Or at least, not necessarily. Creating a visually-appealing, easy-to-navigate website should be the goal of every organization that has a web presence. However, stopping at that point and waiting for the visitors to come flooding in will likely leave you disappointed and frustrated.
It takes much more than a great product or service and a stylish, new website to earn the trust of your target personas and turn them into customers. The same goes for rolling those new relationships into long-term commitments, which every organization should have as a goal.
Beyond Design
It is entirely possible that you could have the most stunningly-gorgeous website design and still no traffic. In order to get people to your website AND keep them there for more than a few seconds, you need to utilize three strategies: search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, and conversion optimization.
Hey Google, Over Here!
Unfortunately, too many folks think that SEO is something you do when you launch a website that will ensure that your website will be found by search engines. In reality, SEO is an ongoing process of understanding what search engines look for when determining where to rank a website on the results page. Neither easy nor quick, the process of improving your website’s ranking can, nevertheless, produce very lucrative results.
Companies that have the smarts to implement an SEO strategy and the determination to stay with it find themselves leaps and bounds ahead of their competitors. The good news of this kind of commitment is that most of the strategies also make the search results listings more compelling, and the website content more attractive to the website visitor. And unlike pay-per-click advertising, SEO does not make a withdrawal from your pocketbook with each visitor that clicks through to your website.
Feed the Beast
While SEO has many components, the production of interesting and useful content ranks among the most important. Search engines “want” (in quotes because they’re not conscious... yet) internet searchers to have a positive experience when they visit a website. If you think of your own web surfing, landing on a website that shares checklists, infographics, helpful hints, etc. surely results in a much more gratifying experience than simply being told about the company’s products or services.
Consequently, Google, Bing, and other search engines rank your website more positively if it hosts a continuously growing catalog of relevant content. And moving yourself from Page 3 to Page 1 of the results can mean the difference between near-zero traffic and a steady (read: profitable) stream.
Delight the Customer
An SEO-friendly website with an appealing design and compelling content is a great start, but ultimately it comes down to how well the website caters to the specific needs of the target personas, and how well the organization and presentation of information persuades the visitor to engage, i.e. to BUY. Great content is really truly great only when it meets the needs of the visitors you're trying to convert to customers. Anticipating precisely what questions your prospective customers have, then engineering a persuasive architecture that is optimized to convert is an all-important, yet oft-omitted component of website design.
So, while “If you build it, they will come,” produced a happy ending for Kevin Costner, it’s best for your organization to think of “building it” as just the beginning.
