Short YouTube advice by Phil Risher (Feb 9, 2024) warning small/local-business websites against common mistakes: overuse of stock photos and making the site all about the company narrative. He recommends using real branded photos, focusing copy on customers' problems and solutions (customer as hero, company as guide per StoryBrand), and adding social proof like Google reviews.
What are some things that you see on websites that are just bad? Yeah. So they need to not do that. Definitely. Well, stock images. You can't take iPhone and point and shoot at you or your technician in a branded something. You need to have those on your website. So get rid of as many stock photos as you can. That's bad. Having the, the website all about you is not good. There's a book called Storybrand and basically you're not the hero in the situation, you're the guide. The customer is the hero that has a problem and, and you're the guy that's going to help facilitate that process. So you want to really talk to the customer's problem set that you can solve. And so that's what we've found a lot. You go to the website and it's like, look at me, I started this company 10 years ago in my garage. Which is great story, but nobody cares. Yeah. But customers are trying to come to your site because they have a problem. They want their AC to work again. They don't care when you start the company. Yeah, none of that matters. Exactly. And so when you go to a website, try to focus it on the problems that you solve. Try to get some nice pictures up there, maybe share a couple of reviews from your Google business profile. That's good.
