The 8 MSP Website Must-Haves to Build a Foundation for Growth

by Kirk Ahlquist | May 23, 2023

Your MSP website is your digital storefront. Chances are, it’s the first point of contact that prospective customers will make with your brand, so you want to look your best and showcase what you have to offer to your audience. If your website isn’t up-to-scratch, you risk losing out on valuable business opportunities.

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Your website is where you show your prospects (and customers!) that you understand their challenges, have the solutions to help overcome them, and build trust that they should choose you over your competition. It should be your number one lead generation tool, so in this blog we’ll explore the 8 fundamental elements that every MSP website should cover.

The 8 MSP website must-haves we’ll cover are:

Substance over style
SEO
Using various media formats
Differentiate yourself
Know your audience
Focus on the prospect
Set up for conversion
Make it user friendly

1. Substance Over Style

The single most important thing on your MSP website is your content. There are plenty of fish (MSPs) in the sea and your website is the first point of contact for prospective customers, so you need to clearly demonstrate your expertise and show them why they should trust you over other IT partners. Yes, your design matters as well, but good design is redundant if your content isn’t good and engaging. If you want your visitors to engage, you need your design to complement your content and all elements on the page need to work together. When writing your copy and building your pages, it’s useful to keep the SEO principle of E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trust) in mind. Don’t just tell visitors what services you offer, show them why these services are important and why you’re an expert in the matter. This isn’t just seen as good practice for visitors, but also rewarded by search engines.

2. SEO

Speaking of search engines, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is crucial to keep in mind when creating or updating your MSP website. Did you know that 62% of B2B customers use web search as one of the first three resources to learn about a solution? You could have the best MSP website in the world, but if you completely disregard SEO principles, chances are no one will ever see it and you won’t be able to attract any new custom. SEO boosts your brand awareness and improves your clicks and conversions, but where you rank on search engines depends on your content. Search engines determine where to rank a website based on several factors:

High quality content
Keyword optimisation
Domain authority
Backlinks
Website structure
Load speed
Mobile optimisation

There are free tools such as UberSuggest that can give you a quick overview of where you stand with your website’s SEO if you’re completely new to the topic. However, we recommend diving into the subject if you’re planning to seriously improve your website. The better adjusted for SEO (not just content, but also from a technical standpoint) your MSP website is, the more you will be rewarded with good rankings. And the better you rank, the more people will see your website, and the more you can grow your business. Tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush can help you get the most out of your MSP website in terms of SEO.

3. Using Various Media Formats

Just like with most things in life, monotony is boring when it comes to your MSP website. Adding a variety of media will engage your visitors and lead to a better user experience. Using imagery and iconography can add to your branding and create visual appeal. It also pays off to add different content forms to showcase your expertise to visitors. This can be in the form of videos, infographics, eBooks and even interactive tools (I.e., pricing calculators) for lead capture. People like to consume information in different ways, and combined with the fact that our attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter, offering various media formats will make your MSP website more engaging, informative and even fun for visitors.

4. Differentiate Yourself

As you will already know, the MSP market is becoming increasingly saturated and, largely, they offer the same services to the same businesses. That means you need to stand out of the crowd in order to be successful and attract new customers. The good news is: you can do this with your MSP website! For one, you can create clear branding so that your website isn’t generic but distinctly you. Secondly, you can also do this with your content. What makes your business unique? Do you offer a specific onboarding process that’s been well-appreciated by existing clients? Are you specialists in a specific niche? Make sure to mention it! Determining and highlighting your unique selling proposition will set you apart from competition and tell visitors why you’re the right IT partner for them. Additionally, if you have any industry awards, accreditations or even great customer testimonials or case studies, talk about them! That’s how you will differentiate yourself from your competitors.

5. Know Your Audience

This is closely related to the above-mentioned point of differentiating yourself. If you want to be successful, you need to not only know what makes you stand out from the competition, but you also need to know your audience. The better defined your target audience, the better you can align your MSP website to address their pain points and challenges. Deep diving into your target audience and creating personas might seem like a tedious process, but we promise it’s worth it. That way, you will know what they are struggling with and what kind of content they engage with. You will then be able to analyse which of your pages bring in the most traffic. Understanding how visitors use your MSP website and how they find you means you can optimise your content in those places to maximise effectiveness.

You can also ensure your MSP website is optimised both for existing and prospective customers. Existing customers might look for support while prospects are exploring your services and learning about what you offer. When optimising your website, ensure that content and pages are clearly labelled (I.e. resources/blog, customer support, contact options, service pages) to improve the user experience of your visitors.

6. Focus on the Prospect

You are an expert in your field and know more about IT and technology than most other people, but if you’re speaking too much jargon on your MSP website, you risk alienating prospective customers. Your content should address your prospects’ pain points and challenges, but keep in mind that most of the businesses you may work with will have little to no in-house IT expertise. Ensure your MSP website content showcases your expertise while still using language that is accessible and easy to digest for every audience. If you’re struggling to figure out what is and isn’t easy to understand, why not have your spouse, a relative or one of your friends (that isn’t working in IT) read over your content? That way you will find out where you might have to change your language or add more context.

7. Set Up for Conversion

Generating traffic is one side of the coin, but in order to be successful, your MSP website also needs to be set up for conversion. The best way to do this is with CTAs (Calls to actions). Intersperse your content with clear and relevant CTA buttons to drive people to take the action you want them to take. Do you want them do download a specific infographic? Include “Download now” buttons. Do you want people to reach out and make an appointment? Include “Contact us” buttons or, even better, include meeting bookers on your page to make the process as easy as possible. Giving clear and actionable CTAs is the key to turning your traffic into leads.

When setting your CTAs, be conscious of the value exchange for the visitor. Is what you’re offering compelling enough for them to hand over their details? Data has become a big topic in recent years, so make sure to only ask for the minimum amount of information from prospects. That way you are more likely to actually get them to successfully interact with your lead generation forms. Research shows that, when there are only 3 fields to be filled out, people are 5% more likely to convert than when there are 3-5 fields and 10% more likely to convert than if there are 6+ fields of information required. In the case of MSP Marketing, we suggest you limit the information you ask for to their name, job role, company and email address.

8. Make It User Friendly

Making your MPS website user friendly is crucial. The technical setup of your page needs to load quickly and have good visual stability. People will bounce from your website quickly if images or buttons are jumping around when they scroll or if pages take too long to load. Having bad site speed also correlates with low SEO performance, which will lead to low ranking on search engines and thus decrease your traffic. Creating an MSP website that offers good user experience also means placing the most important information front and centre, making it easy for users to navigate and engage with your site, and not hiding key pages or information behind layers of clicks and menus.

Request Your Free MSP Website Audit

We hope we could show you with this article how crucial it is to optimise your MSP website for your audience. The more optimised your website it, the more likely you are to rank high on search engines and attract more traffic and potential customers.

At Marketopia, we have been working with MSPs for almost 20 years to help them with their marketing and boost their growth. We have helped hundreds of them optimise and even re-design and re-build their websites in order to stand out from the crowd. If you’re reading this article, chances are you’ve been wondering whether your MSP website is still keeping up with the times. The good news is: we can answer that question for you!

We’re offering a free, no-strings-attached MSP website audit. When you request one, our experts will review your website and create a thorough report covering: