Back when I was a real estate agent, before you ever put a home on the market, you “stagged” it. This basically consisted of decluttering, depersonalizing, and rearranging furniture to make the spaces appear larger and more open and finally getting rid of that floral print wallpaper in the bathroom.
The point is that, before you started bringing prospective buyers through the home, you wanted the home to look its best.
A few days of work and maybe a couple thousand dollars spent on paint, carpet cleaning, minor repairs, and a storage unit could yield 10 times that in return in the offers you received or be the difference between getting and offer or not.
You get this. Heck, you’ve probably done this, and it makes good sense.
What’s arguably as important as your home is your company’s website. It’s your “home” online. It’s the place you want prospective clients to see you, hopefully schedule an appointment, and hire you.
But so many people worry more about getting more traffic, SEO, paid ads, website ranking, etc. that they ignore the first step: making sure their site is attractive to their ideal client! So, even if they get people to come to the site, it’s a mess or looks like every other site that’s out then and is generic and bland.
Let’s look at the single quickest way to fix that and get you started down the right path.
Are you ready? What I’m about to tell you is super easy to change, and I will even give you an exact formula you can use to fix things in about five minutes.
When an ideal prospect comes to your website, they should immediately know that they are in the right place for you to help them.
If I went to your website right now, just looking at the main page and without scrolling down, would I know the following three things:
WHAT Do You Do?
WHO Do You Do It For?
WHERE Do You Do It?
Let me give you two examples. (I’ve excluded company info to protect the innocent.)
I did a Google search for “small-business IT support near me” and clicked through some of the websites I found.
Check Out This First One:
When clicking on that page, I really don’t know what they do. Sure, I can read “Infrastructure – Network – Security – Automate – Cloud,” and if I were a contestant on the “$100,000 Pyramid” game show, this may be okay. But that’d be like someone coming into a home I’m trying to sell to them and me saying, “Rooms, appliances, stairs, space.”
Not exactly compelling.
Furthermore, to even get to the fine print, I’ve got to get past the headline: “We are passionate about delivering on our promises.”
Well, I should hope so. You mean if you promise something to me, you’ll actually deliver on it?!
If we put them through the three-question test, how do they do?
Do we instantly know what they do? Nope.
Do we instantly know who they do it for? Nope.
Do we instantly know where they do it? Nope.
I think we can do better.
Let’s Look At Example Two:
Same search as before — vast difference.
I’ve again excluded the header and the company info, but this all showed up without me needing to scroll down.
Do we instantly know what they do? “Managed IT Services”
Do we instantly know who they do it for? “Servicing Nashville Businesses”
Do we instantly know where they do it? “Nashville”
Now, in all honesty, I think this site could use a little bit of a cosmetic makeover, but I’ll take CLEAR over CLEVER any day of the week.
Furthermore, they go on to hit on a pain point many people have with their current “IT guy.”
Here’s Another Great Example:
They are even MORE specific on WHO they do business with “NYC Law Firms.” If you were the office manager for a law firm tasked with finding an IT company and hit this page, you’d know you found a real option.
The Simple Headline Formula:
We help (WHO) in (WHERE) with all of their (WHAT).
Example: We help manufacturers in Dallas/Fort Worth with all of their IT, tech, and ERP needs.
If You Really Want To Get Advanced, Do A Slight Add-On:
We help (WHO) in (WHERE) with all of their (WHAT), so that you can (2–3 things they hate dealing with).
Example: We help manufacturers in Dallas/Fort Worth with all of their IT, tech, and ERP needs so that you can eliminate downtime, streamline siloed systems that don’t communicate, and avoid ever needing to worry about “tech” again.
I know this is a big departure from headlines like “Cloud, Infrastructure, Expertise,” but that’s the point!
Make sure your headline can answer those three questions, and you’re in good shape.
“What? What’s that, you say?” I think I heard someone saying, “But I have multiple markets and serve multiple types of clients, so how do I do this?”
Easy! If you have multiple markets or multiple niches, just make a different page for each.
I made this same mistake when I first got into real estate before the marketing gods bestowed their wisdom on me.
In fact, I remember being proud of my very first ad headline that encompassed EVERYONE. Ready to be amazed? “Helping everyone in Chicagoland from first-time buyers to seasoned real estate investors.”
Bam! That should be golden, as there are about 10 million people in “Chicagoland,” and I had just announced I could help them all!
This ad (that I prepaid for 24 months) generated a grand total of ZERO inquires … ZERO leads … ZERO anything. I guess less than zero, really, because I spent thousands on it.
Within a short period of time, I had a lot of websites, marketing materials, reports, etc. with headlines like “Helping Libertyville’s Heritage Area Home Owners Sell Fast.” I also had “The First-Time Buyer Specialist For Mundelein” and “Gurnee” and “Grayslake” and many others.
It was rinse and repeat.
I even targeted “Buffalo Grove Homeowners Who Back To High-Tension Lines Sell For Top Dollar!”
I “specialized” in 47 different things and had webpages (not whole sites, just a page on my site) that targeted each one specifically.
And you can do the same.
As a bonus, having multiple pages, each with a different location or market segment, will also help your SEO and attract more people to your page, and that’s really what you were trying to do in the first place.
Not sure? Google “Washington, D.C., IT support” and see who comes up first after ads.
For the last several months (and maybe longer), it’s been this site:
Intelice.com/washington-dc-It-support
Notice it’s NOT Intelice.com.
Intelice.com is their general site, so it doesn’t rank anywhere when I look for “Washington, D.C., IT support.”
Looking for IT services in Columbia, Maryland? Then you’re likely to find Intelice.com/managed-it-services-columbia.
They have several other areas they service, all with similar webpages that you’ll be directed to in a search.
So that’s it. Change your website headline using the formula I shared to answer the three questions: What, Who, and Where.
Then, for extra credit, build other pages to increase your SEO juice and attract the right people.
Until next time!
