Holistic health practitioners, who make up the bulk of my PR clients, love to spread the word of healing, by educating people. This caring tendency often leads to websites that are packed with way too much information — making it difficult to navigate the website or even figure out what exactly the practitioner does. Here are a few tips to ensure that your website is performing optimally.
Get clear on your brand, message, and target audience.
You need to be rock solid in this foundation before attempting to communicate about your work. Who are you, what do you do, why do you do it, whom do you serve, how do you serve them…These are some of the fundamental questions you must answer for yourself, before you have any business writing website copy.
Have two calls to action, highly visible on the home page.
What is most important to you – signing up for a consultation? buying a book? You want to make that call to action front and center, so that a visitor can’t miss it. In addition, you want to create a freebie download, for a visitor to receive upon signing up for your newsletter. Not only will the download serve as an enticement for the visitor to share her email address with you, but the download can multitask as a way to build brand trust. In other words, it can give a risk-free taste of who you are, which in turn can interest the visitor in taking the next step of working with you.
Have an easy menu.
If you walk into someone else’s kitchen to prepare a meal, you’ll have an easy time finding the bowls, pots, and silverware, if they are labeled “bowls,” “pots,” and “silverware.” Similarly, you want your website visitors to know exactly where to go, to get what they need. So make it easy for them, with basic labels like “about,” “services,” “testimonials,” “media,” “store,” “calendar,” and “blog.” I know, I know, you like clever titles, and I do too. But website menus are not the time to be clever. They are the time to be clear.
Optimize your website for search engines.
The world of SEO is always changing, and there are people who spend all day, every day studying how to get your website to the #1 position. The headache-free version of it all is this: How will someone who needs exactly what you offer look for you, before knowing you? For example, if you are a massage therapist in San Francisco, a no-brainer keyword is “massage therapist in San Francisco.” Work the most likely keywords into your content, and hyperlink them (to another page in your site) for extra search engine points.