December 1, 2002 - - Volume 1, Number 6

Four Ways To Help Your Web Site Attract New Clients
by Mark Altenbernd

The Great Dot-Com Bubble Burst is now more than two years old. You may remember the heady days of the late 90s, which persisted into mid-2000 once we got clear of the Y2K worries. We had a New Economy that operated on New Rules. We were Creating Wealth with our marvelous technology. Everything Had Changed. There was so much noisy commotion that most of us didn’t hear the insistent hiss of the bubble’s slow leak. But soon enough we were aware of it, and the Great Boom of the 90s had turned into a New Century’s Big Bust. Kaplooie! Game Over! Lights Out! The Web was Dead.

Welllllllll, maybe not dead, exactly; resting, perhaps. Oh, sure, venture capital has pretty much dried up. And simply calling yourself Anything-Dot-Com is no longer enough to drive your P/E ratio into the 80s. But it is interesting that, in spite of the general disillusionment with dotcomism, the Web has continued to grow. New users are getting connected everyday, and more and more businesses are registering domain names and putting up Web sites. The Internet may not be growing as fast as it once did, but it certainly has not begun to shrink, either.

You may very well have a Web site of your own. If you do, you probably share a couple of feelings that many business owners have: first, that your Web site cost a good bit more money, time, and aggravation than you had expected; and second, that it doesn’t seem to be paying off very well (although it’s hard to know for sure). In the first case, my best advice is “Get used to it.” Yes, building a Web site, even a bad Web site, is a time- and money-consuming undertaking. But if you decide that you really must have a presence on the World Wide Web, then you should be prepared to give it the money, time, and attention that you would lavish on other business development activities, such as marketing, public relations, and advertising.

In the second case, you can improve the return on the investment you made in your Web site by following a few simple rules that will help attract prospects to your site and then turn into clients. Let’s look at 4 specific things that you can do.

1. Design your Web site carefully

A Web site must be carefully planned and designed. That’s it, that’s the rule. It’s that simple. And obvious, as well, one would think. Except that a surprising number of sites seem not to have been designed or planned at all; they seem pretty much to have just growed and growed.

There are a few general guidelines that apply to almost any Web site with a commercial orientation, even those for non-profit and governmental sites. Probably the single most important requirement of a successful site is that it must be easy to use and to navigate. What that means is that the visitor to the site must understand very quickly what the site is about, what the site’s layout is, where he is within that layout, and how he can get to other parts of the site that may interest him.

Several years ago I was describing a new Web site authoring tool to a colleague. One of the nice things about the tool, I said, was that it was easy to generate a whole set of pages that had a hierarchical relationship – a parent page with some number of subordinate child pages – with the navigational hyperlinks already set up. “But wait,” he cried. “isn’t the point of hyperlinks precisely that you are not bound by old traditional ways of navigating, that you can do anything you want? Why would you want to limit yourself to a stuffy old hierarchical structure?”  I was not eager to visit any Web site that he had designed. I wanted a stuffy old hierarchical structure because hierarchies are one of the several ways that people organize their perception of the world around them in order to understand it and deal effectively with its complexity. I want to use hyperlinks to take advantage of that existing predisposition in people, not to go to war with it and raise annoying cognitive dissonances. 

There is an area of inquiry known as information architecture, closely related to the academic field of library science, that concerns itself with the classification, storing, indexing, and retrieval of information. The principles of information architecture should be important considerations in designing your Web site so that it becomes easy for a visitor to understand it and move about within it. But most Web designers are not well versed in, or even aware of, the discipline. If you are not happy with your current site, or if you are designing a new site, it is probably a worthwhile effort to look around for someone who understands information architecture and can apply its precepts to your site. This person probably would not be a talented graphic designer and would represent an additional cost. But as I said above, get used to it. If it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth doing well.

2. Optimize your site for search engines.

One of the things that sets the World Wide Web apart from other forms of marketing communication is that the Web is ubiquitously and instantaneously available to almost everyone in the world. When a prospective customer of yours turns to the Web to find the kind of product you make or the kind of service you provide, he is confronted with tens of millions of Web pages. How is he to find yours amid all that noise and clutter?

Unless people know the URL, the address, of your home page, and know it precisely, they will need some help in finding you. Even if they know who you are and know that they want to visit your site, as opposed to any other site, they still will need some help in getting there. And if they don’t know who you are but only that they are interested in the kind of product or service that you offer, they will need even more help.

Where will they get this help, and how can that help steer them to you? Almost everyone turns to a Web search engine or directory to help them locate the kinds of things they are looking for. They enter a search term, “kitchen ranges”, perhaps, and the search engine returns a list of Web pages that have something to do with kitchen ranges. The list is in order of “relevance”, and presumably you would be most interested in the page at the top of the list. The challenge you face is to help the search engines help the searchers find you by pushing your page toward the top of the list. You do that through a process known as search engine optimization.

