A Celebrity Website?

“Here’s my understanding of how people find my website,” a client recently told us. “They hear my name or the name of my organization, they search for one of those terms, and my website comes up.” His website is findable, he figures, because it is a celebrity website.

We often hear from clinics and other health care facilities that they want to focus on the names of their doctors. “We figure people identify more with their doctors than with anything else,” they tell us. And sure enough, medical facilities do usually find that they get a high proportion of their traffic from the names of the physicians working there. Their doctors are local celebrities, so they can target their website as a celebrity website.

Plenty of our clients are celebrities in small, specialized communities. Their press coverage, the books they’ve written, or their reputations in their fields are among the assets they have for their marketing efforts. We can make sure that helps their website reach their intended audience.

Is this a practical marketing strategy for you?

Do you have a celebrity website?

If you’re a celebrity in the sense that you are a famous actor or sports figure, you know that you’re a celebrity. But we’re talking here about something a bit different. You may be a celebrity within your particular community. Maybe you’re a well-known local vet or a popular blogger in a niche market. Maybe you plan to be a famous medical specialist or you’re writing a book and intend to be a best-selling author.

If your name is the keyword that brings you the most traffic, then you might want to treat your website as a celebrity website. Your personal brand should be a big part of your marketing strategy.

If this is either your current reality or your goal, you should build your own name and identity into your website:

• Use your name in your URL (web address).
• Include your name in the main navigation and/or homepage text.
• Include your name among the keywords you work on.
• Connect with your readers directly, sharing behind-the-scenes views and linking to news stories about you and your work.

Do you want more?

Remember, the usual path to purchase looks like the diagram below. People may hear about you and look for your name online, but they probably also follow this common pattern:

You may be the most popular physical therapist in town, a physical therapist to the stars, with speaking engagements and a clear personal brand. But the number of people looking for help with back pain will still be much larger than the number of people searching for your name.

Extend your reach by making sure that you have content for people all along the path to purchase:

• Identify and work on keywords for every stage of search, from recognizing a problem to taking action.
• Produce good content for each of those keywords. Have great go-to content on your website, and leverage your name recognition to place guest posts or affiliate links on other high quality websites.
• Include a strong call to action in every piece of content, whether it’s a simple form to fill out or a link to a dedicated sales page. Your celebrity status will increase your conversion rates all along the way.

Don’t ignore quality.

Sometimes we meet people who think that their reputation means they don’t have to have a high quality website. Their visitors, they decide, will not care how their website looks, because they are famous.

Actually, their visitors are likely to question whether their shoddy website is actually associated with the celebrity they think they know and love.

Recently, a government official tweeted a controversial position. There was plenty of reaction on Twitter, but quite a few people concluded (and tweeted) that they thought the account was fake. There were few tweets, few followers, and no sign of the strategic use a real government official ought to make of Twitter. We checked, and the account is real. Visitors don’t trust it, though.

If you’re a celebrity hand surgeon, your website should look like a celebrity hand surgeon’s website. That means polished design, up to date technology, great functionality, and excellent content. Anything less is likely to damage your reputation.

Our SEO strategy document will help you use the celebrity website strategy effectively in your specific circumstances.