So you have a website, you have done all of the hard work and written your content and added it to your website, yet still you keep asking yourself “Why is my website not showing on Google?” and “Why is my website not generating enough new enquiries?” There are usually several good reasons for this, so let me take you through them.
Let me start by telling you a brief story from my last days as a solicitor who was by then only doing law firm marketing (I had managed to stop doing the legal work completely). I was employed in a full time marketing position for a law firm. My main achievement for them was to build a website which was largely ahead of its time and certainly ahead of the legal competition because it had over 100 pages and it was very well optimised to please Google (more not that below).
When I left that firm to set up my marketing consultancy the website was generating a lot of enquiries for that firm’s legal services.
One year later, I met with one of the partners from the firm who exclaimed excitedly that they had got rid of that huge website that I had built for them and replaced it with a simple five page website.
When he said this I replied:
“And overnight your telephone stopped ringing”.
“How did you know that?”, he replied.
”Because all of those lovely pages of content that I had prepared for you were the main reason that you generated so many enquiries for your services”, I replied, astonished that they had ruined such a good marketing asset.
There is lesson number one: If you don’t have enough content on your website you will never generate any enquiries. Let’s look at that lesson in a little more detail.
If You Do Not Have Enough Content Your Website Will Never Show On Google Or Generate Any Enquiries For Your Services
Your website needs enough content for two reasons:
- So that Google knows what the website is all about, so it can send you visitors who are interested in your services; and
- So that the prospects who arrive at your website believe that you are specialists in the services that you provide, rather than looking like amateurs if you only have a few pages each with only a few words on.
How much content is enough? Well, it’s a piece of string answer but at least 500 words for every page that you want people to find but as much as 4,000 words if you are diving deep into a topic.
If you know your topic well, writing enough content about what you do should not be a problem for you and as long as that content answers questions that your target audience are asking, it will deliver the right people to you at the time that they are ready to engage your services.
You Must Know Your Key Performance Indicators In Order To Work On Ranking Better On Google
If you are serious about generating more enquiries for your services from your website, you must know your numbers. Your website visitor numbers should be one of your monthly Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s).
Your KPI’s are the numbers that you, as a business owner who is serious about growing your business, must check every month.
These will include the obvious items such as your turnover for the month, your gross profits, your new enquiry numbers for your services and the number of new clients you have taken on, but it should also include the number of visitors who have found your website.
How can you tell what is a good number of visitors per month?
If we being with the end in mind and remember that you are trying to generate more enquiries for your services from your website, let’s look at some fairly standard website conversion figures.
What I mean here is that for every 100 visitors to your website, how many of them will either pick up the telephone to call you, fill in your online enquiry form or live chat or download your free guide which adds them to your email list. Whether you want your clients to make instant contact with you or to download your free guide will depend on whether you run a DNA Marketing Now Or DNA Marketing Nurture business. You can read more about DNA Marketing Now/Nurture here:>>
Back to your conversion figures, it used to be stated that the standard website conversion rate was 2%, so for every 100 visitors 2 people would enquire about your services.
From my experience of managing 100’s of websites, and writing a book about generating more enquiries from your website, I can tell you that it is in fact often less than 1%.
Let’s use 1% as an example to help you quantify the number of visitors you should be getting to your website each month.
So, if you want to take on 5 new clients each month, 500 visitors per month should get your 5 enquiries. The reality is that you will not convert every one of those enquiries into new clients, so you might need 10 enquiries to take on 5 clients, meaning that you now need 1,000 website visitors every month.
What is your current conversion figure?
You should know this because once you do you can work on increasing the volume of visitors to your website to ensure you can generate the number of new clients that you want to take on each month.
Life is so much easier when you know your numbers!
Work out your numbers then use the marketing tips below to help you generate more enquiries for your services.
To discover additional tips about how to make your website generate more clients, plus the other best marketing tactics for the owners of service businesses, simply click the button below:
What Is A Good Monthly Volume Of Website Visitors From Google?
Now that you know that you need to know the total volume of visitors to your website so that you can calculate how many more visitors you need to generate the volume of new enquiries that you would like for your services, how do you know what a good number is?
The number will vary greatly, but below I have put some ideas down for you based on the averages of visitors I see across a vast range of service based businesses.
