Ask the Right Questions Before You SEO Your Site - Why Would I Visit Your Web Site?
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Lately I’ve become rather fond of the idea of thinking like a visitor to attract visitors. So pretend, for a moment, that you’ve never heard of your company and you’re visiting your own website for the first time. Perhaps you came in through the search engines, or someone who knows your interests sent you the link, or you may even have read a story about the site in a blog. Why did you come here?
If you said “because I saw the link,” try again. Anyone who visits a web site is looking for something. They want to buy a product, be entertained, solve a problem, get some information…you get the idea. So what do you offer your visitor?
You can see why you need to ask this question before you begin any SEO campaign. What you offer your visitor affects everything from the keywords you choose to the structure of your site’s content to the methods you use to promote your web site. And by the way, the field you’re in may have less effect on how you answer this question than you think.
Does that sound a little crazy? Let’s consider a fairly mundane field: plumbing. Are you a plumber? Do you sell tools and plumbing parts to professional plumbers, or do-it-yourselfers, or some combination? Is your business a plumbing school? Do you offer a newsletter to keep plumbing professionals up to date? Do you sell books on plumbing? Do you publish articles on plumbing? Do you promote a convention for plumbers? Do you publish a trade magazine for plumbers? Are you running a website for a plumbers’ union?
You can see from this list that there are a ton of specialty interests just in the field of plumbing. Each of these different kinds of sites will want to attract a slightly different audience. And each person who visits a site might have a slightly different reason for doing so. They might even have drastically different reasons, to be honest.
In researching this article, for example, I ended up on the web pages of a large plumbing supplier. I clicked their FAQ; after scrolling down a bit, I saw links to some interesting-looking pages (a “fun quotes” page). When I got to the top of that page, I saw links to more fun plumbing pages – a list of plumbing jokes, various words of wisdom, a founder’s page, and so forth. A plumber might visit this site to get a part – or a non-plumber might end up here to be entertained, because some of these pages come up for their own special keywords, like “plumber jokes.” The point is that you need to be clear and focus on why your visitors are coming to your site in order to give them what they're looking for. Or, put another way, you need to be clear about what you’re offering them so that they know what to expect when they get there.
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