Here’s a common problem: lots of sites try to engage visitors before providing relevance and fulfilling their intent.
Lets take a simple example: If you can’t figure out if you can park somewhere you’ll likely not stay there. The same way, if your visitors don’t know if they can find what they’re looking for when they arrive on your pages they’re probably won’t stay on your site. The secret is to fulfill your visitors intent first.
Poor page relevance (in relation to your visitors’ intent) plus less than crystal clear page content equals bad parking signalization.
Yes, Montreal is famous for confusing their visitors parking intent; if you read french just try figuring out when you can park on that street.
Whether it’s on your site or parking in Montreal, you need to fulfill your visitors’ intent first. Provide relevance on your pages, make them relevant. Don’t do it and say bye bye to your visitors and their money.
What’s the root cause for such miss-alignment between your visitors’ intent and your pages relevance?
As in everything else, there’s often an easy temptation to do things in reverse; launch something and figure out later how to make it useful, work, stick, or be relevant. Would you build shaky foundations and layer 5 floors on top of it?
The same is true when your visitors come to your site; it can be tempting to try to engage them before delivering what they want to accomplish (aka, their intent). Fixing it can be fairly easy: you may simply need to tweak your pages to improve their relevance and clarity.
When is the last time you did a search using keywords relevant to a page, landed on it only then realize the layout and/or content doesn’t make too much sense?
Understanding what your visitors want to achieve (their intent) when they arrive on your site is what will make your site and their experience relevant for them.
Step1-Fulfill your visitors intent
Knowing and fulfilling your visitors intent is the key to:
- Keep them from bouncing off your site.
- Moving them deeper into their goals (first and secondary).
- Start to engage them.
Ok, so how do you figure these out?
Starts from where people are coming and how they found your site. The possibilities are: organic search, pay-per-click, referral link/bookmark and offline.
Organic search
For organic searches use their search query for their intent.
If you did your SEO job well, each of your page have its own unique title, meta description and site links with relevant anchor text. If that’s been done, and well done, you can expect your page to rank fairly well into the SERPs. Then you can start to think about fulfilling their intent when they find you.
What happens when someone do a search for lets say “Denver mortgage rates”? The tittle and meta description of your page that got triggered by this query should be very relevant. Lets say the title is “Denver refinance mortgage – YourSite” and the meta description displayed below the tittle is “Find the best refinance mortgage rates in Denver…” The visitor click on it and arrive on that page.
Provide Scent
Once your visitor arrives on that page what do they find and see first? They need to first find a scent of what they’re searching: ie “Denver Mortgage Rates”.
They should easily see and find front and center on your page the query they typed to search and the main word(s) used in the title of that page. In cases where they clicked on an ad, the keyword found on the clicked ad should be clearly visible on the page.
In our “Denver Mortgage Rates” example, does your page content is first and foremost about mortgage rates in Denver? If not you’ve a big problem because your visitors will bounced off your page right away. Can you say bye, bye?
What else do they need to find on that page in order to not hit the back button?
In our example, they probably need to find:
- Refinance mortgage rates for Denver,
- Some way to find clear and relevant information about these rates,
- The banks offering them,
- and a very clear way to make sense of those refinance rates.
It’s very important that the information needs to be clear and concise. Fail to fulfill your visitors basic intent (refinance rates in Denver) and/or make it difficult to see and you loose them.
If you first fulfill their intent you can then (and only then) try to complete their secondary goals.
Pay-per-click campaign
Fulfilling intent for PPC traffic can be done by using the relevant Campaign, Adgroup and Keywords to move them to the most relevant landing page; that’s the one matching their intent best.
If someone search for “mortgage refinance Denver” (their intent) and they click an ad for a refinance mortgage in Denver they really don’t want to arrive on your home page.
It’s a little bit better if they arrive on your general refinance page but the ideal is simply to land them on your Denver mortgage refinance page.
Secondary goals
You can even make it easier to fulfill their intent by helping them complete their secondary goal. Secondary goals are harder to know but they usually revolve around their main goal.
In the case of a Denver refinance mortgage someone may have a hidden secondary goal to learn about the available terms, which bank offers the best rate in that city or the bank with the best reviews for mortgage products. Showing them some or all this information will help your visitors understand they are at the right place AND help them complete their main and secondary goals.
You need to make your landing page relevant for your visitors by fulfilling their first and secondary goals before thinking about engaging them.
Referred traffic/link
Third parties are a great way to get traffic at an either free or medium cost price range. The main issue for this type of traffic is that not all sites provide the same traffic quality and most of the time you don’t have any control over the content of the page talking about you and/or where the link on that page send the traffic on your site.
Best case: You have control of the content and the links
You’re lucky you have a good relationship with that site or you pay them a lot of money to have your say on the content of the page and its links. That means you’ll be able to create or have them create content targeting your site’s mission. You have say about where will be the best location on their site to display the content and decide where the content’s links send traffic to your most relevant page on your site.
That means you can make sure the content of the referral page and its links are aligned with your site’s best page for that content. That’s the ideal scenario.
Worst case: No or little control of content and links
What can you do? Well, that’s still free traffic! Seriously, there are a couple of things you can do to try to be relevant to these visitors (for example provide a different experience to first vs returning visitors) but this is much harder.
Most of the time this traffic will arrive on your home page and that’s where you can make the biggest impact for poorly targeted traffic. This will be the subject of a another complete post.
Offline traffic
If you’re getting traffic from sources that are not online (paper magazines articles for example) you’re best chance is that they’ll arrive on your home page. If you know a magazine or newspaper talks about you, you should put their logo on your home page so your visitors have an idea that they’re at the right place (plus it gives you third party validation for all your other visitors).
In cases (such as offline advertising) where you can use a page to get people to come to your site, you should create a specific landing page with an easy to remember url. Ex: www.mysite.com/newspaper-ad
Step 2 – Engagement
Once you fulfill their intent by meeting their first and secondary goals, engaging them is the 2nd step. Then and only then you want to engage them.
You may want to have them stay longer on your site but if you let them get distracted from their main goal you will just loose them and they’ll not complete what they were looking to accomplish in the first place.
That’s a terrible way to loose revenue.
So how do you engage them after helping them complete their intended goals?
You can achieve this in many ways. This varies for each site’s products and services but you can let them:
- Select how they’ll choose the best product or service for them.
- Search, compare and configure their product or service.
- See what other visitors have done, bought and said about the product or service they have the intention to research or buy.
- Have them come back to share their experience with your product or service and help others in that process.
- Enable them to share their experience with people they know and/or they think may be interested in your product or service.
Step 3- Keep going
So there you are: you fulfilled your visitors’ intent, they found your page relevant, their first and secondary goals have been meet and you’re on your way to engage them.
You’re on the right path, but don’t get side tracked or become lazy; now you have to optimize their whole experience! What does that mean? Test, test, and test again in order to optimize their experience by fulfill their intent, your pages relevance, how to best meet their first and secondary goals and how to best engage them.
Yes, this is just the beginning.
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