By Corrie Driebusch And Shira Ovide 

Shares of GoDaddy Inc., a technology provider to small businesses, opened at $26.15 in their market debut Wednesday, 31% above their initial public offering price.

The stock recently traded at $26.10 on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "GDDY."

GoDaddy, which is perhaps known nearly as much for its racy television commercials as it is for selling Web domains, has been working to make over its image. It also wants to promote that it does more than sell Web domains, including helping customers get their websites running, growing their business, and selling them products.

GoDaddy priced its initial public offering at $20 a share late Tuesday, above expectations. The deal raised $460 million by selling 23 million shares. The company had planned to sell 22 million shares between $17 and $19, according to a regulatory filing.

The total doesn't include a so-called overallotment option, which gives underwriters the opportunity to sell additional shares under certain circumstances. Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Citigroup led the deal.

GoDaddy's image makeover is part of the plan behind the IPO, according to people close to the company. Commercials with model Bar Refaeli and race-car driver Danica Patrick are gone. A Super Bowl ad in February showed a business owner skipping the big game to work at his desk.

GoDaddy also wants to tell the world it is more than Web addresses. The company seeks to convince its 13 million customers to buy newer services like company-specific email addresses, bookkeeping software and e-commerce tools.

The broader product strategy is potentially more lucrative, but it also exposes GoDaddy to a fleet of rivals vying for small-business owners. It is an open question whether GoDaddy can remain relevant as scores of tech firms pursue a similar approach.

GoDaddy became the go-to provider of Web addresses, known as domains, thanks to the marketing strategy of Bob Parsons, who founded the company in 1997. The company's first Super Bowl ad in 2005 featured a woman with a low-cut top raising a ruckus at a mock congressional hearing. Mr. Parsons kept a blog to stir attention about what he said were racy ads rejected by TV networks.

"As long as they know we're GoDaddy.com, and they can type it into their browser, that's all I'm after," Mr. Parsons told The Wall Street Journal in 2007.

Shifting the brand's identity now won't be easy, said Allen Adamson, chairman of the North America region for branding firm Landor Associates. "It's hard to go from something edgy and trendy and outrageous into what's necessary to succeed in a [business-to-business] world," he said.

In IPO documents, the company said there "can be no assurance that we will succeed in repositioning our brand, or that by doing so we will grow our total customers, increase our revenue or maintain our current high level of brand recognition."

The new owners hired technology-product executive Blake Irving as chief executive, signaling a push to upgrade the company's technology. The company opened offices in Silicon Valley and the Boston area to attract high-caliber talent. Since 2010, spending on technology operations has more than doubled, a faster pace than GoDaddy's revenue growth over the same period.

Perhaps a bigger change--and the one on which GoDaddy is hitching its fortune--is the shift to providing a more extensive range of services from selling Web domains.

The company increasingly has pitched add-ons like website hosting, or running the computers that keep a company's website online. GoDaddy also sells email addresses customized to a company name, digital security features, and versions of Microsoft Office software tailored for tiny businesses. A GoDaddy service called Get Found automatically creates listings on Facebook, Yelp and other digital spots where people look for business information.

Sales of the newer GoDaddy services have grown at least twice as fast as domain sales and have fatter profit margins. Continued growth in customer sign-ups plus the new services have pushed up average annual revenue from each GoDaddy customer to $114 in 2014 from $93 in 2012. Still, GoDaddy generates more than half its revenue from domain sales.

Technology companies increasingly are targeting small businesses, hoping to turn mom-and-pop operations into a foundation for growing their own businesses. Hopefuls include payments company Square Inc., e-commerce tools provider Shopify Inc., and online-marketing firm Yodle Inc. Shopify and Yodle are planning IPOs this year, The Wall Street Journal has previously reported.

While GoDaddy tries to hook small-business owners on its suite of services, its rivals are following a similar playbook. Two companies that help small businesses design and run websites, Wix.com Ltd. and Squarespace Inc., also help small businesses design and run websites, and each advertised during this year's Super Bowl broadcast with ads that embraced star power, featuring former NFL quarterback Brett Favre and actor Jeff Bridges, respectively.

So far, public investors have embraced only tepidly the idea that small businesses are a big opportunity. Shares of small-business domain seller Endurance International Group Holdings Inc. are up 59% since their first day of trading in 2013, while shares of Wix are up 14% since their public debut.

Investors are pricing these firms at lower valuations than other Internet companies. Wix trades at about five times revenue, and Endurance at about four times. That compares to average of eight times revenue for companies in the Bessemer Venture Partners' Cloud Computing Index, which mostly consists of companies that provide Web-based services to big firms.

GoDaddy and others say the small-business market is big enough to accommodate a wealth of entrants. "Having multiple players means the space is growing well," said Endurance CEO Hari Ravichandran.

Telis Demos contributed to this article.

Write to Corrie Driebusch at corrie.driebusch@wsj.com and Shira Ovide at shira.ovide@wsj.com

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