Websites are not a set-it-and-forget-it marketing channel, but I feel like a lot of business owners treat them like they are, especially in a service-based business.
At least once a year, I recommend that you take a look at the products/services that you have listed on your site and make sure they are still relevant, correct, and complete.
A few years ago, I did a promotion campaign where each day for two weeks I sent an email to my list explaining one of the services or packages that I offered. I had several of my existing clients reply that they didn’t know I offered the service that I had highlighted that day – because it wasn’t on my website. In one case, I was offering a pre-fabbed sort of website package for authors because I was working with a lot of author’s coaches then. I didn’t have this particular package on my website because, you know, it was just website services, which I already had on my site. And I thought my customers could read my mind. (Not really, but in retrospect, that’s what it seems like.)
What products/services do you offer?
The first step I do is to get my sticky notes and the nearest wall/window/table. Then I look at my site from the front end and write each service on a separate sticky note and put it up. At this point, I’m not trying to organize them or anything – I’m just getting them all noted.
Then, I go through the pages on the back of my site. Sadly, I usually find a service or package that I have a page for that isn’t available from the front end of my site. Maybe it’s something specific I made for an event or sent the link out directly in a campaign before. Or maybe it’s something I’ve stopped offering. But, if I’ve got a page for it on my site, onto a sticky note it goes.
Tip: Different color sticky notes or different color pens can come in handy here, so you can use one color for what you have on the front end, and another color for the stuff you only found one back-end.
What’s missing?
After you’ve gone over everything that you currently have, think about what might be missing. Is there something that you see a lot of people in your target market looking for that you could offer, or partner with someone to offer? Write it on the sticky note (if you’re using different colored stickies, I would put these on a different color than the others so it’s easy to identify what services are new.)
What do you want to offer?
By now, you might have a bunch of sticky notes littering your wall/window/desk. That’s great. And if you only have three, that can be great, too, as long as they are really targeted. Now it’s time to look at the them all and decide what gets to stay, and what has to go.
Is there a service that you hate providing? Even if it’s a money-maker for you, if actually performing this service makes you cringy and filled with avoidance (are those actual words? meh – you know what I mean) then maybe you shouldn’t offer it anymore. Maybe you can find someone to outsource it to if you, or to refer your leads to who want that service.
Is there a product/service that’s not making you any money? If you have customers wanting this but it’s not making a profit for you, look for ways to revamp it or change the pricing to make it more profitable for you? If it’s not getting any sales, then it may be time to drop it from your offering list or try to change up the offering or how you market it to make it more attractive to your audience. (See below for copy writing tips for your services page.)
If you have a specialized package that you offer, make sure there’s information about it on your site. It might seem intuitive that if you offer Service A and Service B, then of course you can offer something that looks like Service A+B. But, not everyone thinks like that. Or if the services are offered in different places, your audience might not realize that you offer B, then they might not even be thinking about A+B. So make sure you tell them, and be sure to mention and link to this from both pages.
Organize it!
If you’ve ever seen the amount of random stuff that lives in my car trunk, you probably wouldn’t believe me when I say that I love to organize things, but it’s totally true.
When I do this process for myself, after I’ve pared down the list to include only the services I want to offer, I then like to organize these. On my home page, I have these 4 sections – Build, Maintain, Enhance, Learn – and I always try to keep my services sorted into these kind of categories. Then, when I create landing pages for these services, I put it under it’s respective section. This makes me happy.
Organizing your services into some major headings can help you customer find things they are interested in. (And search engines, btw.) It’s like having things grouped in Target. It would not be helpful if Target had products organized alphabetically, for instance, because if you don’t know the particular brand name of something, you might not even know that it’s a potential solution to your problem. But by grouping things by the problem they solve instead, it makes it easier to find options to help you. So, figure out what your audience is looking for and organize it like that.
Write a Compelling Services Page
The secret to a services page that turns visitors into leads or customers is in the content. (Isn’t that the secret to a lot of things involving your website and marketing?) If your services page is currently just a bulleted list of stuff you do, you’re not doing yourself or your audience any favors. At the very least, you need to expand these a little to describe what the service entails and how it helps your customers.
And please, for the love of your customers, don’t use jargon! If your services page is covered with jargon and industry words that your customers don’t really understand, you’re kind of pushing them away. They need to connect with you and what you’re selling them, so use the words that they would use.
Make sure you talk about the benefits of what you’re offering, and not just the features. Features are things like the color or specifying what’s included. Benefits tell your customer how the features help them. For example:
Features:
20+ videos that teach you how to create your WordPress website…
Benefits:
So you’ll feel more confident about building and managing your own website that your audience will love!
Now, I’m not a copywriter, and I don’t even pretend to be one on T.V. But, I wanted to give you some more tips on how to write a service page that your audience will love (and actually read!)