The converting MSP website checklist

How’s your digital shop looking?

Are the exterior and interior eye-catching? The products appealing and well laid out? Are there real, radiant people and irresistible offers that incentivize onlookers to walk in and get to the check-out? If they do, can they get what they want easily, or do they need to ring a broken bell?

A shortfall in any step on your prospects’ customer journey will lead to missed conversations. It’s time to put an end to that for your managed service provider (MSP), for good. This guide will show you how.

We’re also going to share the number one principle behind creating an MSP website that starts conversations and grows your business, it’s also a principle that will help you to market your business more broadly.

Let’s take it from the top.

The golden principle of a converting MSP website is…

Trust! No matter the sector, size, or approach of a business, we are all in the business of earning and keeping trust.

In all of your marketing efforts, including for your website, you can ask: ‘How can I make this build more trust with my audience? How could this currently be lowering trust?’

Trust is about lowering uncertainty and costs for your prospects across the customer journey and maximizing certainty and value for them.

Trust isn’t just about products and deliverables, it’s also about relationships and how you make your audience feel across your channels and touchpoints.

Your website is the central foundation of your digital marketing efforts, so how do you enshrine this principle and transform this foundation into a launchpad for growth?

Pro tip: We’ve recently launched our own free MSP websites assessment tool that asks the key questions you need to know for building a converting MSP website. You can get your site scored in minutes here.

So how do I create a converting website for my MSP?

Building a converting MSP website involves a range of parts, including some lying beyond the website itself. In a nutshell, these are:

• Nail your website peripherals
• Entice visitors to read on with your hero section
• Get found by making your website search engine optimized
• Delight your audience with a great website design
• Secure trust with social proof
• Convert prospects with irresistible call to actions (CTAs)
• Win over readers with clear, convincing content
• Endear your audience with the human factor
• Ensure a smooth experience by getting the small, miscellaneous details right

Nail your MSP website’s peripherals

Your audience’s journey can go astray before it has even really begun! Before finding your website, customers may find it through other channels like search engine results and various social media platforms.

The less findable and appealing they are, the more likely they won’t click on your website in the first place. Here is a checklist for your peripherals:

• Do you have a complete and up-to-date Google Business and Bing Places profile?
• Does your business have complete, up-to-date company and personal accounts on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn? Do you post on them regularly?
• Does your business have solid, up-to-date profiles on online directories such as Yell (UK) or Yelp (US)?
• Do you have reviews on these accounts? Do you regularly source them? Are you responding to them all?

Entice visitors to read on with your hero section

Okay, so your peripherals are on-point and get your audience clicking into your website.

Once they do this, you’ll usually have between 5-10 seconds to secure their interest in reading on and getting to know you. This is what a great hero section helps you to achieve.

A hero section is the first part of a website that you see when it loads, which usually includes a header title and a banner image as a minimum, but there is so much more you can do with it!

The Wingman MSP Marketing website’s hero section

A great hero section should include:

• A header title that compellingly summarizes what you do, for who, and your value proposition.
• Social proof such as a glowing customer review or a quantitative measure (like ticket ratings, response times, years in business).
• An appealing banner image that brings out the personality of your brand.
• A simple navigation menu with a CTA in the menu, rather than on the banner.

Some don’ts for your hero section:

• Banner videos are often not ideal, they can distract your readers from the headline message and increase your site’s load times, even a couple of seconds of added load time will exponentially increase your website’s bounce rate.
• Don’t use too much text – nuff’ said.
• Avoid a low-quality or excessively cliché image (beware the white-toothed people!)
• Ensure it’s optimized for non-desktop devices – around half of your visitors will be using them.

Get found by making sure your MSP website is search engine-optimized

SEO is key for creating MSP websites that gain traction and start conversations. SEO is about optimizing your website to rank at the top of search engine results. Your audience is asking questions, and search engines are gauging who can best answer them.

It’s not just about keywords and alt tags, however. Over the years, platforms like Google have increasingly linked rankings with the quality of experience that the website provides.

More than ever, keeping people on your website is important, because it indicates the relevance and value of your content.

