I would like to introduce a Sarasota therapist who specializes in what is called divorce counseling or divorce coaching: Cassandra Winters. She also happens to be my latest client and we just completed her web development project. Check out her new website at www.CassandraWinters.com
Her concerns during our initial meeting included the effectiveness of her website and whether she should invest in SEO or other online promotional marketing. I set out to review her website and provide an initial assessment.
What We Found
Cassandra was building and hosting her website on Square Space and had done a great job on her own. The site was very attractive. Square Space’s templates are quite lovely and Cassandra had a clear idea of the mood she wanted to present. As a photographer she used many of her own photos of beach and water scenes, sans people. This resulted in a tranquil, contemplative ambiance with hues of blues and sandy browns.
There was sufficient copy on most pages that was well written from an academic perspective. Her copy focused on her preferred counseling speciality: divorce coaching, for which she has certifications over and above her 2 master’s degrees.
The website operated over an encrypted https connection (which is quickly becoming the standard) and the pages loaded surprisingly fast.
There were 3 primary issues we identified: the web page structure didn’t clearly direct the visitor, the copy was written for academics, and the copy targeted terms that simply aren’t being searched for.
Based on these observations, it was my opinion that we first needed to sand off the edges of her website before trying to drive traffic to it. I wanted us to take the great work she started and really drive it home.
What We Did
While maintaining the positive elements of the site (speed, security, attractive design, copy volume and quality) we targeted the weaker elements. First, the CMS platform.
I am not a fan of hosted solutions like Square Space or Wix. You are pretty much locked in to using their resources and you can’t move your data easily if you want to. For that reason I will almost always advise a client to migrate to WordPress because of the open-source nature of the product and culture, and the vast number of tools available for development. Thus, I advised Mrs. Winters to migrate.
Refocus Search Terms
After doing a key word volume analysis, I realized that nobody is really searching for the term Divorce Coach, which was largely what her pages were targeting. We refocused her copy to target a variety of other industry terms that are more popular.
Rewrite Copy For Larger Audience
We identified that her copy also needed to be rewritten for a broader Internet audience. We broke up large paragraphs and sentences, added more headings to clarify information, and used more bulleted lists to make it more scannable.
Reorganize, Rename, Reinforce
Finally, we addressed the page names, navigation structure, and the main page layout. Page names were changed to address SEO concerns as well as entice and clearly direct a viewer to read.
Navigation structure was reorganized to put service pages under a general service category while giving pages that discuss the more specific topic of divorce coaching their own main category heading.
Finally, the main page layout was rearranged to create easily identifiable excerpts of important information (services, credentials, consultation, etc) and reinforce the content that represents her primary focus: divorce counseling.
The final product is a website that is a solid bedrock for growth:
- It maintains an attractive, tranquil, and contemplative design while conveying an educated professionalism.
- It satisfies the fundamentals of SEO writing.
- It more clearly directs the visitor to important information.
- Being built in WordPress it is highly scalable and customizable.
Please visit my portfolio at www.AustinWelch.com to view this and other website and graphic design examples.
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