| How Is My Website Connecting with the Goals of My Business? |
Take a look at what you’ve written on your Goals Worksheet. Is there a disconnect between your business goals and your current website? Is your website focused on corporate info or, worse yet, executive bios instead of your business goals? Or does the website provide only content geared toward supporting existing clients when the primary business goal is to gain new clients?
Who Do I Want to Visit My Website? In the introduction, we pointed out the fact that the person who you most want to find your website is the person who is searching for your website! And, of course, this is true. But now let’s dig a little deeper and describe your ideal audience so that you can help them make their way to you. Who is the target audience for your website? Surely it will include potential clients/customers. But don’t forget that it may also include members of the press, employees at your own company, current and past customers seeking support, even potential investors nosing about for the inside scoop! Using your Goals Worksheet, describe your target audience with as much detail as possible: professional status, technical vs. nontechnical (this will affect how they search or even which engines they use), age, workplace vs. home users, and geographic locality. Knowing your target audience(s) will help you make important decisions—such as keyword choices, directory site submittals, and budget for paid listings—when you start your SEO campaign. It will also help you segment your site for each audience, which can improve your sales and other goals, as well as usability. Jason at Babyfuzzkin says, “Our target audience is parents of infants and small children, with a great sense of style and plenty of surplus income. They are probably fairly technically savvy, maybe a little short on time because of the kids—that’s why they’re shopping online. Also, a lot of our customers are grandparents, buying the clothes as gifts. Some parents don’t want to spend as much on clothes they know are just going to get covered in oatmeal and grass stains! And the grandparents, they are a lot less savvy with the Internet. They use it from home, maybe with a slow connection, and they’re located nationwide.”
Which Pages Do I Most Want My Website Visitors to See?
Now it’s time to start thinking about the top-priority pages for your SEO campaign. These are the pages you’ll optimize when you get to your daily tasks in Part III. These are the pages that you most want people to get to from the search engines, and for best results, they should contain the most compelling content and the most useful information. Since your visitors “land” on these pages from the search engines, we call them landing pages (you might also hear them called entry pages). The main functions of your landing pages are that they speak to your desired audience and contain a call to action for your desired conversion. Figure 1.1 illustrates possible paths through your website from entry to conversion. Often, your landing page and your conversion page will be the same, as is the case with Babyfuzzkin’s Gift Sets page. This is a great situation because your site visitor doesn’t have to navigate within your site to complete a conversion. Other times, your conversion page will not be an appropriate entry page because your visitor will need to review other information first and then make the decision to continue. After all, the Web is a highly nonlinear space, and your visitors are free to ramble around your site in all sorts of ways. |
