Whose Website Is It, Anyway?

A website is a great marketing tool. As long as the site is doing its job. That job is to attract your intended audience. And then make it easy for members of your audience to carrying out their objectives. How do you do that?

Create a website:

• that’s easy to find,
• that provides a good user experience, and
• that speaks directly to your audience.

Finding Your Site

The main way your audience reaches your content is through Google searches. That means you need search-engine-friendly content. Which is having subheads and copy containing key words your audience will type into Google. And using meta content on your home page to describe your organization.

Most of all, though—and this should not come as a shock—you need quality content that’s relevant, well written, well presented, and up to date. If you’re checking a site for the latest advances in animal ID tagging, for instance, what happens when you notice the site hasn’t been updated in 12 months? You look for another site. And you may never return.

What About My Home Page?

But what about my home page, you ask? I want users to visit my home page. Here’s the scoop: while you may go to your site via the home page, few others will. And if they do, it’s usually because Google put them there so they could decide where else in your site they wanted to go. Which means your home page needs to shine like a window into your content.

But, say, you want your audience to land on your home page for promotional purposes. How do you do that? By promoting your home page and its URL through advertising. And through brochures, email, and other materials about your products and services. Users also reach your home page (and your other content) through links from other websites and by word of mouth.

The User Experience

What happens when you go to a site for information, to find a product or service, or to complete a task? The last thing you want to do is to have to think. The website should be doing the thinking for you—anticipating your needs, so to speak.

What you’re looking for should be easy to find. You want relevant links. Intuitive, well-organized navigation. Now think about a member of the audience you covet going to your site for products, knowledge, instruction, or services. The game of hide and seek now becomes okay?

Actually, it’s natural to think it’s not a problem for your users to have to hunt down the links they want. Because, of course, you know where the information is. It’s right inside that hall closet and down some stone steps that lead into that old neglected root cellar. No, not by the shriveled potatoes. See those beets over in the far corner? Yeah, that’s where it is. Wasn’t that easy?

Influencing Your Audience

Creating home pages with content your audience doesn’t care about—information that reflects your internal structure, for instance—is worse than useless. It’s egos on display. You can have that kind of page, but you should tuck it away, maybe behind the shriveled potatoes.

Why? Because you’re presenting your audience with irrelevant content. You’re creating a puzzle. Or a roadblock. Distract, confuse, annoy your users, and they go somewhere else. There’s always somewhere else to go.

Think about an ad you’d put in the Sunday newspaper to promote your business or organization. Every inch of that ad is valuable marketing real estate. Would the ad contain absolutely anything that didn’t serve the purpose of influencing your audience? Would you put your dog Nipper’s photo in the ad? Or a birthday greeting to your Aunt Jo?

Of course not. These items don’t serve your purpose. Your home page is no different. It’s valuable real estate. It’s there to influence members of your audience—to persuade them that your internal pages are worth visiting and spending time with.

Which brings us back to quality content that’s relevant, well written, well presented, and up to date. Nothing makes a web audience happier and more likely to return.