subject: Website Writing - What Do You Want Prospects to See About Your Service Business on the Internet [print this page] Website Writing - What Do You Want Prospects to See About Your Service Business on the Internet
We get so involved in figuring out what to say, how to say it and how to lay it out, that it can cause us to forget to take a look through our prospects' eyes.
To get started, think about the way you assess a business from looking at their website. First of course, is the question, "Do they have a website?" Then, you look it over in an overview fashion to glean what you can from it. Is it obvious what the business does and what their services are?
Then, from the appearance of the site, you want to see if the business appears to have substance, or does it seem to be "thrown together", careless, disjointed, or professional? Does something catch your eye and draw you further into the site so that you must know more? Then, you look at the person's credentials and see if they can impress you with a background that convinces you they could deliver on their service promises.
Here are a few things you want to think about when you do website writing so that your prospects see what you want them to see on your site.
1. Have a website. Without a website, your prospects will not see you at all, either literally or otherwise. When they search for a provider, your name won't even come up in their search results. You simply are not considered a viable business without a fully functional website. If you've been in business for some time and you still don't have your website writing done, don't despair. This is actually a common situation. Sure, it's nothing to be proud of, but give up the shame and put together your plan for getting a functional site in place. You're losing business without a site.
2. Have a professional looking website. If your site looks amateurish, prospects will see you as an amateur, no matter what your experience and training says. Sure, it doesn't seem fair, but sometimes "saving money" actually costs you in lost clients, lost revenue and lost profit.
3. Have a cohesive, well organized, logical site. If your site is a chaotic aggregation of unrelated information, prospects will see your business as dysfunctional and chaotic. Unless you give them a smooth "virtual tour" of your business that lays out the information in the sequence they need to know it, site visitors (prospective clients) will click off your site quickly and look elsewhere for a more orderly site.
4. Make it easy for a prospect to get an overview and understand what your business. Think about the times you have gone to a site and seen pages and pages of dense type, where you would have had to strain to glean the overview of what the business does. There is no white space to make the font easier to read. The paragraphs are not broken up with headings and sub-headings. They have not used bolding judiciously on important concepts so that you can scan easily and discover what you need to know. What did you do? You clicked off in frustration.
5. Make sure your credentials support your promises on the site. Have you ever been on a site and read the About Us page and wondered how that background qualified the person to make those promises? Take a few minutes and "sit in" the prospect's chair. Think about what you have promised. Make sure that the information you provide on your background illustrates your expertise in every aspect of what you provide to clients.
When you are doing your website writing, pay particular attention to what you want prospects to "see" about your service business. How do you want to represent yourself and your services. Think about what your site "says" about you.
Suzi Elton provides business writing that attracts targeted prospects to your service business and converts them into clients for you. She is a Robert Middleton Certified Action Plan Marketing Coach, as well as a professional writer. Her website offers a free series of 8 assessments you can use to analyze your own site.
To learn about her Robert Middleton style Web Site Tool Kit Writing Package, go to http://www.wowfactorwriting.com/services/web-site-tool-kit-package/
