Improve the effectiveness of your public-facing web site

Are you getting the most out of your company's web site? Do you get a small number of leads or a low interaction rate with your site? Do you feel like the site could be doing more to engage your customers and drive conversions?

The solution to these problems may not lie in a new modern design, or expensive technology. It may reside in the content or focus of the site. Companies are often good at writing and publishing content that outlines what they do. The problem is that customers aren't interested.

The problem

Think about the visitors to your site. Are they interested in your perspective on the marketplace, your history, or even the list of your products and services? Perhaps, but they are likely more interested in specifically how your company can help them. When visitors come to your site, they have a problem that they're looking to solve. If all they find is a list of selling points for certain products, or descriptions of the various groups in your company, they'll have to make up their own mind on how the information they see applies to them.

It's easy to put information about your company on the web site. You know the organizational structure, how you want to differentiate yourself in the market, and the key selling points of your products and services. It is more difficult, but much more effective, to have content that speaks to the needs of visitors in their language.

The solution

1. Determine the needs of your visitors. You'll likely know this based on the type of business you have, but if you need more clarity, even a little bit of user research will help shed light on specific visitor requirements. Generally, visitor needs come in three flavors:
   1. Purchase needs — a potential customer needs data and information that will help them make a decision on which product/service/donation to purchase.
   2. Transactional needs — a visitor needs to interact with your company to get something accomplished.
   3. Entertainment needs — a visitor is looking for content that is engaging and entertaining.
2. Develop content that meets those needs. Put yourself in your visitor's shoes – imagine you don't work for your company. What content would meet your needs? You may also have to reorganize the layout and navigational structure of your site to move the new content up in the site's visual hierarchy. Stay focused on the visitor: for each page or content decision, ask yourself, "What visitor need am I solving right now?"
3. Speak from the visitor's perspective. Make sure you create content in the style and voice that your visitors use. Don't talk about how great your company/product/service is: show how you can help the visitor. This can be as easy as a simple change in perspective:
   1. Bad: Our widget is 100 times faster than the competition
   2. Good: Get your work done in 1 hour with our widget
4. Cut your content in half — then cut it again. Sure, you can write volumes about how great your company is – but people just won't read it. Visitors come to your web site with a goal in mind, and unless that goal is to learn details about your business, they'll pay little attention to paragraphs of content about your company. Reduce the content about your company to the most salient points and direct them to contact you if they really want more.
5. It's OK to keep an "About Us" section. The essential information about your company can stay — but keep it out of the way. If a visitor clicks into that section they're explicitly looking for information about your company.

   However, the "About Us" section shouldn't occupy a primary spot in the site's navigation. When you're developing content, evaluate each page — does it meet a primary need, or does it belong in the "About Us" section?

Conclusion

A new web site design can show that you are an active, vibrant company. And new technology can make it easier to manage the site, or provide useful functionality for visitors. However, for companies that are not getting the most out of their website, expensive upgrades in design or infrastructure may not be necessary. The first place to look when improving a web site should be the information and overall content strategy. Align content with visitor needs instead of internal company organization and jargon, and you'll see a marked improvement in visitor engagement and conversion.

Have any good tips for improving a business web site? Share them below!

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