After years of paying more attention to my client’s brand than my own, I finally said to myself “what am I doing?”  And my answer was…so far, nothing.

So that all is now changing.  My clients and friends have probably noticed a subtle change in how they receive emails from Hannush Enterprises.  Gone are the days of the mile long signature, featuring any method of communication including instructions on how to contact support.

No one was paying any attention.  And why should they?  We were doing the same thing we had been doing for years…basically following the status quo on our communications.

The shock came when I did a customer survey.  My customers were overall happy with how things were going…in fact, oddly enough our highest rated strength was in Customer Service and Responsiveness.  Sadly though, it was also our biggest weakness (although not many people answered the weakness question…which makes me happy…I wouldn’t have thought to leave it blank as an answer…I have smart customers obviously!).

So, after all of my months of trying to get people to read my big notice above the signature of my emails about how contacting the support desk would get them faster service or trying to get testimonials to my Yelp account, I decided a swift kick in a new direction was needed.

The answer: a new look, a new focus, and finally a brand I could be happy with.

But before unveiling a new brand, I had to think seriously (yes, seriously finally) about who Hannush Enterprises, LLC is as a company.  What is our personality?  I had told my customers this day in and day out, but I wasn’t taking my own advice.

I finally said, the cowboy look has to go (the current brown incarnation of our website)…I liked the colors and wanted to get away from blue (my wife says all of my websites are blue…which isn’t entirely true, but there are a lot of them).  But this was change for the wrong reason.  You don’t brand yourself to get away from something.  You brand yourself because you want people to know in a glance who you are.  And a good brand says more than hundreds of words of copy about who a company is.

Our focus has always been on making the technical seem simple.  We talk to our customers about technical issues, but we translate into simple to understand concepts.  We design websites with a focus on making them clean and concise.  We focus on simple navigation that helps customers find products and services quick and easily.

Yet our own brand was sending a different message.

In addition, we have been separating aspects of our business from each other.  Why is our blog branded as “Revolve Your Brain?”  It was catchy, different, and I wanted to be able to bridge the gap between Hannush.com and Evolve Your Search.com.  Plus I liked the burgundy color.  Again, all the wrong reasons.

Sometimes we endeavor to show so much creativity that we fall off the end of the planet.

Over the next few days and weeks we will be unveiling our new brand.  We have had positive feedback from our clients and we think it is clean, positive, a strong symbol for our dedication to the web, and our ever growing reach over the world of search engine marketing, web design, and social media.

If you made it this far through the article, I am going to reward you with a sneak peek at our new logo.   Watch for our new web design to quickly follow.  Heck, I just finished putting in my order for my new business cards too.  A cohesive brand and a new dedication to doing what we suggest for our customers…make your brand feel like you.

Here it is…let us know what you think.

Well, surprising to me, in the highly competitive market of Greenville, SC we were able to jump in with both feet and within 2 1/2 months the site hit #3 in Google under the keywords “Greenville Web Design.”

This was our goal when we started, since we had pretty much completely ignored our own website’s optimization to focus on our clients instead (funny how web design companies always forget to focus on their own sites).  But a slow economy made us realize that good search engine placement is critical at all times, because you never know what will happen tomorrow and you don’t want to be playing catch up when you need the business the most.

In the Greenville market we had always been around page 3 or 4 in Google results, so it felt like a triumphant achievement when be broke onto page 1 of Google, let alone the result of hitting as high as #3 ahead of some firmly established web design companies.

Yet it was even more surprising when we looked at our Asheville, NC results the other day.  Asheville is where I grew up and we have a couple of customers there, but it has always been a very creative market and one that I thought was untouchable.  In fact, our search results there were non-existent.  In January, you couldn’t find us as deep as page 10 in Google.

Today, I looked and we were #2 under “Asheville Web Design.”  I must say, this was a lot more than I was expecting.

But this proves that in some cases good search engine optimization and a lot of patience (it took 5 months to get here) alone can get you to the results you desire and maybe better.

The key is, use your website’s strengths to leverage the results you desire and decide up front where you want to focus your energies.  Then hyperfocus on that goal.

A single plan of conquering a couple of keywords or markets can really help you and your web designer take your site to the next level in SEO.  But don’t rest on your laurels.  There is another website soon to sniff out your techniques.  SEO takes patience, but it also takes some care and maintenance.

For more information on how to achieve your SEO goals, I’d suggest trying out our Free Web Report, from EvolveYourSearch.com.  It will give you a little food for thought and help you decide if SEO is your next logical step.