Professionals, such as lawyers, doctors, and accountants, rely heavily on referrals from colleagues or existing clients and patients. However, this does not mean that professional practices do not require an online presence. To the contrary, a majority of people conduct online research — and more than half read online reviews — before spending money on products and services.
You may have seen this in your own life. Even when a friend or family member recommends an accountant, you likely visited the accountant’s website, read his or her professional biography, and read online reviews before making an appointment. What are some approaches professionals can take to ensure their online marketing strategies hold up to this investigation? Here are four suggestions for utilizing online marketing for a professional practice.
Trust the Experts
Small business owners, including professionals, often try to wear many hats to save money. However, custom web design and SEO services apply specialized techniques that require a great deal of training and experience to do correctly. This is particularly true for search engine optimization or SEO web design services.
A doctor would be shocked if a web designer tried to treat their ailments. Similarly, a web designer would be shocked if a doctor tried to tackle their own SEO practices. Doctors, lawyers, and other professionals should trust the experts in web design and SEO services , just as they expect to be trusted as experts in medicine, law, and so forth.
Customize Your Website
In the early ages of the World Wide Web, template web pages were commonplace. These days, however, clients and patients expect professionals to have customized websites. Customization not only gives you control over the look and feel of your website, but it also allows you to tailor the content to your professional practice.
For example, while stock photos can save time and money, no doctor wants to be faced with the embarrassment of using the exact same stock photo of a nurse in scrubs examining a patient as his colleague. By using a custom website designer, the copy, visuals, and layouts can be tailored to your practice, providing a unique look and feel to your website.
Determine Your Market and Your Customer
To take full advantage of online marketing tools such as search engine optimization, local searches, and pay per click advertising, you must focus on what aspects of your professional practice you wish to market. That is, very few potential clients search for “lawyer” and even if they did, there would be so much competition for the keyword “lawyer” that you might appear deep within the search results.
If you determine that you want to market a particular aspect of your practice — such as divorce law — to a particular locality, a company providing web design and SEO services has much more to work with. For instance, a search for “divorce lawyer near Tampa” is a much more targeted search keyword than just “lawyer.”
Make Sure Customers Can Find You
Your online presence is practically useless if customers and potential customers cannot find it. Search engine optimization (or SEO) helps businesses avoid being lost in the 60,000 searches Google conducts every second. SEO web design services optimize the content on your website so that search engines can find it in response to particular searches.
Suppose you want your website to appear in the search results whenever “dermatologist near Kissimmee” is searched. SEO web design services optimize the content on your customized website so that the search phrase appears in specific places and ways that cause search engines to associate that search phrase with your website. Professional SEO web design services understand how search engines work and can tailor your website to reach your desired customer base.
Aside from search engine optimization, you may also want to consider pay per click or PPC marketing. PPC marketing is commonly found on Google and Facebook. If you have noticed the “sponsored” search results at the top of your Google search results, you have seen PPC marketing. The benefits of PPC marketing are that you only pay when a potential customer clicks on your ad. Moreover, PPC ads are targeted to particular keywords so your ad only shows up when users are searching for the words and phrases your PPC management company has chosen.
You have many options when it comes to online marketing. Contact Studio98 today to learn more about how your professional practice can benefit from web design and SEO services.