Can Potential Clients Find You?

INFORMATION FOR NEW LNCs

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LNCtips.com: Can Potential Clients Find You?


Can potential clients find you? To be more precise, can potential clients find your website? Congratulations if you even HAVE a website because many independent legal nurse consultants don't. Over the past decade, it has become an expectation that all businesses have a website. Potential clients will want to check you out and possibly compare you to others in the field. What better way to present your most positive characteristics than on your website?

When potential clients look for your website, there are several ways they can find it.

1) They can click on a link to your website from another website, such as a link from AALNC's LNC Locator.

2) They can type your web address directly into the address bar of a browser, something almost no one does for unfamiliar websites.

3) Or they can do what most people do - type keywords in Google, Microsoft Edge, Yahoo or some other search engine to search for your website. Keywords,  key phrases, and content descriptions are examples of meta data, the information that search engines use to find your site.

To illustrate the importance of keywords, in one recent week, I had 1,117 visitors to my website.  Of those, 51 (less than 5%) found their way to my site from my email newsletter, 180 (16%) were already familiar with my website and typed my website's name directly into a browser's address bar.  The remaining 886 (79%) didn't know anything about my site, but they found it because they typed keywords in a search engine.

Meta data describe your web page but they do this in a way that's hidden from most of us. And because it's hidden, you may not be aware that your website lacks meta data. If you don't have meta data, it's unlikely that any search engine, or your potential clients, will ever find you. There are an estimated billion websites on the internet so having this type of meta data on your site is crucial.

So how can you tell if you have meta data, and how can you fix it if you don't? Right click on your webpage and select "View Source"  or "View Page Source" depending on which browser you use. Here's an example of what it might look like near the top of the page.

metadata

If your website has no description or keywords, you will need to create this content for your webmaster to include in your webpage.  If you made your own website using a service such as GoDaddy, WIX, or Weebly, you'll have to not only create the content but also publish it to your website. Your service should have a Settings tab that will walk you through the process. Or you can always use the Help section of your service.

Once you've created the description and keywords and published the changes, you will need to submit your website to search engines. Google is the most popular search engine; it handles about 65-75% of all searches. To submit your site, go to Google Add Url.  For all other sites (Yahoo, Edge, AOL, Ask, etc.), go to the DMOZ open directory project.  Submission to these search engines is free and easy enough to do yourself.  After submission, it should only take an hour or two for your search terms to show up in Google but it may take weeks or months for them to show up in other search engines.

Now that you've added a description and keywords to your website, you've increased your chances that potential clients can find your website. And if potential clients can find your website, they can find you.

...Katy Jones