Website Planning: Are you planning your website for your users?

It is often far too easy, when planning a website, to spend hours and hours thinking about portraying who you are, what you do, what the design should look like… And then forget the people that are going to decide whether your website is a success or not – your users!

Two groups of users

If you already have a website, one way to consider this is to split your users into two groups:

• your target audience
• your actual audience

Who are they really?

Think about who is actually looking at your site at the moment. This is not always straightforward, but you can start by looking at the enquiries and input you get from your website. Are the enquiries from the right type of people?

It’s also worth looking at your website user statistics (get Google Analytics installed on your site if you haven’t already – it’s free!):

• Where are your users coming from?
• What search terms are they using to find your site?
• What do those search terms tell you about what the user is looking for?

Who would you like them to be?

Think about the profile of an ideal visitor to your site:

• What would their age, sex, job, company size, location be?
• What would they be looking for?

Compare the two

Do you target audience & actual audience match? If not, think about the following:

1. Do you need to adjust the search terms your site is optimised for – to find a different type of user? Think about the different types of the user the following search terms might bring:
   • landscape gardening
   • landscape gardening company

   Although they appear similar on the surface, the first term might be used for people wanting to move into the landscape gardening market, people wanting to research the history of landscape gardening, as well as people looking for a landscape gardener.
   
   The latter term is far more likely to consist of simply people who are looking for a landscape gardening company.

2. Do you need to adjust your on-page content to cater for the users you’re actually looking to convert into paying customers? For example, think about how your site will:
   • gain people’s trust – particularly if the majority of people will never have heard of you before. This will vary in importance depending on who your users are & what your business is
   • address your users – how technical should your language be? Are your users tech savvy or not? Do you need to explain everything from scratch, or will your users a basic industry knowledge that you then build on?
   • give the right impression of your company – are you trying to move into a professional market or target 18 year old students? Your language, style and content will (should!) vary tremendously dependant the answer.

Google Local Business Listings are relied upon by many businesses as a way of generating more traffic to their website and thereby more enquiries and more business from local customers.

For any unfamiliar with the term, Local Business Listings are the search results you see next to a local map when you type in a localised search term, let’s say ‘electrician oxford’ (see results left).

Click through rates vary from industry to industry, but as the local results appear before the standard stuff, a Local Business Listing is not something that should be ignored! Watch/read more information on creating/claiming your Google Local Business Listing on the Google site: www.google.com/local/add.

Getting on the map

What I want to cover in this post is how you can improve your chances of ranking in the results that appear next to the map on the first results page.

There is no one single factor that will win you that number one position – as with organic search results, it’s a combination of lots of different factors, some of which are more important than others. Most of what is below is taken from the results of a survey published by David Mihm earlier this year, so if you want to go more in-depth, have a look at his write-up here: Local Search Ranking Factors by David Mihm.

• Where possible, & without making the listing seem ridiculously unreadable, try & get your keyword product / service (e.g. electrician) in the listing title & also in the categories your business is listed in.




• If your Local Business Listing address is in the city/location the user is searching for – so Oxford in this case, you’re more likely to rank. This can prove problematic if you’re not based in the same area in which your target market is




• Citations – these are the ‘links’ of normal search engine optimisation. Citations are references to your business; they are often links to your website too, but it might just be a directory entry containing your business name and telephone number. Look at the ‘Web Sites’ section in your listing and in those of your competitors – can you add directory listings for your business to increase the number of citations? Bear in mind that quality (of citation site) does have a bearing as well as quantity. Industry and location specific citations are important. Have a read of this blog post by David Mihm on citations in the UK.




• Reviews: Previous clients have the opportunity to leave a review on your local business listing, & Google also picks up data from other review sites. A good number of positive reviews can have a big effect on your listing position. Why not get into a habit of asking each client to leave a review for you? For starters, ask existing clients if they would mind going back and adding a review; send them the link to make it easy.




• Pictures. So this is less about ranking, and more about usability & trust. From a user perspective, if you add GOOD images to your listing, it will stand out that bit more from the rest. It’s all about engaging trust – whether it’s a picture of your office, a product example, or something else, just make sure it’s relevant & will work towards making the user feel more happy about picking up the phone and talking.

That’s it for now – I hope that helps you in your quest for local business; unfortunately for me, Google recently has stopped showing local business results for web design and seo companies for some bizarre reason yet to be established…. frustrating!! Google, please reinstate ASAP!

I’ve said it myself so many times – people browsing the web are lazy; they have short attention spans; don’t you dare give them huge chunks of content without breaking up with headings, bullet points and the like – you’ll scare them off!

But something got me thinking. I recently read a recommendation that ‘you shouldn’t make users scroll’ – i.e. that all your content should be visible when the user arrives on the page. And I actually disagree.

I think perhaps we’re being too harsh on web users here. It suddenly occurred that rather than being lazy, a lot of this is simply down to people demanding more. By it’s very nature, when you’re on the web, your competition is normally (although not always) pretty big. And so users can demand more.

And I believe that if you fit that demand, if you provide the right content – users will be happy to scroll ad-infinitum. What’s crucial then is not so much how long your post is, but how relevant it is. And using impactful, eye-catching and relevant headings, images, lists and the like are a means to an end – helping you to persuade the user that your post or web page is interesting, relevant and the right one for them to stick around and read.

Think about how that applies to your own website …