Read our how-to's about how to improve your MSP's website.
Your website is the primary marketing tool for your MSP, and as such, it must look and operate as expected. It has become a pretty standard practice for smaller businesses to use prebuilt WordPress or Joomla templates as opposed to paying a designer to build a custom website from scratch. It saves money, and it gets you, essentially, the same end result. However, not all templates are created equal. An inferior template or theme will end up costing you in the end.
A website is a key component to any business’ marketing these days. For MSPs, there are a lot of options out there for pre-built or templated websites. This includes our Ultimate MSP Website, which comes with over 100 pages of content to choose from, several different designs, and a ton of features. In addition, we can also build custom websites. Let’s explore the differences.
An important part of your website and your MSP marketing strategy are landing pages. However, a lot of small businesses don’t understand how to effectively use them. In this blog, we’ll cover the general components of an effective landing page, and ways that your MSP should be using them.
When a potential lead visits your website, you want to know who they are so that you can continue to hit them with marketing touches in an attempt to move them through your sales funnel. In order to get this visitor’s contact information, you’ll need to obtain it.
There are six main types of deliverables that any MSP should have at least one of on their website. Here, we go over what those are and where you should be putting them if you want them to be seen by your website visitors.
Making a website is easier than ever. Not only are there a myriad of companies offering pre-built websites, but you can also use a number of drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) website builders to create your own website with little-to-no web design training.
Your bounce rate is one of the fundamental metrics in determining whether or not your website is attracting an audience and relevant traffic. While you can’t have an audience without traffic, traffic without an audience is just noise.
Any website you visit online is designed with a certain purpose in mind (whether or not it’s designed well, is a different story). As a managed service provider, your website needs to have just as much forethought and planning as any other - in fact, it should probably have more. Let’s discuss a few requirements that a good MSP website needs to represent.
About five years ago, your MSP’s website went through a huge redesign. The difference was HUGE! Your clients were happy that your website was finally easy for them to navigate, and prospects were converting after visiting your website at rates you hadn’t previously seen.
You can sing praises about your company’s dedication to providing superior IT support in your marketing all you want. The fact of the matter is, this isn’t always enough to convince every prospect that it’s worth entering into a business relationship with you. How do they know you aren’t stretching the truth?
You want your website to best represent your MSP and the many services that you offer. As your central marketing hub, your website NEEDS to impress its visitors. To do so, it needs to be up-to-date and continuously maintained.
When was the last time that you Googled your company? What about the last time that you navigated from your company’s homepage to each of your service pages? Your company blog? Your About Us page? What do those pages look like? When were they last updated?
Forms are a must-have on any website, but especially for B2B companies. The added convenience that they provide allow you to collect more leads and move these leads more quickly through your sales funnel, while at the same time providing a positive user experience for the person who can fill it out versus having to use other methods to contact you.
Despite reports to the contrary, 404 errors do not directly hurt your SEO and marketing practices. They can, however, indirectly cause issues. We’re going to examine how, but rest assured Google doesn’t look at a 404 error and take points from your site as if it was a punishment.
The ultimate goal of your marketing is to get prospects to your website. Your website is where you provide information about your company as a whole and the services that you provide. Through your website, prospects can contact you if they are interested in signing up for one or more of your service offerings.
To get them to your website, you often have to direct them from your marketing materials - not every prospect is going to learn that you exist through a Google search.
When managing hundreds of websites for managed service providers (MSP), security is paramount. An MSP can’t preach strong security practices to their clients while having problems with their website. These days, hackers are aggressive and relentless when it comes to using exploits to test your security. So much so that even when applying multiple layers of protection across a site, the server, and keeping everything patched, threats can sneak in. This is why it is critical to have a first line of defense; in this case, a CAPTCHA.
Your clients want to learn as much as they can about you before they make the decision to do business with you. This means that they will be scouring your website in an attempt to learn as much about you as possible before they decide to actually reach out to you. One of the places they’re almost guaranteed to visit is your ‘About Us’ page. Are they going to like what they see?
When business decision makers are attempting to look for an MSP in their local area, they are not picking up a phone book like they would have 30+ years ago. As you probably already know, they are using the internet instead. Specifically, more than 70% are starting the process through a simple Google search. Assuming you set up your SEO right, your website will probably be somewhere on the first page of results.
Personalized and customized content and services are everywhere, in both the B2C (business-to-consumer) and B2B (business-to-business) markets. As a result, any B2B audience you’re trying to target is going to be primed to be more responsive to personalized, direct engagement. To take full advantage of this phenomenon and its benefits, you need to make sure that the epicenter of your marketing - your website - is offering a personalized experience to your audience.
When seeking out information about your web visitors and audience, your forms are one of your best, and most crucial, tools. Admittedly, this does rely on your audience filling out your forms, which you can make more likely through particular best practices and design choices. In this blog we’ll review a few of these practices and choices to optimize the effectiveness of your forms.
