Ask the Right Questions Before You SEO Your Site - Why Would I Stay and Do Business with You?
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While you’re still in the visitor frame of mind, think about this: does your site look like it belongs to the kind of business you’d want to patronize? First impressions matter; they’re frequently hard to shake. You may want to consider having your web site professionally designed. Who would want to do business with someone whose website looks like it was built by the owner’s 12-year-old nephew?
Whether it’s a brick-and-mortar company or an online retailer, customers prefer to do business with those they trust. If they don’t feel as if they can trust who they are dealing with, they will take their business elsewhere. For a brick-and-mortar company, even on a first look, there are certain cues (many of them subtle) that let a person know a company can be trusted. That’s every bit as true with a website; in some sense, it’s even more important to generate trust, since your visitor is not dealing with people face to face. You might want to consider earning and adding appropriate seals to your website (i.e. BBB Online) to help make your visitors more comfortable. There are other strategies you can use as well.
Once you get past the first impression, how easy is it to do business on your web site? Can a visitor find what brought them to the site fairly quickly? Think back to the previous section. Everyone comes to your site for a reason; make it easy for them to find your articles, sign up for your newsletter, buy your product, or do whatever it was that made them click the link to your website.
To put this question another way, what do you want your visitors to do? Once you figure out the answer to that question, your job is to make it as easy as possible for them to do what you want them to do. If you’ve set up your site correctly and are sending the right messages, what YOU want them to do and what THEY want to do will be pretty close to the same thing.
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