10 Steps to Creating a Lead-Generating Authority Website

One of the most effective client attraction strategies you can create for your business is to develop an authority website.

Most websites, even in this day and age, are simple brochure sites, telling visitors who run the business, what they do, and how to contact them.  An authority web site, however, is one based on a specific topic.

Better yet, search engines love these sites. Because search engines strive to provide the most relevant sites when someone is seeking information on a particular topic, these types of sites are usually found at the top of search engine results.

To find the authority site in your niche or on any particular topic, simply go to a search engine, type in a keyword, and view the top 3 results that appear in the natural (organic, not pay-per-click) results.  These are typically the authority sites for the keywords you entered.

Here are 10 steps that online service business owners can follow to create an authority website for their business:

1.  Pick a niche.  Make your niche as narrow and focused as you possibly can. Perhaps it’s professional organizing for home offices or web design for cleaning companies or career coaching for baby boomer women.  You get the idea here with my article, 5 Steps to Discovering Your Niche Market.

2.  Select your keywords.  Keywords are the “key” to being found online, so select yours carefully.  Select a niche-specific keyword phrase, 2 secondary keyword phrases, and then search for other related keyword phrases that have a fair amount of traffic but not so much competition.  Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest tool can help you find these keywords.  You should end up with 10-15 keyword phrases at this point.

3.  Domain.  There’s still a bit of leverage given in search engine results to domains that contain your primary keyword.  Buy a domain name containing your keyword phrase. I highly recommend Namecheap for all of your domain purchases.

4.  Gather content.  Now you need to gather all the content you have created related to this niche. This could be articles, blog posts, audio, or video.  If you don’t yet have content in this niche, you need to create at least 10 pieces of content, each of which uses one of the keyword phrases you found in Step 2.

5.  Lead generation magnet.  Now you need to create your lead generation magnet, or ethical bribe, that you can give away on your site in exchange for a visitor’s name and email address. Need some ideas? Refer to my article, Ethical Bribes: 10 Most Effective Client Attraction Device Giveaways,

6.  Autoresponder follow-up. Create eight to ten follow-up autoresponders that are sent out over the next 3 weeks to the people who requested your lead magnet.  The goal here is to educate them about what you do or the product that you sell and invite them to purchase from you.  I use and highly recommend Birdsend for all of my email marketing and the creation of autoresponders.

7.  Design and Navigation. Make your site easy to navigate and professional with a clear call to action.  Nothing is worse than visiting a site that looks as though it were designed 10 years ago or gives you a confusing array of things to do.  Use a simple design with attractive colors, and make sure your call to action (signing up for your ethical bribe) is on every single page of your site. I suggest you create a website using WordPress as your content management system and then have your site customized accordingly.

8.  Site Pages. At a minimum, your site needs a home page, about page, contact page,  products and or service pages, FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page, a privacy policy page, and a page for showcasing your reviews or testimonials.  Lastly, your site needs a  place where you can post new content.

For most WordPress sites, this uses the blog post feature of your site and is noted in your site navigation menu as Blog or Articles.  You’ll want to create those pages, as well as add the content you gathered or created in Step 4 to your site. Be sure that the keyword for each piece of content appears in the content’s title, first paragraph, page description and title, and page headline.

9.  New content.  Content is king online, so plan to create one new piece of content each week that is added to your site. Plan on creating at least one new piece of content for your site each week.

10. Measure your site’s success. After creating your site, you’ll want to know how your site is performing in the search engines, who is visiting your site, and where your traffic is coming from, among other statistics. To get this information, you need to have Google Analytics installed on your site.

An authority website will help you leverage your expertise in your marketplace.  If you create it according to these steps, it will continue to generate leads for your business while your content marketing system continues to drive traffic to your site.  Now, you have created an automated marketing machine that will continue to send clients to your business.