Creating a Website Strategy that Converts Leads into Clients on Autopilot
In this session, I’m teaching you how to create a website strategy that's bound to convert leads into clients for your practice. I'll be sharing tips on how to design a website that does the heavy lifting for you, including setting up a clear call-to-action, optimizing user experience, and building trust with your visitors. This session is definitely a must-listen if you want to elevate your online presence and attract the right clients effortlessly. Let's dive in!
Takeaways
The importance of Website Strategy in Converting Leads into Clients
Significance of understanding the target audience to design a strategy and layout that works effectively
Components of a Website Strategy
Designing the entire website to push visitors towards taking the desired action
The importance of user experience (UX) for search engine ranking and visitor retention
Tips for improving user experience
Best practices for creating and optimizing calls to action buttons
Importance of incorporating trust signals like testimonials, certifications, and case studies
Using website analytics tools to measure the success of the website strategy
Meet the Speaker: Samantha Mabe
Samantha Mabe, creative director of Lemon and the Sea, designs thoughtful websites for experts who want to make a positive first impression so that they can get started with the right-fit clients faster. With her signature framework, Samantha has designed and customized websites for all different types of entrepreneurs. When she is not digging into design and strategy, Samantha loves reading (her goal is to read 200 books this year), adventures with her kiddo, and trying to keep up with her Netflix queue.
Transcript
Timestamps
[00:00:00] Welcome to the Summit & Introduction
[00:00:57] The Importance of a Website Strategy
[00:02:42] Designing Your Website for Conversion
[00:05:06] Understanding Your Target Audience
[00:06:20] Enhancing User Experience for Better Conversion
17:55 Optimize [00:08:35] Crafting Compelling Calls to Action
[00:13:24] Building Trust and Credibility
[00:16:33] Measuring Your Website's Success
[00:19:05] Conclusion and Additional Resources
Full Transcript
Welcome to the Summit & Introduction
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: Welcome to the Elevate Your Practice summit. In this session, I am going to be sharing all about how you can create a website strategy that converts leads into clients on autopilot.
In case we haven't met before, my name is Samantha Mabe. I'm the creative director of Lemon and the Sea, and I also founded Elevate Your Practice and the summit that you're listening to right now. I design thoughtful websites for experts who want to make a positive first impression so that they can get started with right fit clients faster. With my one week website framework, I've designed and customized websites for all different types of health and wellness practices.
When I'm not digging into design and strategy, I love reading. My goal is to read 200 books this year. I love going on adventures with my kid and trying to keep up with my Netflix channel.
Let's dive in to the session.
The Importance of a Website Strategy
[00:00:57] Samantha Mabe: So I want to talk to you about why a website strategy is so important for converting all of the leads that you're getting from your marketing into paying clients.
When you think marketing, you may think more social media strategy, referrals, all of the outgoing marketing pieces. But what I don't want you to ever forget is that your website is actually the number one piece of your marketing strategy. The reason that it is so important that you have a website that is designed to convert leads into clients is because that is where almost everybody is going to land before they reach out with you to you.
Through all of the rest of the sessions that you'll hear in this summit, we talk about websites as the place people are going to go Before they actually book a consultation or they purchase a service from you because while they're getting to know you on social media or they heard about you from a referral, they are going to end up on your website when they want to know if you're the right fit. They want to know more about what you do. They want to get a really good glimpse into your credentials and they want to The strategies that you are going to use to help them get the results they're looking for. A website is what communicates all of that.
It's so crucial for private practice owners like you to have a well defined and optimized conversion strategy on their website. When you think about a website strategy, I want you to be really specific.
Designing Your Website for Conversion
[00:02:42] Samantha Mabe: You can get out a piece of paper to do this, or you can do it on the go. The first question you need to ask is, what do I want people to do when they land on my website if they are a target client for me?
This question is going to determine the entire rest of your website strategy and design. So the answer to this question could be something like, I want them to sign up for my email list because I know that's where I warm up leads and get them to actually reach out to me. It could also be something like, I want them to sign up for a consultation call with me, or it might be, I want them to fill out a contact form and then my office will reach out about getting them on the schedule once we have the information that we need.
Whichever one of those you choose, we want to design our entire website to push people towards taking that action. If they are the right fit client for you, and we want our website to also funnel out people who aren't going to be a good fit.
And that's what it means to have a website strategy that converts leads into clients on autopilot. When somebody lands on your website, whether that's from social media, from a referral, or they found you on Google through SEO, your website should be doing the work for you. It should be telling them what you do, where you're located, answering their questions, and then making it super easy for them to take the next step towards getting onto your client calendar. You don't want to have to be monitoring your website or answering questions all the time. We want our website to be like another employee that we can design it, we can write the copy, and then we can let it go and simply check back in to make sure everything is working.
