One of the best ways for you to start attracting more interest with your website is by redoing the branding.

It helps to have a target customer in mind when creating or reinventing the branding for your website.

Why?

Because if you invent a prototypical customer who has a specific personality, way of talking, preference for how they like things to look, and of course what their buying habits are, you can create a branding experience on your website that matches their ideal.

So if you’re not sure who your ideal customer is, think about it and write down a customer profile.

• What’s the age group?
• What roles do they play in society? Could be teachers, moms, veterans, any sort of occupation or category applies here.
• What is their socioeconomic status?

Things to Think About

Color and style

The color and flavor of your branding should match what your ideal customer would find appealing.

This definitely matters because you could essentially separate your audience into frugal versus big spenders. Then you modify your product offering and price to meet the needs of whomever you are targeting at the time and in this particular place.

If you’re having trouble with this, think about Banana Republic, Gap and Old Navy. This is one company separated into three different types of customers. Each customer type has a different perception of value, as well as its own, unique buying habits.

You can so very easily do this with your online business, by making three different websites and molding your product three different ways, at three different price points.

In fact, you should do this if you have an online business. It’s far less complicated than building 3, in-the-flesh companies from the ground up out of one preference for one type and styling of, say, clothing.

Wording and slang

How does your customer talk?

Are they colloquial? Formal?

Do they use modern vernacular?

Is slang a part of their everyday conversations?

Pepper in some words and phrases that they would identify with.

Try not to overdo this, though. Your goal is to be communicating in a professional manner at a certain level of expertise and authority. Alo, being too casual will cause people to not take you seriously.

Social beliefs

Consider your audience’s social beliefs. With so many companies shifting to a more socially responsible outlook, you should probably know what your target audience’s social hot buttons are.

Even better is if you are actually building a company to reflect those beliefs based on your own. This means you will be naturally aligned with how your target customer thinks and responds.

Don’t settle for generic

Resist the urge to be a generic, everything-to-everybody type of brand. You might be afraid to add flavor and personality to your brand, or worried that you’ll attract a certain kind of customer, but repel another kind.

The truth about branding is that the generic, no-frills style attracts almost no one. You’ll get the extremely frugal types which unfortunately don’t always make the best customers.

And what you probably don’t realize about your branding is that you can sell the exact same product to two different types of customers by tweaking it to fit the audience and then setting up each brand separately!

Overhauling Your SEO: Keywords are Key!

From time to time, you’ll want to tweak and modify your SEO strategy. Your website will drop in rank if you don’t, especially if you work in a competitive industry.

SEO stands for search engine optimization. A lot of so-called experts will try to boil this down to numbers and spew a soulless, algorithmic formula at you.

The people who do this are typically search engine optimization companies. They want it to seem like this elusive and confusing calculation that you’ll never be able to conquer without their guidance. They want SEO to be a puzzle that can only be solved if you sign up for their most expensive SEO service package.

You can take the paid package if you want. But if you stop paying, you’ll probably drop out of sight.

Truth be told, you don’t actually need to buy placement to start getting ranked on search engines.

The thing with paid SEO is that it can give you a good boost in the beginning, when you’re just starting out. So you might want to invest in some advertising to get people looking your way. Later though, you can back off.

With SEO, some business owners are just really not working with a lot of capital and you may be one of them. If you have the time and patience, slow growth could be the better way for you to do SEO. That basically means knowing and including your keywords, and an ongoing commitment to creating amazing content that will keep new heads turning your way, hold their attention AND get the sale when it’s time.

That said, you may have a search engine strategy already. Your best bet for seeing if that strategy is working is to hit the Googles and other search engines. You’ll be able to tell by searching for your terms, your company name, and terms that are used by your competition, how well you’re performing.

Start revamping your search engine strategy. You don’t need to talk to a pro if you don’t want to. Find a good keyword tool.

Start by searching keyword phrases and single words that you know are used by people looking for what you sell.

From there, the keyword tool will spit out the number of searches that were done on this particular search term in a particular month. This way, you can tell just how many people were looking for what you have.

Your search engine tool of choice will also serve up related words and word combos. Keep a list of the different phrases, because subtle changes do matter.

For your search engine optimization strategy, you’ll want to choose words and phrases that bring a moderate amount of monthly traffic.

If it’s a very large number, you’re going to have too much competition, and your site is not likely to get found in the pile.

If there’s a very specific, long tail keyword phrase that only a few people search each month, you will definitely attract those people. But the problem is that you’re not going to get volumes of customers this way. You’ll only get like the three guys who went looking specifically for what you put out there.

Keep a list of all the keywords and phrases that could potentially help you attract your ideal customer. Even if some of the words are not familiar to you in your niche, it could open doors to new business in a different level of the market… so include those as well.

What’s next? Soon you’ll be finding ways to incorporate the keywords into your web marketing to start driving traffic.

You may not have a solid web marketing plan yet, but that will come in a bit. For now, set those keywords aside. You’ll be picking them up again later after you work on your blog.

Overhauling Your Website

If you have a website then you might be sick of looking at it. You want to break up with your website, maybe.

Maybe you never really connected with your website. That’s the problem when someone else designs your website. Instead of being intimately involved with your website, you end up getting attached to whatever you put on your social media pages for your business instead.

What happened? Do you even know what’s up with your website? Do you know your website analytics and what’s working or not working on your website? You should.

If your website is not with WordPress or a modern website management platform, it should be! You should be able to easily update content on your website to keep it constantly fresh.

Having a digital agency update your website may run you a few dollars, or a lot of dollars depending on what you decide, but it is worth it! If you have left your website out in the cold until now, you probably have been missing opportunities to change the wording around and organize pages in ways that work to get you found in Google.

Lost search traffic = lost potential client leads!

What’s the best way to conduct your website overhaul so you can start getting more leads and customers? Contact me.