Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Websites for Service Professionals/Consultants - Part 2

Websites for Service Professionals/Consultants - Part 2

Getting Targeted

Who is your client ? The more you know about your client the more you can cater for their needs and the easier it is to present your offer.

So you need to make a sketch of your clients.

  • How old are they?
  • Are they individuals or businesses?
  • How old are they?
  • How much Money do they have?
  • Where do they Live?
  • etc

You may have several types of clients. In which case make a sketch for each type. That way you can consider offering different services to each type.

What Service are you Offering

A little bit of this and a bit of that doesn't really work on the Web. You see people don't go to Google and search for:

Web designer with search engine optimisation and php scripting and reasonable cost.


 

Instead they type

  • Reasonable cost Search optimisation
  • Php scripting help
  • Reasonable cost Web design

You need to pick a niche. The tighter the niche the better. So what are you offering, where, when, how much, Why should they choose you and not your competition.

Adding the Two

You then need to match your service to your clients. It may mean choosing a particular client type and it may mean modifying your service.

Getting Clients - What's the State of the Competition

If you are looking for a local service, say for example, a dentist. Your first reaction is to go to the yellow pages and look under dentists. You may already know which dentist you are looking for but need the contact number.

How do dentists attract new clients:

  • Word of mouth (no pun intended)
  • Local advertising in newspapers and magazines
  • Billboards
  • Local Sponsorship
  • Yellow Pages/Local directory

Which one of these attracts the most clients varies from service to service and with the age of the business. A new business will have very few clients and hence fewer people to recommend it. It will therefore rely on advertising.

An older more established one may never advertise and get all new customers via the yellow Pages and word of mouth.

Your Website is one more avenue of attracting new clients it may be the main one or just part of an array of methods. It's  nearest rival is the Yellow pages and it is likely to replace the yellow Pages in the future as the Telephone World meets the Internet.

If you haven't heard of local search you will, it is a rapidly growing area and It means that even if your service is local in nature you will face increasing competition from local service providers that are net savvy.

 So would you go about finding a dentist using the internet?  You would use a search engine like Google. You would simply search for

Dentist Telford UK

or

Private Dentist Telford UK

or

National health Dentist Telford UK

 
 

Take a look at these results. For those that aren't familiar with the area Telford and Ironbridge are 7 miles apart and so are local to each other.


 
 


 
 

What is amazing that only one real practise is listed and even then only for the one search when they could easy have made it number one for the second.

One practise  in the whole Telford area is switched on, but even they made one of he most common mistakes.. They used Frames! Search engines don't like them.

What I think the above shows quite clearly is that very few local service businesses try to use the Web, and of those that do, most are very naive. This means that anyone who takes the trouble to become a little net savvy has a clear playing field.

In Part 3  we will be looking at Researching your site

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