Who Are You Actually Talking To? What is a customer profile and why you need one.

Here's a question that stops many small business owners short: who is your website for?

The most common answer is "everyone".

It makes sense from where you're standing - your product or service could genuinely help all kinds of people. You don't want to exclude anyone - and appealing for everyone feels safer than narrowing down and potentially missing out.

But appealing to everyone, can end up appealing to no one.

When your website tries to speak to every possible visitor at once, it ends up saying nothing that resonates with any of them. The copy becomes vague - and if it doesn't clearly answer anyone's specific problem, Google has no reason to show it to anyone.

The shop window problem

Imagine walking past a bakery with cupcakes in the window. You go in expecting to buy a

delicious cake, but find they’re selling bakeware, mixing bowls, spatulas...

Not quite what it said on the tin! So after a quick look around, you leave.

That's what happens when your website content doesn't match what the person arriving was actually looking for. They don't need to read much. They came for cupcakes, they found bakeware, and they're gone - straight back to Google to find what they actually wanted.

And Google notices. If it keeps sending visitors to your site and they keep leaving immediately, it takes that as a signal that your page isn't the right answer. It stops ranking you.

This is also why you see Google Ad campaigns failing… but more on that later! 

The fix isn't writing more. It's getting clear on who you're writing for - and making sure everything on your site speaks to that person.

Who are you starting with?

You might genuinely serve a wide range of customers. But you can't write for all of them at once.

The goal isn't to exclude people - it's to choose who you're starting the conversation with. Which customer, if you could fill a room with them, would make your business work? Who is most likely to buy from you, come back, and refer you?

Start to build from there.

What is a customer profile? And why you need them

A customer profile (or customer persona) is a way of putting a face to the person you're writing for. It doesn't need to be complicated. What matters is that it's specific enough for you to actually picture that person, what they need, how they find you, how you would speak to them in person.

A basic customer profile covers five things:

1. Who they are:  Age.... Occupation.... Location...

   It doesn't need to be a detailed biography - just enough so you can picture them clearly.

   
   

2. What they're trying to do: 

   What are they looking for when they find you? What problem are they trying to solve? How urgent is it?

   
   

3. What makes them hesitate: Price? Trust? Other options? Not knowing what to expect from working with you?

   This shapes what your content needs to reassure them about.
   

4. What they already know: Are they familiar with your service, or are they a new customer?

   This changes everything about the language you use and how much you need to explain.

   
   

5. What they actually type into Google: Not the words you'd use to describe your service - the words they'd use to describe their problem.

That last one is the most important, and it's what many small business don't realise. The gap between how you think about your business and how your customer searches, could be wider than you think:

You might call it "bespoke residential landscaping consulting", but your customer types "help with my garden." Same service - but if your website only uses the first phrase, you're customers won't find you.

A customer profile example

Chippenham Park is a historic estate with two distinct things to offer: an exclusive wedding

venue, and stunning RHS Partner Gardens open seasonally to day visitors. Two very different audiences, with completely different motivations for being there.

The wedding couple are wants to picture their day, understand the capacity, and arrange a viewing, whilst the garden visitor wants to know whether the gardens are open this weekend, can they bring their dog, and how to get a ticket.

When both audiences landed on the same website with no clear pathway for either, both left, frustrated, without what they came for. The wedding visitor couldn't answer basic questions about capacity and the garden visitor thought they were looking at the wrong place. Neither felt like the site was talking to them - because it wasn't.

Rebuilding the site with both audiences in mind, with clear routes to what each person actually needed, resulted in a 40% increase in traffic, a huge increase in garden visitors (even on cold rainy days!), and an increase in wedding viewings.

The two offerings didn't disappear - we reorganised the content and the signposting (links, navigation etc), to be clearer and help users find answers to their questions.

Building your own customer profile

You don't need specialist tools to start... begin with what you already know:

Think about the customers you've most enjoyed working with - or who were the best match, or who came back. What do they have in common? What did they say when they first got in touch? What were they worried about? What did they hesitate over?

If you have old emails, go and read them. Look at the language your customers use. The questions they ask before they commit. The things they say thank you for. That's your customer profile, already written, hiding in plain sight.

From there, it's worth spending some time looking at how people actually search for what you offer. Free tools like Google Autocomplete (just start typing your service into Google and see what it suggests), the "People also ask" section in search results, and Ahrefs' free keyword generator will show you the exact phrases people use when they're looking for your kind of service. The difference between those phrases and the language on your website is often where the problem starts.

If your site is already live, Google Search Console shows you which search terms are bringing people to your pages - and which pages they're landing on. It's free, and it tells you more about your actual audience than most people realise. Many website hosting services, eg Wordpress and Wix, have easy plugins so you can apply Google Search Console to your site easily and quickly without having to go near any code.

What if your business is new?

If you don't have existing customers to draw on yet, you'll need to make some educated guesses about who you're writing for. That's fine - the important thing is to form a clear hypothesis, build your content around that person, and validate your assumptions.

Your analytics and Google Search Console will begin to tell you who's arriving and what they were searching for. Your customer profile isn't set in stone. It's a working document. The businesses that get this right revisit it as they learn more - not because they were wrong, but because they know more now than they did when they started.

Can you do it yourself?

Yes, and it's worth trying. A few conversations with your best customers, a read through your old emails, and some time with a free keyword tool will take you further than most business owners expect.

Where it gets harder is doing this consistently across a whole website - writing for that specific person through every page, every heading, every call to action - and continuing to hone that message over time as your business matures and you learn more about your customers - while also running your business. Be careful not to underestimate the time it takes to create, manage and iterate your content and website to attract your audience.\

Audience research and positioning is the starting point for every project I take on at Diopatra. Before anything is designed or written, I want to understand who the site is actually for - because everything else follows from that. If you'd rather have that work done properly from the start, get in touch.

Next week's post....

Knowing who you're talking to is step one. The next question is what happens once that person actually lands on your website. In the next post, we'll look at why so many small business websites aren't converting - even when they're getting traffic.