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Identifying Your Websites Target Audience

Written by: Bill Golden

Article Overview: Many times, websites are created without any thought given to exactly who the website is for and how (or even if) the website reached the intended audience. Knowing your audience may just be the most important consideration in website design and search engine optimization.

Identifying Your Websites Target Audience

Many times, websites are created without any thought given to exactly who the website is for and how (or even if) the website reached the intended audience. Knowing your audience may just be the most important consideration in website design and search engine optimization.

When was the last time you visited a website and you either a) wondered who the website was intended for or b) could not understand what the website was talking about (as in, the words used within the site)? It may or may not have ever happened to you, but you will run across a website like this, in time.

Website visitors can be very forgiving when visiting a website – they fill in the blanks where content may be missing or they just skip over the words which are foreign to them, hoping to still make sense out of the web content. Search engine “bots,” however, may not be so forgiving. Either the particular website or web page makes sense to them or it does not and, many times, the website simply does not get the job done.

Take a landscape company website, for example. The site may focus on the term “landscape design/build company,” but as a homeowner, you would never search for that term. Rather, you would enter something like “landscape trees” or “install home landscape.” In this instance, the two of you are speaking two different languages and are not connecting at all.

As you think about content for your website, consider two things. First, who is your target audience and second, are you speaking their language? It is quite possible for a website to have more than one target audience. For example, a website can target customers, wholesalers, and distributors. However, this web content needs to be on separate pages and be specific to each targeted audience. You need to ensure that the language you use on the web page is the language a web searcher will use when looking for a product or service you may offer.

Search engine optimization is all about using the correct words in your content and it is critically important to feed your search bots the ideal words your target audience will use when conducting a web search. There are a variety of tools you can use to see exactly what web searchers are entering when using search engines, some of which are quite affordable. These tools will be covered in greater detail in a separate article.

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Article Tags: audience, customer, design, engine, knowing your audience, optimization, search, search engine optimization, target, target audience, web, website



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