How To Attract An Audience To Your Website: Part 1

Just about everything can be “googled.” After all, the ultimate goal of a query is to lead to a satisfactory answer, and a search engine’s purpose is to help users solve a problem. They exist to complete tasks and make relevant connections to help make life easier.

So if you’re online, you’re good to go. Right?

Almost. If your website is the virtual presence of your business, it must also accurately represent all the answers your business can offer and problems that it’s able to solve in order to capture the most value. You don’t want to leave any revenue-generating possibilities offline. And these opportunities are driven by unmet needs.

So who do you provide answers for? What do you contribute to the world of the web that makes your ultimate searcher elated that they’ve found you? The answer is found in the content and context of your website’s presentation.

But who decides what makes a website good? Your boss? Your creative director? The search engine? The searcher?

The answer actually lays in a combination of the latter two. In order to be successful, user intent and user experience must be top considerations. Form follows function, as functionality takes high priority.

Design and Organize Your Site With The Searcher In Mind

The searcher decides the fate of my site?

Indirectly, yes, they do! Google and other leading search engines have designed their both paid and organic algorithms to show quality websites over lower quality ones. And a searcher’s behavior continues to contribute to this algorithm’s evolution as it determines a user’s ability to successfully interact with a website. The features that contribute to the searcher’s eventual successful interaction with a site—be it an answered question, a form fill, a purchase, a phone call, or a download—will be programmed into what Google will prefer. So, grow with it, or get left behind!

With the pervasive growth of website optimization, search engines aren’t lacking for quality results. Competition online is growing increasingly more difficult. The fight to gain leads and keep customers is a constantly engaging battle. But these challenges still present valid opportunities for businesses.

Starting with your user is essential. Just like you would put your best customer service foot forward if he or she walked through your front door, catering to a searcher’s needs at the first touch point with your online presence is what will deliver an ultimate victory.

Back to the basics: Think about your target audience. If you lose this focus, you are losing potential sales, growth, trust, referral traffic, return conversions, etc.

In order to relate with the user, though, we’ve got to become human again in our approach. We must move beyond keyword research, and re-learn how to identify with those searching for us.

Coming soon: Contextually Attracting Relevant Search Traffic