There is an entire industry built around search engine optimization, and it’s even known by its TLA of SEO. (For the uninitiated, TLA means “three-letter abbreviation”.) There are at least a dozen SEO newsletters that are published weekly, and there are many small consulting firms that do nothing but SEO, helping their clients to get their pages pushed higher in the list.

There even are firms that consult to SEO consultants to keep them abreast of the latest developments in SEO techniques. The SEO consultants have become so adept at getting pages pushed higher that the people who run the search engines feel that many pages are pushed higher than they should, that they are given an unreasonably high relevance ranking. So from time to time they quietly change the rules that the engines use to rank pages. Then that second set of consultants tries to figure out what has happened and develop a strategy in response, which they then share with their clients, the SEO consultants. Then those consultants make adjustments to the pages of their clients’ Web sites to get them ranked up near the top again. And so it goes, the cat chasing the mouse, and the mouse chasing the cat.

The message here is that if your Internet strategy relies on your being found by anonymous strangers who are using the search engines, you probably are best off hiring a good SEO consultant, an experienced and well informed professional who can do a good job of optimization at a reasonable price. Yes, it is yet another example of how your Web site is going to cost you more than you had planned. But just get used to it.

3. Enable your visitors to become members

So far, you’ve designed a nice Web site that is both engaging and informative; and you’ve made it easy for the right kind of people to find your site. You’re actually beginning to see an increase in traffic to your home page. Now that you have the traffic, what will you do with it?

One of the most effective things you can do is get your visitors to feel a bit of ownership of your site, to feel that they are welcome and actually belong there. You have already given them a reason for visiting: you offer a product or service that interests them, and perhaps you have some useful information available, probably for free. Now you can take one further step: allow them to sign up as “members” of your site. Make your visitors an attractive offer – “Sign up for FREE membership so that you can stay informed about important developments in [whatever it is you offer]!”

When people agree to sign up, gather just enough information so that you can keep in touch with them: probably just first and last names and e-mail address are sufficient, although you might ask for a bit of corporate information, such as company name and title. But don’t overdo it, don’t risk putting off your prospects by digging for too much information at this first encounter. You need just enough information so that you can initiate subsequent encounters, keeping in touch with them so that your relationship can develop. Take whatever information they give you and store it in a database. As you gather additional information over time, you can add that to the database, too.

4. Use your visitors’ information discretely

Oh, the taxing labor of the high-wire performer, how delicate the balance he must maintain! Or, put another way, one man’s meat is another man’s spam.

The point of gathering data about your visitors is to permit you to learn something about them that will be helpful in your efforts to use your Web site as an important part of your marketing strategy. When you offer them the opportunity to register as a member, you should tell them that, from time to time, you will communicate with them. You now have at least their implicit consent to send them occasional unsolicited e-mail.

But you have to be careful. The best guidance probably is “Not to frequent, and not too crass.” An occasional e-mail with some useful information and an inoffensive bit of promotion shouldn’t be a problem with anyone. But if the communiqués become too frequent or too stridently commercial, you’ll start to lose your audience.

As an example, I use a plug-in gadget that uses the Internet to feed me a constant stream of weather information for my locale: temperature, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, precipitation, forecasts and so on. Very nice little gizmo. But the sponsor of the gadget sends frequent, crassly commercial e-mails that have nothing whatever to do with the weather. He is using his e-mail list to send out advertising for other people, who pay, him, I am sure, for his efforts. These things were becoming a real annoyance, so I set up a filter in my e-mail client to route all of these messages directly to the trash bin. I would have tolerated a reasonable amount e-mail, but he went way over the limit, to the point that everything from him is now considered to be spam. So now instead of having a minor but possibly growing relationship with me, he has no relationship at all.

What is a ”reasonable” amount? Well, I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it. Deciding what is reasonable and what is excessive is part of striking and maintaining that delicate balance. But it’s a determination worth making. Your communications should be not too frequent and not too crass; do as you would be done by; and NEVER sell that carefully collected information to anyone else for any reason whatever.

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We can help

At Altenbernd Consulting we have been designing and building database-driven Web sites for more than 6 years. Our own Web site serves as an example of how most of the techniques we discussed can be implemented and integrated into an overall site plan. If you are a small to mid-sized business looking to increase the productivity of your Web site and get more back from the investment you’ve made, perhaps we can help you. Visit our Web site to learn more about how we can help you: http://www.Altenbernd.Com.

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© 2002 Altenbernd Consulting, LLC. All Rights Reserved.