Is It Useful?

Recently we talked about the importance of knowing your audience or customers.  Now we want to use that knowledge to optimize your site for them.

In SEO (search engine optimization), you'll hear much talk about getting new visitors to your site.  What sometimes gets overlooked, though, at least on an abstract level, is optimizing the site for visitors once they get there.  As anyone who's had to deal with disappointingly high bounce rates at their site will tell you, simply getting new visitors through the door isn't enough.

Ensuring that the site is worth sticking around for is just as important; not only to the eventual conversion, but to the SEO that comes from having a truly useful site. (It's all cyclical in a sense.)

And therein rests a key of SEO: creating a site that people actually want to visit.

But before we go any further, put away your books and get out your supplies; it's time for arts and crafts.  If you have any input in the development or maintenance of your organization's website, stop reading this (momentarily) and do the following:

1. Find a piece of paper.
2. Write "Is it useful to our customers?" on the paper.
3. Tape said paper near your computer monitor, where you will see it everyday.

Asking yourself whether or not something on your site is useful to customers will be one of the best things you can do for your online marketing.  The Internet, after all, was invented as a tool to help people.  It wasn't created as a business or marketing tool.

The Internet was created to help people find information quickly and comprehensively, not to sell more units of the Shamwow.  That's why, even though businesses can benefit from the Internet, a site's usefulness is still more important than anything else, including the usefulness of the product itself.

Good work.
You've just accomplished the most foundational component of a successful website.  You've recognized, or will soon, that in order for your site to enjoy the success and efficacy you need, it must be useful to those who find it.  Believe it or not, just understanding this is a big accomplishment.  Go ahead, take the rest of the day off.