One thing we want to consider when it comes to choosing our website strategy is what our target audience needs, what they prefer, what their pain points are, because this is going to lead us to designing a strategy and a layout that works for our clients.
Understanding Your Target Audience
[00:05:06] Samantha Mabe: So what I want you to do is think about who you most want to work with, and we want to get specific here. Every interview in this session is going to mention getting specific with the type of client you want to work with, and this one is no different. You can know your target audience and speak to them a whole lot better. If you know exactly who they are.
One of my clients works with adults who need help with speech. And one of the things she told me when we were updating her website design is that we needed to make sure her buttons. We're not in all uppercase, but that each word was capitalized, or it was written in sentence case because the people who were coming to her website could read that a whole lot easier than all uppercase letters. And knowing that we were able to tailor that small detail on her website so that the strategy was even more impactful. It Subconsciously tells people that we understand what their needs are. We understand what makes things easier for them. And it helps us to then get more conversions into our business.
Enhancing User Experience for Better Conversion
[00:06:20] Samantha Mabe: Let's talk about website design and the impact of user experience on that strategy that we are creating. User experience, or UX, is how somebody Interacts with your website. The reason that this is so important is actually twofold. So search engines like Google are measuring user experience through some very specific things and they will rank your website higher if you have a good UX and lower if you don't.
But it also has a huge impact on whether or not people are going to stay on your website and move towards becoming A client. We want people to be able to use our website, to find it really simple to navigate through, to understand where they need to click next.
And there's a lot of pieces that go into user experience that I'm not going to talk about in this session. But what I want you to know is a couple of things that you can work on for your website right now.
The first thing you want to think about is your website navigation. You want that main menu bar at the top of your website to be really simple and straightforward for people. I like to tell my clients to have a homepage, an about page, a services page, a blog, and then a contact page. That's it. We want to keep it really simple so that it's easy for people to click through each of those pages and know where to go next, and then end up on that contact page where they can take action.
The other thing we want to think about when it comes to user experience is making sure that our website is really easy to read and navigate in the actual design. So we want to make sure that our buttons stand out and look very clickable. We want to make sure that our text is large enough to read. We want to make sure that we're using things like headlines to divide things up and just make it really easy for somebody who lands on your site to scroll through, understand what you do, click on that button and get to the next step.
Crafting Compelling Calls to Action
[00:08:35] Samantha Mabe: I've talked a lot about calls to action in this session. Once you know what that main call to action on your website is, we always want to drive people to that. That is the way we are going to convert them into clients either right away or down the road. So how do we create a compelling call to action that encourages our visitors to take actions? I'm going to share a couple of best practices for placing and optimizing your calls to action throughout your website.
So the first thing I want you to remember is that your call to action should be a button. We want these to stand out, to look clickable. We want it to be really clear what people should do. And so when we create a button, we are telling People who are looking at our website visually, people who are looking at our website through a screen reader, we are letting them know this is a button you can click and it is going to take you somewhere else to then take action.
We want our buttons to stand out. So when you are looking at your brand colors, I want you to pick something that is in the pink, yellow, orange, red family for your button. It's probably going to be the brightest color that you have because those are the ones that encourage the most clicks on our website.
We also want to make sure that they're large enough for people to read. So when you are writing your text throughout your entire website, you want it to be at least 16 point text, but we don't want to forget that on our buttons as well. We want to make sure that they are big enough for people to read and click on. We don't think about this as much on desktop, but when you're on mobile, you need a button to be big enough that you can click it with your finger and not get caught up in all of the other surrounding stuff and frustrate people into leaving our website.
And then when we actually think about where we want to put our calls to action on the website, I recommend a couple of places. First, you always want a call to action button in the hero section of your website or the above the fold section. So that's the very first section of your website. You should have a headline, some kind of subheading, and then you want a call to action button.
You also want to call to action button in the very last section before your footer. When somebody is looking at your website, they've scrolled all the way down, you want to make sure that your footer has a button for whatever that main call to action is. If they've gotten that far on your website, they are clearly interested in something, and we don't want them to have to scroll back up to click on it.
And then throughout your page, you want to repeat that same call to action button. We want to have it every two to three screen lengths as people scroll so that they never have to go up or down because they have to find that button. We want it to be really easy for them to see.
We also want to make sure that our calls to action are very clear about what's going to happen. So this might be saying something like, schedule a consultation instead of just saying click here or learn more. Maybe it's get access to this resource now instead of download it. We want to be really clear about what's going to happen when people click on a button to inspire confidence, but also for our accessibility standards to make sure people know what's going to happen next.
The other thing I want you to consider when it comes to calls to action is that the homepage is a little bit different than everywhere else on your website. You are still going to focus on that main call to action throughout the homepage, especially in that top section and right before your footer. But you do have a section in the middle that I like to call the choose your own adventure section where you can have a little bit more flexibility.