- 500 unique sessions per month or less = low.
- 501 – 1000 unique sessions per month = average
- 1001 – 3000 unique sessions per month = good
- 3001 – 7500 unique sessions per month = very good
- 7500 + unique sessions per month = excellent
These are average figures. If you offer a very niche service but with a hungry audience, you may generate less than 500 visits per month but get as many enquiries as you can handle.
However, if you are a larger business with a team, you should be looking to grow your website visitors beyond 10,000 as many of my clients who have a lot of mouths to feed do.
Now that you know this, let’s look at some of the factors that effect both good and bad performance in terms of website visitors.
How Old Is Your Website Domain Name?
The age of your website domain name is a huge factor when it comes to determining whether your website will ever show on Google or not.
Why?
The search engines tend to ‘sandbag’ new website URL’s, meaning that they don’t pay them much, if any, attention, for between six to twelve months.
So you might have a brilliant website with lots of content and good meta tags (below) but still you do not get many visitors to your website.
There are two things that you can do in this situation:
- Play the waiting game and let time pass until Google starts giving your new website some love; or
- Pay to receive more visitors. Use Google Ads to target people looking for your services.
Now that you know what the volume of visitors to your website is, from point 1 above, if it is incredibly low and it is a new website, this may well be the reason why you are not generating many enquiries for your services.
However, there are other things you can do to improve this position.
Meta Tags Are A Huge Google Ranking Factor
Whilst you human visitors read all of the content on your website to determine if you are the right service provider for them, Google uses this content but more importantly reads the code behind your page to decide what service you offer so it can put your website in the search results for the right phrases.
It does this by reading your meta tags, which are pieces of code behind the page.
Here are the main meta tags:
- The Title Tag – in other words the main page title
- The Description Tag – more information about the content on the page
- The H1 Tag – this is the title of the page that your readers will see at the very top of your content.
- The first paragraph of the content on your page – not strictly a tag, but it is important so I have included it here.
- Image tags – each image should have an image tag which features a description of the image.
I won’t go into the technical details of how to write these tags in the course of this article, but if you would like that information it is available in my bestselling book on Amazon: More Clients Now: 10 Proven Methods To Instantly Generate More Enquiries For Your Services Today.
However, the key point to note about all of these tags is that they MUST ALL feature the words that you are targeting the page to be about.
For example, all of the tags for this page that you are reading now will feature in them in some variation of this form (important to tweak them slightly so they are not all identical) these words:
” Why is my website not generating more/ enough enquiries”
Why have I chosen these words? Well, I used one of my usual methods to see what my audience are typing into Google when they are looking for help to grow their business.
Choosing the right keywords plays a huge part in generating more visitors to your website.
Would you like some help on this topic?
Choosing The Right Keywords For Each Page To Help You Show Up More On The Google Search Results
If you choose the wrong keywords to target on a page, even if you get everything else right as detailed in this article, you will not attract the right visitors who could become your clients.
If you are a mortgage broker you might try and target some keywords which might seem good but which wouldn’t generate clients for you.
For example, if you targeted “how much is a mortgage broker” and ranked in the top 10 of the Google search results, you would probably find that you generated a lot of visits to your website from people a long way from you geographically. If you offered a primarily local service, this wouldn’t be good for generating clients.
So, how do you decide which keywords to target?
1. Let Google Help You
If you head to the worlds most popular search engine and type in any phrase related to your service, then scroll down the page, you will find that Google will add two sections which are very helpful for this purpose:
- PEOPLE ALSO ASK….
- RELATED SEARCHES
Under each of these headings you will find a range of related search terms.
What you are looking for is questions that your prospective clients would enter into Google when looking for your services.
For my search term above, these were the suggestions:
PEOPLE ASK FOR:
What does a mortgage broker do?
Who pays a mortgage broker?
Is a mortgage broker worth it?
RELATED SEARCHES:
Mortgage broker fees
Online mortgage broker
Mortgage broker salary
Find mortgage broker
What you are looking for is a search phrase with ‘buyer intent’ attached to it. You want someone who is looking for a mortgage broker now.
In the examples above, the clear winner is ‘Find mortgage broker’, so you might answer the question on the page “How to find a mortgage broker near you” and on the page explain how people can find a mortgage broker, what they should look for in terms of experience and qualifications and how at the end of the page the obvious thing that they should do next is to contact you.
