Cheetos & Mountain Dew?
If you’re reading this, you’ve surely heard of this thing called the Internet, and you’ve probably visited your share of websites. But, how much thought have you put into the design of those websites? Probably not a lot, you just expect them to be there and provide you with easy access to information… and that is as it should be.
Most of us tend to think of a website as being designed in a dark room by some nerdy guys with a bag of Cheetos and a couple cans of Mountain Dew nearby. That’s often not too far from the truth! But, those guys are doing a heck of a lot more than you might think they are.
In the early days of the Internet, there really wasn’t much to consider in designing a website. Choose a background color, choose a text color, sprinkle a little bit of clip art here and there, add your text content and call it a day. While those things still need to be done, a successful modern website requires a great deal more attention to detail in many different areas.
While we could easily write a book on Modern Website Design based on our experience in the field, we’ve decided to narrow the focus of this series of articles to appeal to the business professional who doesn’t need to know how to design a website, but just needs to know a little about the process in order to make more informed decisions about who to hire and what to ask for when they are faced with the need for a new website. This series will be presented in two parts. This part will cover the content of the website, and the second part will cover design and programming. Both of these topics are probably much broader than you expect!
Let’s brush the Cheetos crumbs to the side and take a look, shall we? Don’t worry, we’ll keep this article as non-technical as possible.
Content Is King!
First, let’s be perfectly clear, the most important part of any website is the CONTENT of that website. We like to say that “content is king”. We can build a fancy website that looks awesome, has great functionality, and might even have good search engine optimization, but it will ultimately fail to meet its objectives if the information on that website does not address the user’s needs. The modern Internet consumer expects a great deal of information to be available and presented in an easily digestible manner. This is the on-demand Internet age, and every question a person might have, they expect to find a quick and easy answer for. If your website isn’t providing that information and your competitor’s website is… guess who’s getting the sale? Content is king, and it’s worth whatever it costs to gather, develop and present it.
Generating effective website content means a lot more than just having a knowledgeable person free-associate a stream of everything they know about a business and it’s products and dumping it on a page with some photos. (though, that isn’t a bad place to start!) That information needs to be organized and presented in a logical manner so that it meets the needs and expectations of your website visitors.
There are two primary types of Internet users that will visit your website. Those who just want a quick answer and need to be able to find it quickly, and those who are there to read and learn everything they can. Most users will be closer to the “quick answer” type, which is why a well-organized menu and website structure, and well-organized and written content on each page are critical to the success of a website. We can’t overlook those who want more in-depth information, however -- website content needs to enlighten and entertain, as well. Website content must provide a balance that will appeal to both the fact seeker and the more casual browser.
Lost & Found
Okay, so you’ve come up with thorough content and taken the time to organize and structure it so that it makes sense to people… now, how do you keep it from becoming lost among the millions of other websites on the Internet? This is what is called “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO), and while it is a fairly simple concept, it does take a great deal of work to do effectively. How do we get your website “found”?
It all starts with research. Words and phrases (we call them “search terms”) related to your business are examined to see which ones are most used in actual web searches. We then gauge the depth of competition for each of those terms, and whether that competition is related to your business or not. Synonyms and related terms are also examined, sometimes those that you might not have considered. A list of the best terms related to each page of your website should be compiled and used to optimize the content on that page.
Now, remember, we said “content is king”… and that is SO true that if your content is thorough, well-written and relevant to your business, the optimization of that content becomes much easier. With a good content base, we will often merely have to make slight adjustments to the content to emphasize the most important terms. We call this “natural” SEO, and it is invariably the most effective method of SEO. Search engines get more complex and “intelligent” by the day, so any tricks applied to your website to fool them will ultimately fail. The search engines are learning to see the true content of a page and rank it accordingly, so if your content “naturally” fits the bill, it should always be ranked well.
Of course, there’s much more to it than that. Search engines also look at how popular your website is, how long it’s been around, and many other things that they just plain don’t tell us. So, no matter how good of a job we do optimizing a website, we can never guarantee how well that site will rank in the search engines. (and anybody who tells you otherwise is lying to you!)
50 Million Visitors – 5 Sales
Having lots of people find your website is a good thing, right? It means we’ve done our job, we’ve succeeded at this “SEO” thing, right? Wrong! It can be easy to get found on the search engines and generate traffic. As easy as inserting (intentionally or otherwise) a controversial word or phrase, or something related to a certain three-letter word that begins with “s” and ends with “x”! But, if the traffic you’ve generated is the wrong traffic, it is of no benefit to your business. What you really want are “qualified visitors”, visitors who are truly interested in your product, and might actually generate revenue for you. You’ll hear this referred to as “improving conversion rate”. You want to “convert” those website visitors into sales.
How do we find qualified visitors and improve conversion? Simply by doing more thorough research to learn what people who are interested in your products are actually searching for. Not just what “everybody” is searching for, but what “your target market” is searching for. It’s not as easy as it sounds, and sometimes it takes careful review of the statistics of the website itself over a period of time to learn about how visitors are actually finding using the site.
A 6-month SEO review can tell us an awful lot about how a site is working and how to improve it. What terms are people finding the site with? Which terms are resulting in visits that “bounce” (immediately leave the site because it wasn’t what they were looking for)? Which terms result in visitors that spend a lot of time on your site and view a lot of your pages? And lastly, which terms have the most visits that end with either your “contact” or “checkout” page, achieving the ultimate goal of conversion? Learning which terms work will help us to make them work better. Learning which ones DON’T work (especially if they are terms that “should” work) helps us to learn which areas of the website content may need improvement to better meet the needs of your visitors.
So, while the monthly services that some “SEO Experts” might try to sell you are almost certainly not of great value, revisiting your website statistics, SEO and content periodically can pay big dividends to your bottom line. A quarterly or bi-annual website review his highly recommended.
Now What?
Did you notice that we haven’t actually started designing a website yet? We’ve got good content and a plan for how to structure it on the website, but no website at all! And so it goes. Really, it is as it should be. In fact, if you’ve heard of “Web 2.0”, it’s all about separating content from presentation… and that’s exactly what we’ve done. It is pointless to have a design with no content! Be sure to read the second article in this series to learn about building a proper website to display the content.
