Looking for new clients is hard, everyone is wondering what channels are the best way to get their agency noticed and bring in new clients. It often takes hard work, lots of persistence, and lots of patience. In order to get traffic flowing to your website you will need to be strategic about your online presence.
I will go through some high level strategies you can use as you think about your marketing agencies’ website and how to get it noticed.
Invest in your website
Even if your agency can create websites, making your own businesses website is often one of the hardest things. It’s like the “cobbler’s children have no shoes”. It can be hard to invest time and money into your own website, especially when it is being crowded out by timelines and other projects from your demanding clients! Find a way to get the project done, give it a set timeline, put a small team on it, or lower your expectations at the start.
If you can’t make time for it consider paying someone else to make it for you! I’ve even heard of agencies doing trades with each other where they treat each other as clients and help them to get out of their heads when it comes to describing their expertise and what they do for their clients.
What should be on your website
At the very least, your website should show your work. Potential clients are looking for “what can you do for me?” They want to see what you have done for other clients, and they will judge whether you are a good fit for what they are looking to accomplish. This work section can include simple screenshots and descriptions of projects, or it can be as comprehensive as case studies and breakdowns of all of the components of each project and your strategies and outcomes from the project.
In addition, it’s always a good idea to clearly list your expertise, capabilities and specialties on your website. Potential clients have a checklist of what they are looking for and they want to be able to see that you are a good match for what they want.
Finally, make your website actionable. Include buttons at the bottom of each page that encourage visitors to start a project with you, or get more information about you. Make it more than a contact form, make it feel like they are starting something special.
Make sure the right key words are on your website
Words matter, a lot! If you are looking for people to find you for “video content creation minneapolis”, then you had better have those words on your website! And not just once. You will want to make sure that the most important keywords you want to be found for are in the primary headline of the page, the seo title of the page, the description of the page, and in several locations throughout the text of the page.
Try to think about each page as an opportunity to be found for one set of related keywords. Each page should have a purpose. Instead of creating one page that lists all of your capabilities, consider creating that one master page, and each of them links to a separate page for a particular capability. Include a thorough description of that capability, include your local area (like “minneapolis”), and consider adding a few case studies of work you have done in that area. That kind of link is pure gold for Google search!
Get links for your website
Unfortunately, just having the right words on the page isn’t enough. You need to get links TO your website. Preferably not just any links, but links that are valuable. Valuable links are reputable links that have to do with your same subject matter or keywords.
You will have to get creative for where to get these links from. Consider some of these sources:
- Write some guest articles for other websites about your expertise. Offer them as long as they are willing to provide a link back to your site in your author bio.
- Find listing websites where you can include your link. There are plenty of sites out there like Agency Search, Agency List, and Clutch that all give you the ability to submit your agency to their lists.
- Find articles that are already talking about your area of expertise and linking to your competitors and reach out to them to see if they would be willing to include your link. This takes patience and persistence.
Have a social media presence
Some agencies invest a lot of time and energy into their social media presence and others simply don’t have the time. In my opinion at least having a social media presence on a few channels is a requirement for an agency. You don’t have to post on it every day, or even every week, but even a few monthly posts can be hugely valuable. At the very least, having these links from your website to Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Twitter shows your audience and Google that you are a reputable business and that there are other ways to find out more about you.