Your average massage therapy client or prospect is a savvy consumer. 

They don’t want a brochure website. They won’t tolerate an ugly outdated site. They will abandon ship immediately if they can’t find what they want.

So what does make a website attractive to people looking for massage? In the following post we’ll go through some of the anatomical parts of a good massage therapy website. Now, I have a disclaimer: I’m having some fun here with the metaphor, so please have fun with me. I know at some points the anatomy analogy wears thin, but it is entertaining (at least to me) and useful at times, so I’m keeping it and following through to the end!

The Face (Homepage)

A cutting edge interactive experience and other bells and whistles are not the most important thing about your homepage. The face of your website should give off the best impression, with clean design and priority calls-to-action for your visitors.

We always want to put ourselves into the mind or our visitors and users. What they want is a clean, uncluttered website that makes it easy to find what they’re looking for.

Have a natural face! Limit choices and simplify. Don’t overwhelm your visitor with too much stuff.

The Voice (Original Content)

The voice of a great website is original content. It goes out into the world to draw visitors and traffic back to your website. Content speaks of what you do, what you are passionate about, and how you can help. Fresh content examples are things like:

• blogs
• videos
• articles
• photographs
• presentations
• how-to guides 

Your original content gets results, too. It attracts and eventually persuades prospects to become loyal clients.

• Blogging results in a 55% increase in website visitors
• Search engines like fresh content (SEO benefit)
• People are searching for solutions to their problems and will refer back to you as an expert on topics of health, massage, well-being and other topics you speak on
• Good content promotes brand awareness

The Hands (Booking and Payment Tools)

A good massage therapy website will incorporate tools that act like good hands. The hands do the work, and the work of a website is to make money for your business. Simple.

You can reduce friction in the buying cycle by making it easier to book and pay online. Of course, Massamio offers these tools as part of our website services and it makes it very simple for your clients to schedule a massage.

The Stomach (Landing pages)

I tried but I can’t really avoid an absurd digestive metaphor here, so I’m just going to go with it. Landing pages (like a simple blog subscribe landing page) are like the stomach of your website. With landing pages, you can gobble up data from your visitors, converting them to leads.

Your massage therapy business relies on finding and getting new clients. This is where the brilliance of landing pages comes in. On a landing page, you can offer an ebook or guide or a presentation. In order for your visitor to download the guide, they need to first fill out a short form on the landing page. Those leads should go into a system where you can follow up with them via email or phone call to further engage and work toward converting the lead to a customer.

The Brain (Metrics to analyze)

What are the most important metrics to analyze on your website? In order to know your website and marketing is effective, you have to be smart! The brains of your website is YOU. You have to know what stats are important for measuring and analyzing, and ideally you can then set up your website to be smart and capable of tracking them.

The three most important metrics to track and tweak over time are:

1. Visitors – How many new and returning visitors are coming to your website each month? Is the number trending up or down? What can you do to attract more visitors to your website?
2. Leads – Of those visitors on your site, how many are converting to leads? Are you collecting leads through your contact form and landing page offer forms? What is the conversion percentage from Visitors to Leads?
3. Customers – Of all your leads, how many are converting to customers over time? Are you tracking what content or marketing efforts are leading to more customers? It’s wonderful to be able to connect the dots, if you can, to see what works and what doesn’t on your website.

The Skin (Good Design)

Good design is terribly important. I can’t stress that enough. What is good design?

• Professional photography
• Brand and color management
• Consistent typography
• Layout and style

“Professional means that the design meets certain standards in its typography, layout and style. When visitors see a site that skimps on these standards, its a short leap to assume the business might skimp on other things as well–customer privacy, for instance.”
Entrepreneur Magazine

Users make snap judgements about a sites overall design. This point is closely related to The Face, the homepage. The design of your website can very well turn away a prospect, or keep them around for longer than a second. Studies show that a user can make decisions about a website’s visual appeal in as little as 50 milliseconds (1/20 of a second). Simply put, poor website design hurts your business.

The Bones (Content Management System)

This is a very sound end to our beleaguered anatomy analogy: the backbone, the skeleton, of a good website is a solid content management system (CMS). The CMS is what makes it easy for a non-technical user to edit and update her website. Whether you use WordPress or HubSpot or Massamio, the CMS should be easily accessible to anyone who needs to update your website or blog. If your website is built on a complicated platform, you’ll have a bad time updating your content and making time-critical changes to your website. The CMS is also what allows you to add modules or connect to other services, like shopping carts or scheduling tools. Make sure you have a solid framework, or bones, for your website.

What other “parts” of a website could you add this list? I would love to see your ideas in the comments!

Comments from original Massamio post:

This came at the perfect time! I am just building my own website and this has really helped give me clear guidelines for what I should be considering to add or not to add on my website. Thanks! — Posted @ Thursday, April 03, 2014 8:56 PM by Janelle

What a great post.  I have been recently rejigging my site and realised that my poor blog has been neglected, as I felt like I was talking to myself, but I really need to get back into regularly posting as it’s so good for SEO!  Thanks for sharing.  Paula Holistic Therapies with Paula Kemp  — Posted @ Tuesday, April 15, 2014 7:42 AM by Paula Kemp