Here are some things to look out for to get your MSP’s website ascending the search rankings:

• Minimize your website’s load time, with a minimum goal being within 3 seconds.
• Use headers on each page, use one H1 header on each page, and H2 and H3 headers for your content sections.
• Appropriately name and use alt tags for your images, including relevant ones. descriptions and keywords and compressing images will also help site performance.
• Establish links to your website, from sources such as social media profiles, directories, links within your blogs to your services, and forums.
• Use audience-relevant SEO keywords for each page – without overdoing it! An appropriate keyword frequency will typically be 2-3 percent of a page’s total word count as a ballpark figure.
• Make sure it is mobile responsive – Google uses mobile-first indexing, so ensure the user experience and layout on the mobile version of your website is in good stead.
• Make sure your pages link together to facilitate indexing of your website’s pages.

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Pro Tip: You can use tools like GTmetrix to benchmark your MSP’s website

As SEO is also a dynamic and evolving part of marketing, you should also keep your finger on the pulse of what works, by regularly reviewing your website traffic flows and the keywords that are performing.

You can do this using inexpensive tools such as Keywords Everywhere to discover what your prospects are actually searching for and tailor your approach accordingly.

Delight your audience with a great website design

A slick website that is easy on the eye, is one of the fastest ways to build trust and make it as easy as ABC for your visitors to get value from your website.

Being honest, assess your website’s design along these lines:

• Is your logo modern, appealing, and compatible with the rest of your site’s design?
• Is the design well laid out and accessible?
• Quite simply, does it look good? Second opinions can be invaluable here.
• Is it confusing or disorienting? For example, scrolling carousels and content sliders can make it hard to read the content on them.
• Are your images relevant? Are they too cheesy?
• Does the navigation bar scroll with the page? This gives visitors convenience, with a CTA there too, you ensure that the next step with you is always just a click away.

Secure trust with social proof 

An example of how solid social proof is being used on MSPs websites.

Put your proofs in the pudding to layer on more and more reasons to trust your business while showcasing its X factor. You can use various forms of social proof across your website, including:

• Client testimonials and quotes – are they matched with relevant pages where possible?
• Quantitative measures – ticket ratings, response times, award rankings, and years in business are among the possible measures.
• Vendor certifications – these can be particularly appealing to IT professionals visiting your site. Be careful to avoid putting them ahead of customer-based social proofs.
• Video testimonials – where the human factor meets with an engaging format and storytelling, are a powerful way to build trust today.
• Awards and community proofs – are you featuring awards? Has your MSP been on a magazine cover or featured on a platform that displays your thought leadership?
• Books and white papers – these can be linked to CTAs and display your specialist knowledge in tackling the IT challenges relevant to your audience.

And another! Customer reviews are a powerful way to win the trust of prospects on MSP websites.

Convert prospects with irresistible call to actions (CTAs)

Aside from not getting enough trust from your audience before ‘the ask’, some MSP websites fail to get prospect conversations simply because they don’t ask! They do not put loud and proud CTAs on their website – your MSP should if it isn’t already.

But there’s a second barrier when it comes to CTAs. Prospects want value, but they don’t want hassle; they also don’t want to be pitch-slapped!

We love the personal touch behind this CTA and the generosity of time it’s offering.

Everyone’s pushing a sale or offering a consultation, so making your CTA as valuable, trustworthy, and hassle-free as possible, is the key to being the MSP that gets prospects to say ‘Okay, let’s take the next step!’.

This is where irresistible CTAs come in. Here’s how to build some for your website:

• Add social proof to it, such as a quote or link to a case study around the offer
• Make it generous. The more you offer (within reason), hassle-free, the more likely you are to convert. Some MSPs worry that doing this will be unprofitable, but counter-intuitively, when done right, the opposite is the case.
• Make a dedicated CTA page, where you can expand on why prospects will benefit from your ask, like our free website review
• Embed a meeting booking link for consultations, using tools like Calendly.

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A CTA from our website with the personal touch, offering free MSP website review or consultation.

