Websites are still around, even if it feels redundant because of AI & content creation platforms. Here’s what we see is working, and what’s dying.

Brand Touchpoints – How Websites Build Your Brand

Your website is the definitive moment to establish your brand. It’s where you can align with your customer. The way your website feels, the way it looks, & the content that you share all build on top of an impression your users already have about you. These are brand touch points. The more they see you, the more you align your values with their values, the higher likelihood that they need a solution they will work with you.

‘Branding’ is more important than ever. Trust is at an all time low, scams are on the rise, & the barrier of entry is low. That’s why building brand touch points that reinforce your values and align your customers with you is a necessity. We’ll talk about how your website can rank online, build your brand, & generate more business.

The Hub – Your Website

Your website is still your Hub. Even if they found something you said interesting on your linkedin post or your instagram reel, when they want to find out more, they will find your website. Your website is the bridge from the bottomless void of content to an intentional framing of your brand. That’s why we recommend having the core 5 pages of building your brand touch points:

• Home Page (duh) – this sets the tone of the website
• The about us page – this builds a connection
• Your offer page – where conversion happen
• FAQ – addressing those objections
• The ‘moment’ – A unique experience tailored to your business that helps your customers

Let’s talk about what your ‘moment’ can be.

Fun Experiences

These always provide value to your customers. Quizzes, tests, interactivity, & feedback. Think of anything that feels like ‘play’. These widgets are more important than ever and tying them to conversion actions are increasingly more important. Here’s a special moment we built for Pat Norton, an insurance consultant focusing on athletes & veterans. This reinforces his brand to existing customers and helps align his values with his values.

Connecting Local Data to Classic Tools

We created this water heater savings calculator specific to Tacoma’s local data, and it’s one of their best ranking pages. Combine local information to a service you provide, but clearly show how it will help them with a custom developed tool. With AI & a smidge of technical experience, you can have Claude boot up a custom coded tool quite easily.

Thought Pieces

Building your brand with thought pieces has never been more important. There’s a disdain for AI and seeing it everywhere. However, the more they see AI in your business, the more em dashes— “no drama, just clarity” type of of copy text, the more repulsed they might be. That’s why it’s important to create thought pieces that are just that, your thoughts. This builds trust & authority to the people that matter. Even if your thought pieces aren’t SEO optimized, building out an email list to send these though pieces to will help build super fans.

Conversion Pages

Landing pages, money pages, conversion pages— whatever the hell you want to call it, still matter. A carefully crafted offer that meets your ICP where they are at, never fails. The classic conversion factors like risk reversals, authority building, social proofing, clear writing, aligning with your customer, ethical scarcity, & being authentic still work. People want to be helped and they’ll pay for it. Include these page, afterall, your website is the hub, people want to be pointed in the right directions. Paying you might be one of those things.

Search Engine Optimization. What’s Going On With It?

SEO has been touted as the free way to get new leads for service businesses. Why would you ever pay advertising when you can just ‘do SEO’ and get leads for free. That’s how it was pitched. It turns out, that ranking 1st & maintaining that 1st place cost just as much as running an ad campaign. It’s still worth pursuing, but that there’s a sore misunderstanding of how ranking works. Not to mention, the first 1/2 of your screens when looking up a local service will be ads, anyways. That 1st place position matters less and less with all of the ads.

How are people finding answers to questions?

People find answers to questions from AI. Even if you rank 1st place, there has been a 67% drop in clicks for the 1st place position, with favor being placed on AI overviews. Additionally, the “zero-click” era has been ushered in, with users finding answers to their questions without ever having to visit a website.

So what does this mean for the rest of the industry? The good news is that AI platforms reference the same type of website that you’d find on google anyway, so to rank within GPT is the same to rank on Google. But if your content addresses questions that AI answers better, then there isn’t a whole lot of value in writing that content, outside of building authority. We advise creating content/tools/write-ups that require you to visit the page in order to receive the value. Think of a pricing calculator or a web-speed analyzer— you have to go the site to get that value.

But not all is lost, recently Google updated their search algorithm to include more content from local experts. This is fantastic news for service business in hopes of gaining more clicks, but to what extent are clicks from informational material important to what businessses care about.

If you’re playing the long game, you understand that value provided today will be reaped later in the customer journey. The more positive brand touchpoints they have with you today increases the odds they purchase from you tomorrow. But if you don’t have money to invest for tomorrow, what is the value? You can build some authority in your local vicinity, which will help your other pages rank higher. But how do you reap that value sooner? Let’s talk about it.

The Lead Magnet – Beating AI search engines

More important than ever is being able to tie in the information that you are able to provide into a lead magnet. An example of this is creating a water heater savings calculator specific to your city. This means you’re able to grab information without a ton of documentation and people will have to land on your website in order to perform the calculation. There is a level of specificity that is implied within the calculator that people are more likely to rely on than a guesstimate that an AI platform would create. Besides, you will most likely be referenced within AI query, which will help your overall SEO. This will aid in improving the rank of other, more important pages that lead to revenue.

Increasingly, topical information with a local bend has become more important in a recent update from Google. This means that writing content using expertise on the subject and relating it to insights about the city is the key to rank. These build valuable brand touch points for conversions later on in the buying cycle.

With the downranking of general information based pages, creating these lead magnets that push for emails to add to an email list is ever more important. You can advertise these lead magnets and build a list by directly sending them offers or using them in an advertising list.

Final Thoughts

Building brand that offsets the fears of the American consumer is the way to win. That happens by showing face, showing your humanity, and letting AI do the work unseen by the customer. Build your website in a way that accentuates the human part of your business, and let AI execute on the technical side of your business. Create the 5 big pages and make sure to include a unique page that AI will love to reference. SEO & websites go hand in hand but the constant changes of SEO, the drop in value in ranking, & the more ad spots eat up organic positions make it hard to want to invest a lot of effort into.