Your website may have the hottest products on the market, and the most engaging content – but if the site doesn’t have “findability,” potential customers won’t even know you exist. They’ll go to Google or Bing (or other search engines) and search for products or information, and your site won’t turn up on the first page of results.
But if your findability has been fixed, your site will rank high in search, and conversion rates for visitors will improve. Today I’ll be talking more about the keys to findability at the Gilbane Content Management conference in San Francisco. I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion titled “Findability – Crafting Your Site to Drive Traffic and Improve Conversions” with Sam Mefford of Avalon Consulting and Richard Zwicky of Enquisite, moderated by Hadley Reynolds of IDC.
One key to improving your site’s findability via organic and paid search is to take a close look at how your current site visitors search on the site, and the language they use. You can use their searching language to adapt your site content (such as product descriptions and keywords) to the way your customers interact. For instance, do people commonly misspell an important search term? If so, that misspelling needs to be built into your site search and your content. Do they often use a generic category term rather than the actual product name (e.g. “MP3 player” vs. “iPod”)? If yes, then you need to incorporate that generic term into your site content. Your customers’ search language can also be useful in identifying the keywords to utilize in SEO and paid search efforts.
Improving findability ties in with site visitors’ increasingly short attention spans when it comes to finding what they need. They spend their days browsing search engines and social networking sites and they have high expectations for being able to quickly track down what they need – and they’ll easily desert any site that doesn’t meet this requirement.
If you’re at the Gilbane conference today, please come check out our discussion – we’ll be speaking at 1:30pm as part of the Customers & Engagement track. And if you’re at the conference this Thursday, I’ll be speaking again as part of a panel discussion on “Smarter e-Commerce – Raising the Bar for the User Experience.”
