What Do Your Prospects Want From Your Site?

By adding content to your site that describes your expertise in detail, Google can direct the right prospects your way. Those prospects frequently find your site by asking Google many of the marketing questions that confound them. So, what do they want from your site? They want answers. The better a job your site does of answering the questions your prospects have about their marketing problems, the more leads your site will generate. When your site answers their questions, it becomes a valuable educational resource for them. Once they see your site in that light, they are eager to sign up to receive your thought-leadership content on a regular basis through newsletters, blogs, webinars, white papers, e-books, podcasts, and videos.

Your prospects want to be informed and inspired. You inform them through your search engine-friendly content that is based on your expertise and your solutions to your prospects’ problems. They are inspired by your work.

In order for your site to succeed in its role of informing, it must be intuitively navigable. When people arrive at your site, regardless of the page on which they initially land, they need to have an intuitive sense of exactly where they are, what the site has to offer, and where they would most like to go.

Information design is the practice through which you ensure that your site operates in this way.

Information Design

When implementing a search engine optimized content strategy on your site, you create a new front door to your site with each article you publish. Because visitors may begin their relationship with you from any page on your site, the site’s information design must be flawless. In this section, we will look at how things can frequently go wrong in the design phases of a web project, and we will review a process that allows you to reliably create intuitively navigable sites.

This post is an excerpt from my book, "A Website That Works."