2. Let Your Existing Website Visitors Help You
The other way to find good search terms that you can use to attract more visitors to your website is to look at the keywords that your website is already being featured in the search results for.
You can discover this inside Google Analytics or inside Google Search Console.
If you set the date range to 3 months, you are looking for any good search terms with ‘buyer intent’ attached to them which have a decent volume of impressions (the total number of searches made for each search term). I class a decent number over a three month period as anything more than 100 up to 500. Any more than this and you are likely to be targeting a search term which is going to be very hard to get into the top 10 search results without spending some money on Search Engine Optimisation, so it is probably not worth trying for these.
The good thing about both Google Analytics and Google Search Console is that you can sort the search terms alphabetically by clicking on the top of the column featuring the search phrases. You can then scroll down to all of the question searches, such as How/What/Why and find the best search terms to target for your business.
Do People Believe You Are A Specialist In The Provision Of Your Services?
When people arrive at your website from a search term related to your service, they have to form an opinion on whether you are an expert in your field and the right person or business to help them.
How do they do this?
They have to go from not knowing you at all to being prepared to part with their contact details in under 90 seconds, which is the average time that people spend on a website.
In under 90 seconds you have to build trust so that they part with their contact details, which is why I developed my 90 Second Website Trust Builder.
It consists of two parts:
- Depth of expertise: and
- Proof of expertise.
Unless you can satisfy both of these requirements it is highly unlikely that you will generate many enquiries for your services from your website.
Let’s look at each in turn to see if any are missing from your website.
1. Depth Of Expertise
It always amazes me when I visit a website for a service provider and they only have one page about their entire range of services.
How can one page convince me that you know what you are doing?
Usually that page also has a giant picture of their local landscape or worse still their office building, but hardly any words explaining how they help their clients to achieve amazing results.
Remember my story at the start of this article?
I built a website with 100’s of pages all about their services and it produced a huge volume of enquiries.
They cut the website down to five pages and the telephone stopped ringing.
It isn’t just that Google needs lots of pages to understand what you do, but that in this 90 second period any potential client of yours arriving at your website has to believe, beyond any doubt, that you are well and truly qualified to help them with their immediate needs.
Whatever services you offer, you should have at least 10 pages about them. You might only offer one major service, but you should have sub pages within your services section diving into more detail about those services, breaking down the overall service into smaller, more manageable chunks.
Let’s continue to use my mortgage broker as an example.
You might say that his service is mortgage broking, but one page is not going to convince anyone of his or her expertise.
However, what if someone lands on his or her website and sees this in the navigation?
- Mortgage Broker Services
- Buy To Let Mortgages
- Freehold Mortgages
- Leasehold Mortgages
- Property Development Mortgages
- Self Employed Mortgages
- Satisfied Clients
- Mortgage Advice Guide
Now we have gone from one page to several and the only thought is that if this website owner has prepared all of these pages then surely he or she must know something about mortgages?
Depth of expertise is the crucial starting test that you must pass.
Take a look at your website now. Are there at least 10 pages about your primary services? If not, adding some more will not only convince those already finding you of your expertise, but it will more likely than not lead to Google sending more people to your website too! Win, win!
2. Proof Of Expertise
It is all well and good you telling me that you are an expert in your field, but some people like some proof of your expertise.
How do you prove your expertise in under 90 seconds?
These are my preferred 90 Second Website Trust Builder Tools:
- Your ideas on why I should choose you;
- Reviews from satisfied clients;
- Client success stories
- External memberships which prove your expertise; and
- Press coverage.
Why Choose You?
To start with, you should be able to clearly explain why I should choose your business over an above your competitors.
You might state how long you have been in business, how many clients you have helped to date or the amazing results that you have achieved for them, but you should be able to provide three or four reasons why I should choose you to help me.
Client Reviews
Moving on from here, your website must of course feature dozens, if not hundreds, of satisfied client reviews. The mistake a lot of people make with reviews is to only have them on your reviews page.
Remember that your clients, if you are lucky, will only spend 90 seconds on your website. The other thing to consider, which is equally important, if not more so, is that they are not likely to look at more than 2 of your pages.