On a final note, you can make it unique. A prospect may not click a consultation button unless they are familiar with your business. They may not find a free network assessment or dark web scan incentivizing under business-as-usual conditions.

What if you could help them to verify the benefits of cloud migration and ensure it is safe for them? What if you offered a refund if they’re unhappy within the first month of service?

Whatever can be made to work for you, these kinds of offerings will help you to stand out, build trust, and create conversations. They don’t have to be free necessarily either!

Win over readers with clear, convincing content

Great wordsmithery does three things for your audience: it endears their hearts, educates their minds, and moves their feet!

Avoid being a copycat by using ChatGPT for your pages, this is all too common on MSP websites. And be wary of vendor-sourced content. They will at best, average your MSP out and dilute your message, both in terms of SEO and winning over your audience.

Here’s what to look out for when it comes to making your content compelling:

• Would a teenager be able to understand it?
• Does it have personality?
• Is the copy short and punchy? Less is often more.
• Do you tell a compelling and unique story? Particularly on your about page?
• Does it fluently weave in SEO keywords?
• Does it address the pain points and questions of your audience? Talk about what you do, but keep it linked to what it does for them.

Endear your audience with the human factor.

The scourge of MSP websites: The trouble with this image? Nobody is going to believe it’s you!

People buy from people, and when it comes to the human factor, it’s all too common for MSPs to either be a somebody for everybody or to hide themselves behind a suspiciously shiny, professional veneer.

Average tactics will tend to get average results. You need to differentiate! Humans are all unique, and we believe MSPs should lean into this fact in their marketing.

Did you know: typically, the ‘about us’ page on MSP websites is the second most viewed page, coming second to the homepage. 

Consider:

• Do you have photos of your people on the website? Or are they white-toothed people?
• Are your offices featured on your website (assuming you are based in one)? Are they nice, shiny, and branded?
• Again, are you telling your story? Is it unique compared to other MSP websites?
• Are your values and ethos enshrined on your website?

Ensure a smooth experience by getting the small, miscellaneous details right

People say the devil is in the detail; the angel is too! Don’t forget these small differences that contribute to the experience and trustworthiness of your MSP’s website:

• Is your contact phone number clickable?
• Does your navigation bar logo click back onto the homepage?
• Do your CTAs work as intended?
• Is your footer complete? Does it feature your pages, links to socials, have a short summary of your company, and your contact details?
• Is your website’s copyright (©) up to date?
• Does your website have an SSL certificate and an XML sitemap?

Failing to plan is planning to fail

Before we wrap up, we want to speak to the importance of systematizing and interconnecting your marketing efforts. Your website is like the center of a wheel with many spokes that interconnect with each other.

While MSP websites are crucial for marketing success, put together, your website, content, social channels, customer relationship management (CRM), paid ads, and so much more, offer a web of possibilities for building trust and differentiating your MSP. You need to harness and coordinate them together. Why?

Because inconsistency undermines trust! That’s why a strategic and consistent approach is so important for your MSP’s marketing.

Trust builds a following, a following creates relationships, and relationships lead to sales and better business outcomes for you and your prospects.

You know you can deliver; you just need to persuade your audience that you can. We can help you set up the invaluable foundations for a converting website for your MSP, one that serves as a launchpad for your strategic growth.

Get your MSP website off the tarmac with a free website review

We’ve given free website reviews to hundreds of MSPs, that give specific feedback for both their website and wider online presence. Want to see a real-live CTA in action? Our reviews page is a good example of how we practice what we preach as MSP marketing specialists.

You can find out more about them on the link and hear from the other delighted MSPs who have already gone through the process with us!

There’s no catch, you can take the insights and apply them to build the stand-out website you need. Our only hope? That you love it, tell your friends about it, and remember us, should you ever need marketing support in the future. If you have any questions about it or anything else, we’re always happy to talk.

Join us for the seventh annual Global MSP Day on June 6th for more MSP sales and marketing insights!

Note: This was originally published at Wingman MSP Marketing.

 Photo: Who is Danny / Shutterstock

This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.