Identify Audience

Many businesses make the mistake of building a website whose goal is to describe their company. The thing is, that’s not what the site’s visitors are looking for. Prospects, existing customers, employees, and investors are among the different groups visiting your website…the goal should be to serve their needs.

Your website’s content and the way you present it will determine what actions your audience takes. This is critical if the goal of your website is to help generate sales, service customers, or communicate with employees or investors.

The best way to understand your audience’s needs is to figure out how and for what they are searching. You can discover this from both internal and external sources of information.
Internal sources of information are your sales, customer service, investor relations, and human relations departments. Typically, each department routinely answers but a handful of the same questions from their constituents. Customers probably ask your sales staff, for example, about product specifications, service capabilities, pricing, availability, and product feature and benefits.

External sources of information include user surveys, site keyword data, and search engine keyword data. They provide insight as to the information needs and search patterns of potential customers. Keyword data comes from two sources:

• Keyword data available via your website tracking software: This will tell you the precise terms visitors used to find your website. You will find out what’s important to your visitors and then organize your site to provide this information.

• Search engine keyword research tools: These provide insight as to how all users interested in your products or services search. The difference is that the vast majority of these users will never make it to your website. That is, of course, unless you take measures to build and optimize (for the search engines) content to include these search phrases.
  

The table below shows data from a keyword research tool called Wordtracker. It provides insight into the way users might search for Internet marketing or search engine optimization information or services. We can make several observations from this data.

• After studying the verbs, adverbs, and adjectives within the search terms people used, it is clear that many searchers are trying to solve a specific problem.

• Poor search engine ranking, or

• Low search engine traffic.

• Many people search by describing a desired outcome to an existing negative situation.

• Words like “improved,” “higher,” “increased,” “better,” and “more” are indicators as to the result customers are looking for.

• These people are still in the information gathering stage and are likely not ready to make a buy decision.

• Many people search for a specific service.

• These users understand their problem well enough to articulate a solution.

• These users are closer to making a buy decision than those gathering information.

• Price does not appear to be a dominate concern.

• Internet marketing and/or search engine optimization is not viewed as a commodity.

• Geographic proximity of an Internet marketing or search engine optimization company is important to a small group of searchers.

At Site-Seeker, Inc., we help our customers identify the needs of their audience so they can develop websites that convert visitors into customers. You can contact us and get started today.

The Point

"Prospects, existing customers, employees, and investors are among the different groups visiting your website…the goal should be to serve their needs."