What this means is that you need to cover all of their questions and possible objections on every single one of your website pages.
They will not go looking for this information, so you need to include it on every page. Every page should feature reviews interspersed amongst your page content.
Case Studies
Case studies, or client success stories, go one further than reviews by breaking down the specific situation that the client was in when they found you and how you helped them. Nothing convinces a prospect more of your expertise than by reading about someone else that you helped in their exact position and the fantastic results that you achieved for them.
External memberships which prove your expertise; and
Next, you need to show any qualifications or membership of organisations which back up your statements that you are an expert in your service sector.
Be careful here. One of the reasons that you might be generating enough new enqiuries from your website is if you already do this but then make the fatal mistake of linking back to the membership or organisation’s website (which they often encourage you to do).
Why is this a problem?
Because when you do this, someone can arrive at your website, go on to read about this professional membership or organisation, click through to their website and then do a search for someone else that provides the same service as you do from their member directory.
Never allow this to happen.
Instead, include their logo or organisation name, but then link that logo to a page on YOUR website which explains why your business being a member of that organisation is of relevance to the prospect choosing you to help them.
This part is vital, as in most cases the only people who know what these memberships or organisations are all about are the members. You need to convey the benefits to your prospects so they can see that this makes your business a better fit for their needs.
Press coverage.
I once paid a London PR Company £5,000 a month to work for me in obtaining press coverage, as much as anything to see if PR could be as good as I was constantly told (by PR Companies) that it was.
It wasn’t in terms of generating new business, but it did make me realise that the value of PR is in using the coverage to convince visitors to your website that you are an expert in your field.
The way that we are brought up, someone cannot help but be influenced when they read that your business has been featured in The Sunday Times or even The Daily Mail, that you have been featured on BBC TV or appeared on TalkSport Radio. I can now tick off all of those boxes. It didn’t bring in one piece of business, but it certainly gives people the confidence to get in touch with me. After all, if I have been featured on the BBC….
PR is an excellent website conversion tool.
If you have ever been featured in any local or national publications, add an “As Featured In” section and list the publications that you have appeared in. Never link to the article for the reasons stated above; just mentioning that you have been featured is enough to help generate more enquiries from your website.
Consistently Add New Content To Your Website
I mentioned at the beginning that a website without any content will never attract many visitors nor generate many enquiries for your services.
Once you have enough content about your core services, you should aim to add at least two to four pieces of original content to your website very month.
Why?
It will grow your number of visitors, which, when coupled with all of the other marketing tips that I have shared with you in this article, will lead to more enquiries for your services.
When You Add New Content; Share It!
When you have taken the time to add new content to your website, you should then also share it with all of your social media platforms.
The object here is to drive people back to your website so that they can read more about your services and make an enquiry or download your free guide. This is the main use of social media and one that can help you to generate visitors to your website and enquiries for your services.
Then, last but by no means least (and possibly the best tip here because it can have the biggest impact and quickly:
Calls To Action On Every Page Of Your Website
You must have calls to action at the bottom of every single page of your website.
Most businesses do not do this and miss dozens or hundreds of enquiries for their services because of this.
You might think that having your telephone number or enquiry form on your contact page is enough; it isn’t.
As I explained earlier on in this article most people will only look at one or two pages of your website before hitting the back button. Don’t make them hunt for your contact details, add them to the foot of every single page of your website.
Your call to action should include:
- Your telephone number, hyperlinked so that they can click to call you.
- Your email address, hyperliked so that your visitors can click to email you.
- A link to your enquiry form (which should be on its own page with nothing else (no distractions). Trust me on this one, this will bring in more enquiries than if you hope people will fill in the enquiry form on your contact page – I know because I have tested this extensively.
- Live chat, hosted by a real person not a bot, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This one can dramatically increase the volume of enquiries generated from your website. If you would like an introduction to my preferred supplier, simply download my free guide below then respond to my email and I will be happy to connect you.
Summary
I have shared with you the lessons that I have learned from managing an online marketing spend of around £2 million per annum. This is not fluff. This is real, practical advice that works.
If you take action and implement it, you will generate more enquiries for your services.
If you would like more lessons from my lessons learned from marketing service businesses since 1991, please click the button below (there is a lot of good stuff behind that button):