Understanding your users: the key to regular visits

january 2004

Planning content for a wide variety of visitors vastly increases websites breadth and effectiveness. Targeting content at search engine users is necessary to leverage good search engine visibilty.

Determining appropriate content for a site is the product of careful user analysis.

Many corporate websites are geared at prospective clients, offering a catalogue of products or services.

While this is certainly a valid approach, it misses out on several audiences that could be well served by the internet and are, in certain circumstances, the more important group.

The main user groups are:

• Current clients
• Prospective clients
• Employees
• Jobseekers
• Suppliers
• Investors
• Journalists

Precise labelling will depend on the nature of the organisation. Non profit organisations might not have the concept of clients, for example.

For each group try placing yourself in the users shoes. Why are they coming to your website? What will make them return regularly? Better still: conduct a usability test on your current site with real users.

How essential each group is to a project will vary from case to case. Giving each of them some consideration will avoid oversights. In particular existing customers are often ignored, despite being the one's most inclined to visit regularly and make new purchases.

Those seeking PR exposure should pay particular attention to journalists: A well written online press release is invaluable to a reporter under deadline stress and could mean the difference between your company appearing in the article or not.

Google focused content

Another approach is to base content around search terms you wish to get in the top results on the main search engines.

Ranking highly on search engines is a priority for most companies, but their content is rarely geared to take advantage of good results.

Yet if users do not find information that is relevant to their search, they will simply go back to the search results and click the next promising link.

This has two unfortunate consequences:

• That top ranking is completely wasted.
• Search terms are often indicative of the main objectives of the site. If these are the keywords the site should be found under, it is quite likely that they also represent what the site or company is all about.

Creating content around the targeted search terms is crucial to taking advantage of high search engine visibility and can help focus the website around the end users need.