Not Respecting Visitor’s Time
A website marketing project’s biggest failure usually happens when we don’t respect the visitor, their search and what they are trying to do.
It happens when you don’t listen carefully enough. Start listening more.
Be Less Self Interested
It is a real mindset switch to think about the visitor’s journey and what they are trying to achieve rather than what we want to achieve as marketers (with targets to hit).
A website is primarily for Search.
When you forget that all visitors are searching, you forget to be helpful. What we really need to do is create website content for decision-makers.
The website buying decision journey is usually based on a single topic.
The topic IS the primary audience.
But when you start a website, that audience is frequently ‘out of site’ and out of mind. When you focus everything on what you want to say, visitors tell us they want more content about what they want.
It’s a disconnect that usually goes unnoticed.
Usually, this is started by focusing on the wrong things, like individual keywords and volumes.
Group relevant content together around the visitors’ interest
The answer to building websites that visitors want to engage with is to let them start the conversation. The topic is what they are interested in. Group everything you have on the topic into a hub.
Understand the whole topic first, research it, and see what the audience wants. That context will be unbelievably valuable if you respect the audience.
- The experience is based on how relevant we are to the whole topic audience
- Building hubs will increase relevance for the visitor
- Relevance can double and then double results again.
Time is the crucial missing component. We can see “time” in the keywords people use changing as they reach the ultimate decision.
But even if we can’t see it in the keywords, that’s because they are merely fragments. You often see it more when you turn keywords into audiences. Then, when you can see the decision makers’ concept of changing needs for content over time, you realise it can be applied to all visitor scenarios.
Different content at different stages leads to better decisions.
The tragedy is that most companies probably didn’t notice failure. You don’t miss what you never had, right?
