Who is your website for?

Last week in my blog, I talked about what your business’ website should do.  Dealing with the ‘what’ is great, but you also need to know the ‘who’ or else you’ll never see the ‘how’; as in how much money did my website make me!

When most businesses start down the avenue of designing a website for their business, they are very focused, but unfortunately, they are focused on themselves.  I have been involved in countless website development projects and almost every single conversation was centered around what ‘they’ like, how ‘they’ think and what ‘they’ would like to see.

In a lot of cases, once we meet and determine the scope of the project, the client is completely on-board with an approach that combines appealing visuals and a sound conversion strategy, all while taking the all-important SEO-Friendly architecture component into consideration, they revert back to what they think is best from their perspective.

Hey, I don’t care if you’re from Kitchener and looking for a new website, or if you’re from Florida, I’ll give you want you want from an attractive perspective.  Through Advanced Web Solutions though, I strive to provide websites that work for your business.  You shouldn’t be working for your website.  ‘Pretty’ doesn’t drive traffic.  ‘Pretty’ doesn’t necessarily mesh with converting the traffic that finds you.  ‘Pretty’ isn’t what your website ‘does’.  Yes, ‘pretty’ needs to be part of the overall affect and does have value on a number of different levels, but ‘pretty’ doesn’t pay your mortgage.  It may just cover the taxes though!

So once you have altered your frame of mind so that you realize your business’ website isn’t for you, you still have to determine WHO it is for.  Is it for those looking specifically for your business?  Your products/services by name?  Your products/services in generic terms?  Industry information? Technical information?

All of these potential visitors could be quite different.  They could be either prospective customers, current customers or a mixture of the two.

Once you narrow down some of the above specifics, then you can ask yourself, where in the buying cycle do I want to draw the most attention with my website and its SEO campaign?

• For interest sake, here is a useful tool that Google provides to help analyze a consumer’s journey for various verticals.    

If we look specifically at a website that is looking to sell a product/service, ask yourself, how long is the sales cycle and how can I break that up into a beginning, middle and end.  What questions do those in each part of the sales cycle ask?  Where could those questions lead?  How could they be led away from choosing you?

Each of the dozen or so questions you need to ask yourself when building a new website, or redesigning your current one, represents a specific ‘WHO’ and because of that you need to define WHO your website is primarily for and implement your ‘pretty’ and conversion strategies around them.