I just finished reading another book on marketing. It was well written and had some great tips. But like most books, it included some information that had me slapping my forehead in disgust.
You see, this book included a portion on websites. It read, “The Five Things Your Website Should Include”. These five things started off solid with, 1) Above the fold offer, 2) Obvious calls to action, 3) Images of success, 4) Bite-Sized breakdown of your revenue streams (details in a later blog) and 5) Very few words. That last one is where my right palm connected with my oversized forehead.
I read it and from a designer’s perspective, I totally get it. Negative space, that is space without anything in it, is extremely helpful to bring clarity to the objects and images on a webpage. Think of the Google homepage. Minimalist to the bone and the simplicity leaves no question what the website visitor is supposed to do.
The challenge is that you need to get people to your website in order for them to be impressed with your website. For a person to take that gleaming Call to Action step that you so beautifully crafted into your website that person has to make it to your website. People will make it to your website only two ways, 1) Find it through a search engine or 2) Type it in the address bar of their browser.
Which comes down to how many of your potential clients know you exist already, know your website address and will connect both of those bits of information when they are ready to hit the internet. This leaves only search engines as your powerful tool to bring you people to do what you want them to do on your website.
The striking conflict is then doing what you can to be found in search engines as well as offering the best website visitor experience. The conflict I am speaking of is the number five above which reads, “very few words” and the necessity of words to be found by search engines.
To put this into perspective, let’s say you are Google and no one knows you exist. You want to be found. Could you find the current Google homepage through a search engine if no one knew it existed?
Sure you could use all manner of tricks to get text on the web page that no visitor could see without looking at the code, but that will likely get your site blacklisted…not good.
So to recommend to people interested in learning about marketing that the best way to market their website is to take away the very thing search engines use to help people find your website is not only wrong, it’s red handprint on my receding hairline wrong.
So what is a web designer to do? Compromise, of course. Determine what is needed to be found by your clients and make sure the user experience is as smooth as possible. This means you need to include text on your webpage. Content will help get you found and some people will actually read it. For certain, the search engines will.
I like to tell my clients to write blogs and have their text in bite sized chunks. This will help it be easy to read for real humans as well as give the search engine web crawlers the information they need to bring the right visitors to your website.
No forehead slapping necessary.
James Kademan is a Business Coach for Draw In Customers Business Coaching in Madison, Wisconsin as well as the author of The BOLD Business Book. When he isn’t reading, learning and slapping his forehead in disgust, he is busy guiding entrepreneurs to success in business and beyond. He blogs successfully to the world at www.drawincustomers.com. If you are considering hiring a business coach, take a moment to call James at (608)210-2221. If you want to share a forehead slapping clip you read recently, let James know.
