, if you've been following, isn't difficult at this moment in time.

Joke: Two men are walking across the African plain when they spot a Lion.

One of then stops takes out his running shoes from his rucksack and puts them on. The other turns to him and says:

What are you doing you know you can't outrun a lion?

The other replies:

I don't have to!

 

Researching Your Site

Once you have a thumbnail of

1. The service you are offering
   
2. The client
   

its time to research the site Keywords. This is important not just for the search engines, although that is the main focus, but also because if someone finds your site he/she will have questions...Your site should address those questions.

The purpose of the research is to find those questions so that you can answer them in advance.

Your Root keywords and Your Site Theme

Your site theme will be based on the service you are offering. If you are a computer consultant then that is your theme. Depending on your service you may need to narrow that theme into more of a niche.

For example if you are an Internet consultant then you may want to narrow it to a small business Internet consultant or an email marketing internet consultant.

Whether of not you need to narrow it will depend on

1. The Level of competition
   
2. Your competence in the various areas. For Example you may feel that you are very competent with email marketing but not PPC.
   

The narrowing is done after the initial research as the initial research will show the demand and supply for the theme/niche. There is no point in deciding on small business Internet consulting Services if no one is looking for them.

To give you an idea lets use the computer consultant example. Here are the overture results showing the search term and number of searches in February 2007. You can use this tool online at

 http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

( it will probably be replaced in 2007).

Note: I'm only showing some of the results.

 
 

 
 

From this list you can see that there are over 5000 searches for computer consultant which shows healthy demand. However if you go Google a search for "computer consultant" (using quotes) you see that there are nearly 1 million competing sites.

However if you look slightly down the list you will see that computer consultant services has over 700 searches and a check for the competition on Google shows:

Only 800 competing sites. This is a much better term to go for, and it means that you are also targeting the term computer consultant as well. If you look further down the list you will see that many searches are looking to find a consultant in their area, and so you should also ensure that you include the locations you serve on your site.

Now I'm sure you'll agree with me that the above wasn't exactly rocket science and it didn't take more than 5 minutes to do. Yet very few people do it!

In Part 4  we will be looking at Choosing a Domain Name and a hosting provider.