Every website has a goal. No matter what your business, or hobby, your website exists for a reason. Some webmasters may claim that their website is just there because they ‘need a website’ but they still have a goal. Be it brand building, information for customers or actively selling products, services and driving leads.
As well as your website having goals, your website users also have goals of their own, or needs as you may refer to them. People who are browsing the Internet are always browsing for a reason and deep down in the dark recesses of their sub-conscious they have a desire to find an answer to a particular question.
That means that there is an opportunity for you to bring the goals of your website into line with the goals of each type of user that visits your site. In order to make this happen, I like to approach each website by creating a simple categorising system that allows everyone involved with the website to gain a quick understanding of the goal of each page on the site. This allows you to keep everyone from design and development to the marketing team in line with the overall aims of the site.
The Categories
In order to categorise the pages on your website you need to have a clear understanding of what the people coming to your site might want to know. Thankfully, there is a finite amount of reasons for people coming to your site, regardless of how many services and products you offer. In my last blog post I presented the consumer buying funnel and I like to use this to help me to build up my website categories.
The consumer buying funnel gives us a model of the different stages a person goes through on their journey to purchasing a product or service. This means that on a simple level, you can fit each and every visitor to your website into one of the 5 stages of the consumer buying funnel. For this reason I strongly recommend you have a quick read through my last blog post to get up to speed!
The beauty of this is that you can now begin to think about the structure of your website and how you can use it to exploit the consumer buying funnel. It should be clear now that your website, as a whole, needs to take care of users in each and every stage of the buying cycle in order to fulfil its goals. On top of this, my golden rule is that every page on your website should focus on only one goal and do that well. That means that I believe that every page should be made to cater for only one type of user looking for a very specific type of content. If you get this approach down to a fine art then by all means start to make things more advanced, but from my experience even the most established of e-commerce juggernauts haven’t quite got this completely right.
The key to successfully catering for each type of person that visits your website is to create the content that answers the questions they have in their heads. Generally speaking, each website should approach the categorisation process on its own merit but there is a general structure that I believe can help improve the philosophy and theory behind any website. The categories go something like this:
Informational pages:These pages apply to people who are in the awareness, interest and learning stages of the buying funnel. These are typically the landing pages for people who do not know your brand, they do not know the product they are looking for and are generally unaware of all of the product details they should be looking out for. I would usually recommend that this category of page is taken care of by a blog where you can provide in depth information without the need to try and oversell your product or service.
The informational pages should include gentle calls to action which usher people further along the process to the next stage of the buying cycle; the shopping stage.
Soft Sell / Convincer:
People who are in the ‘shopping’ stage of the buying cycle are typically looking around for differentiators between different products and services as well as the different things that alternative websites have to offer. The name ‘soft sell’ refers to a page which has a clear vested interest in selling something to the user but rather than actively push this aim to the user, the page should gently move the user closer to making a purchase.
A good example of this is a page on a hotel website that focuses on selling the destination. The clear aim of the page is to convince the person to book a room however the page itself does not explicitly push this upon the user, therefore this is a ‘soft sell’ or ‘convincer’ page. Throw in a call to action that reads, ‘find out how to book’ and bingo, you are moving this user to the next stage of the buying cycle.
Hard Sell:
The hard sell page takes care of the final and most important stage of the buying cycle, the ‘buying’ phase. This is the page where we can assume that the user is ready to buy, they know what they want and all you need to do now is give them a final push and provide them with a clear route to making a purchase or getting in contact with you.
This needn’t just be an e-commerce thing either, if you are a plumber it can be your contact page where the main call to action is prompting the user to give you a call.
Please note that although the above categories can apply to any site, I would highly recommend that you review your site on its own and build a category plan that fits with your website and its users. A good example is that a site may require utility pages that allow people to receive customer service advice and other such pages. As always, a healthy dose of common sense will work wonders when planning your website categorisation process.
The Benefits
So what are the benefits of consciously categorising all of your pages? The first main benefit is that if you follow your categorisation guidelines strictly then you wont end up with any wishy-washy pages. By this I mean that every single one of your pages will have a clear, defined action. The other advantage will be that if your website is a little thin on the ground, it will be clear where the priority should lie to get new content added in.
Among the other benefits is that your SEO strategy will love it. It will mean that you can carry out thorough keyword research that defines user intent. From this you will know which keyword someone in the learning phase will use as opposed to someone in the buying phase. With this information you can twin your categorisation process with a content creation plan that will let you hone in on the correct users with the correct landing pages that contain the perfect message and content for the users that lands on them!
Conversion optimisation is another area that will benefit. By categorising your pages you can be sure the keep an eye on which calls to action to use on different pages. Test new ideas out and continue to plug the ones that bring success.
Similarly to the SEO benefit, your PPC advertising can also benefit. One successful way to optimise your PPC account is to segment your ad groups by user intent and the consumer buying funnel. This means that your website will have the perfect landing page for every single ad group; this is the PPC advertiser’s dream, I can tell you from experience!
Your website usability will be greatly improved. Most of the time, if you have some good SEO, your user should arrive on a page that is perfect for them, but if they don’t, you can make sure your navigation takes categorisation into consideration to allow users to quickly find their way into the correct page and join the correct conversion funnel and begin their journey to conversion!
Your office will love you for categorising your pages as well. Your designers, developers, SEOs and marketers will all be on the same page and will be able to see how the site works and focus in on the correct areas of the website.
The benefits are clear and I believe that every webmaster should make some effort to put in place a categorisation framework for their website to help improve the quality of the user experience!
Image: Courtesy of Kim Joar on Flickr - Used under a Creative Commons licence.
photo credit: Andy Ciordia via photopin cc
