Help Your Visitors to Sniff Around Your Web Site

You know when a web site isn’t working for you. The beauty of the web is that you don’t have to tolerate it for more than a second before you’re gone… on to another site that better meets your needs.

But what actually happened on that site you abandoned?  Maybe it just didn’t offer what you were looking for… or maybe it did, but failed to let you know.

We can quickly sense when we are on track to finding the content we’re looking for by detecting what some experts call the “scent” of information. As it turns out, people behave on web sites in a manner very similar to dogs sniffing around for food – or whatever else they’re looking for. We get on a particular scent trail and follow it.

So designing and writing the content of your web site around the idea of creating easy-to-follow scent trails is vital to your success online.

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What Can We Infer from Our Visitors’ Search Language?

I’m hung up right now on the issue of online conversion and why conversion rates are, in my estimation, generally so far beneath where they could be.

One reason we fail to convert visitors into buyers online is that we fail to speak to them in a way that coincides with their needs at the time.  Sometimes this is understandable.  We can’t read the minds of our visitors, can we?  In fact… sometimes, maybe we can.

For many of us, the bulk of our site traffic comes from search engines. People turn a question of some kind into a search term/phase; enter it into a search engine; and follow what they perceive to be the most relevant resulting link.

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