Attract Visitors to Your Website With this Golden Rule
The Rule: Put Yourself in Your Visitor’s Shoes
The most important concept in web design is to create your website for your visitors. This is a simple concept, but one that takes a little practice. It requires the ability of being able to put yourself in your visitor’s place. Instead of starting from the position of what we want our visitors to know and see about us, we start with the question of what would our visitors want to know or see about us. What is the information they seek? What is the experience they seek? Why are they visiting? What’s in it for them?
Putting this concept into practice will increase the likelihood of being found online by the people you want to be found by and holding their attention once they get there.
What Kind of shoes do your visitors wear? Find out and walk a while in them. Then create your dream website1
Here are the first three vital steps in this process.
The first step is to explore who your target visitors are. Where do they live; what are their demographics, age, education, sex; where do they reside. What kind of computers do they use? Do they use smart phones? Pads? Are they into cutting technology? Are they in a third world country? All of this matters in how a website is designed.
One way to find the technical and some demographic aspects of your visitors, is to be sure to use Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/) to get a sense of what computers or other devices your visitors use, and what type of operating systems and browsers they are using. Using Google Analytics will give you a sense of how many visitors you are getting on your website, their location and even their age, sex and interests.
How will your visitors find you on line? If someone wants to find your wonderful business, how will they find you? One way is through the judicious and well-planned use of keywords.
We hear a lot about keywords and keyword phrases and the idea of using keywords can seem baffling and/or spammy and unnecessary. Even so they are still a part Google’s method of page ranking. Keywords are simply words or phrases that people type into a search engine, like Google or Bing, to get information or find things, people or places. To connect with our visitors, we need to put ourselves in our visitors shoes and think of keywords that our visitors will plug in to find us. Besides our own brainstorming, we can also go to Google’s Keyword Planner https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/ and Bing’s Keyword Research Tool http://www.bing.com/toolbox/keywords to learn what our customers are looking for and get keyword ideas and suggestions for content.
Where do you place keywords? In the page title, and in the meta description of each page. They can also be used in the content of each page, especially in the first 250 words, but take care not to overdo it as you could get penalized by Google if you riddle your content with keywords indiscriminately. (Please contact us for more information on keywords, meta description, etc.)
Now that your visitor has found their way to your website, the next step is providing them with the information they are seeking. Taking into consideration who your target visitor is, what their demographics are, education, age, etc., place yourself once again in their shoes and think about the information they are likely seeking, what they hope to find, and what they are looking for. Be sure your website provides what they are looking for.!
You may even want to create two or three fictitious personas who represent a part your target visitors to explore what that that type of person may be coming for to the website, for example, women with young children, older retired adults, urban dwellers, etc.
These three steps are the beginning of creating a website for your visitors and for your success.