Industrial SEO Newsletter Articles Archive
Your Industrial Website Personality: What Does Your Website Say About You? - October 2009
Your website visitors bring their personality to what they search for and find on the internet and are not going to check their personality at the door when they reach your website. When searching for products and services, users’ personalities will emerge all the more – a purchase is an investment of not only their money but their time.
Online buyers make emotionally based purchases justified by logic only after the sale. A few basic elements that work to convey your website personality and appeal to the emotions of your visitors, are things like look and feel, tone and manner, narrative, emotional flare, etc. Basic design and structural elements are equally as important, as the usability of your site can either encourage or frustrate a site visitor.
Does your homepage copy begin with “Welcome to our website. We provide stupendous ‘solutions’, and if you will have a look around, you will surely agree with us”? This does nothing to inform your visitor about what they hope to find on your website.What it says is that you’re self centered, and that don’t care about your customer, and much less how you can solve their problem.
Let’s take a look at a few website personality traits and translate them into what they really mean for your potential clients:
Characteristic: Website Copy - It takes longer than 4 seconds for my visitors to understand what my site is about.
Message: “We don’t know how to express ourselves,” (or worse) “There’s not much of value here to be expressed.”
Characteristic: Code - It takes longer than 4 seconds for my pages to load
Message: “You will wait.”
Characteristic: Layout / Design - I have unnecessary design elements and images that detract from my important copy, and the focal point of my homepage.
Message: “My marketing tools are incongruent with my business model, and I don’t know how to tell you that I can help you.”
A more positive outlook and approach to take is to simply “Focus on your visitor.” Your business exists to provide a service, and, if you’re a manufacturer, to increase other companies’ profitability. How can you convey this message? How can you convey that you care enough to think about how you convey it?
Example: Your site visitors are engineers. This most likely means want to be ‘spoken to’ in a clear, concise, straightforward manner. They want to know product specifications, and they want to find them quickly.This should be an obvious focal point on the home page that conveys what the site is about. They need an organized, intuitive, and prominently placed navigation structure, and product-focused copy. A collage of ‘industrial related’ images won’t do much for your visitors except detract from your message.
If you aren’t sure of your visitors’ personalities and needs, take the time to do a bit of focused market research.Offer your target audience the opportunity to take part in a poll or usability study. Use the feedback to determine how you should say the following: “This is what we do. This is what we offer. We service the following industries. If you need a service or product, here is how we will provide it to you.”
You’ve now become easy to do business with, because you’ve appealed to the personality of your visitors!
