Hey, devs! I recently wrote an article on how to upgrade your site to attract more freelance clients, and wanted to share some of the main principles with you:
1) Adapt the copy to your clients
We might be technical people, but our copy should target our clients from a business viewpoint. Potential clients know that there's risk in hiring somebody, so help them! Instead of showing off your skills and talking about you, explain what you can do for them and their business.
2) Write case studies
Don't just list your projects. Help your prospects by writing about your work process and how your work impacted past clients.
If you want a good case study model to base yourself off, check out https://bejamas.io/blog/case-studies/. These guys do an outstanding job showcasing their work with a business perspective.
3) Focus on your local SEO strategy
Create pages that tackle the task + geographic location + type formula.
You can even target a wider audience by switching up the type (i.e. creating pages targetting freelancer AND agency searches).
4) Make your site fast and SEO friendly
You don't need a super-fancy website to get clients as a web developer. Still, visitors will leave your site if it takes more than 3-5 seconds to load. Also, having an SEO friendly website is the least we can do to show our potential leads that we can deliver excellent work.
If you don't want to spend too much time optimizing your portfolio, you can choose an excellent static site generator such as Gatsby.js or Gridsome, which will do the heavy lifting for you, and then make sure that you get a decent Lighthouse Audit score.
You can absolutely optimize your website to get more (and better) clients, but there's no need to get overwhelmed. Focus on these low-hanging fruits first, and then slowly keep tweaking it to make it a portfolio that attracts premium clients.
Full article, weekly interviews with top freelancers and many more resources for freelance devs: https://thefreelancechoice.com/casestudies
Oldest comments (7)
Do you have other tips to help us devs find more clients through our websites?
Is "case study" just another fancy word for "blog post about my project"? I've read this very often but did not se any difference, except that it sounds more professional^^
Hey Josef! Yes, I agree. In the context of showing your projects it is just a blog post where you go through your thought process and the business case (for case studies about client projects.) The way I see it is that case studies are a way for your prospects to get to know you better and hence, to gain their trust. But blog posts anyways :)
To me there is a difference. A blog post can contain anything. A case study contains directed analysis of the specific case.
You can write a blog post about your project that offers no analysis. It describes what you did, but offers no critical insight. A case study that fails to deliver any insight can't (well, shouldn't) be labeled a case study imo.
Thanks for sharing!
You're welcome Lautaro!
Thanks DUCKL1N6. This is something I'm still working on. It's so easy to get caught up talking about yourself, your company...