What I like to do here is have three different options for people depending on their familiarity with you or their price point or what they're interested in. So that might be something like work with me, learn about me, go to the blog if you have one service. It could be three different service options, and each of those is also going to have a call to action to learn more or to go to the page that they have expressed interest in.
But everywhere else on your website, you're using that same call to action to schedule a consultation to sign up for your email list, whatever it is, so that you can very consistently move people.
Building Trust and Credibility
[00:13:24] Samantha Mabe: I want you to remember one more piece that's really important: building trust and credibility for leads that then helps them convert into clients. What I want you to consider is that when somebody lands on your website, when they hear about you, they don't know you right away. We want to show them that we are trustworthy. We want to highlight our expertise. And that way they are more likely to become clients because they can see themselves working with us and getting the results that they want and feeling comfortable going through their health and wellness journey with us.
You can do this in a couple of ways. To build trust on your website, you can incorporate trust signals like testimonials. I like to include testimonials if possible, on the homepage, on your services page, and even on your about page.
But for some of us, testimonials aren't something we can share. And we can look at other ways of building trust. That might be including our certifications, whether that's a badge for your certification, or just all those fancy letters after your name. We can add case studies to our website like Brittany and I talk about in her session.
We can also build trust by speaking the language of our clients and really showing them that we understand what issues they're coming to us with and what kinds of solutions or results they're looking for. If we can show that we really know what they need and that Our solution is going to be the right one for them, that builds trust.
What I want you to avoid is writing long paragraphs about how your industry can help people or the ethics of your industry or the tenants of your industry. We tend to do this because we're trying to show everything that we've learned and that we Really know our stuff, but most of our visitors aren't concerned with that as much as they are concerned with whether or not you can help them with their fatigue or with their ADHD or with their back pain. They want a very tangible Solution to a tangible problem.
When we can highlight through our copy that we understand that, we build trust with our leads, that is going to make it even more likely that they click on that call to action that we have designed and that we have placed in the right spots to book on to your client calendar.
As you are working on your website and you are taking a look at the strategy, you are cleaning up all of the call to action buttons that you have, and you're really making sure that you're building trust along the way and moving people through that journey, you will want to make sure that it's actually working
Measuring Your Website's Success
[00:16:33] Samantha Mabe: so when you have done that, I always recommend that you let it sit for a couple of days, get some website visitors on your site, and then let's actually measure the success of your strategy. The best way to do this is with your website analytics. You can go to Google analytics. If you have that set up, you can use analytics from your specific provider like Squarespace, or there are other companies that provide analytics as well.
And what I want you to do is look at how many visitors you're getting to your website. Look at how long they are staying on your website. Look at the bounce rate, which will tell you how many people are coming to one page of your website and then leaving. Look at the most popular pages. So are your blog posts the most popular, but you're not actually hearing from anybody as far as working with you? Maybe you need to add a call to action to those posts.
The other thing I want you to look at is to go into your keyword results. So what queries are people searching for? You might have to do this in Google Search Console. Some of your analytic software may offer it, but what words are people coming to your website because they searched and then they clicked. And that's really going to help you with the language of your site. If somebody is coming to your website because you popped up in a search result for something that you don't actually offer or for a target client, you don't want to serve, you know that you might need to change some of the language on your site so that you can be more specific in the type of client that you do want to reach out to and do want to serve.
As you are thinking about strategy and creating a strategy that converts leads into clients on autopilot, I want you to remember to choose your one call to action, create that call to action in a way that it's really easy for people to find and understand. Create a user experience that makes navigating through your website easy and then build trust and credibility so that when people land on your site they know that you are the right fit for them and that way your website can do the work for you and you're just going to get a notification that somebody joined your email list or signed up for your consultation.
Conclusion and Additional Resources
[00:19:05] Samantha Mabe: If you want to learn more about my services or if you want To dive deeper into website strategy, you can find me at lemonandthesea.com or on Instagram and TikTok at lemonandthesea.
I also have two free resources. The first is a series of website review videos where I am, evaluating somebody's website and giving very strategic advice on what they can do to find more clients, get a better user experience or improve their SEO. You can find that at lemonandthesea.com/website-review-series. The other is a quick guide covering the top of three website mistakes that private practices make that lose them referrals. You can find that at lemonandthesea.com/top3 or check out the speaker page on the Elevate Your Practice website.
Thank you so much for tuning into this session of Elevate Your Practice. I was so excited to talk with all of the guests in this round of the summit, and I hope that you'll share it with a colleague or a friend who could use this magnetic marketing magic as well. You can send them to elevate your practice.co to register now, and they will get access to the summit right away.
