The Importance of Defining Site Objectives

I like digging into some of the patents and papers from search engines and academics who study how search works.

But something else I find fascinating is how marketing fits into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how important it is to know about both to be successful in getting traffic to a site. Or should I say the right traffic – visits from the people who will find the pages of a website interesting and engaging to them, which begins with defining site objectives for a site?

A lot of that crossover is getting an insight into the words that people will both use to find a site and expect to see its pages. That doesn’t come out of doing some research on wordtracker or nichebot or the obsolete Overture keyword selection tool.

Those can be nice tools to use, but some of the most important steps in finding meaningful words that people will search for come earlier before you should even be looking at those sites.

Finding those words comes from having meaningful conversations with the people who own the site, understanding what they hope to accomplish with their site, and trying to glean who the people are who will use that site. This means defining site objectives becomes an important part of the process of optimizing a site.

Early on, you will want to know what are the objectives are behind a site. That’s an excellent first step. A site can have more than one objective, and it can target different audiences with different objectives. Instead of just trying to increase traffic to a site from a search engine, it can help to know who those audiences are and what the site owner wants those people to do once they get to the site.

Here are some things to aim at when defining site objectives:

  • Selling goods
  • Selling services that aren’t offered directly on the site itself.
  • Attracting subscribers to online services hosted by the site.
  • Generating leads.
  • Educating an audience
  • Sharing information
  • Attracting advertisers
  • Building a reputation for a person or organization
  • Building a community
  • Storing and offering whitepapers and documents
  • Allowing private communications between members of the organization.

One of the nice things about defining site objectives early on in an SEO campaign is that it can also help define how successful that campaign is and suggest some strategies for that campaign.

But it also may mean that the person performing SEO needs to understand some strategies for helping a site owner fulfill these site objectives once they arrive on pages of a site.

Example: an approach to optimizing a large site selling goods

Increasing rankings in a search engine are one approach to optimizing a site for search engines. But we also know from Chris Anderson’s article on the long tail that a site can attract traffic for a large number of words and phrases that don’t show large volumes of traffic in a tool like Word Tracker or the Overture Keyword Selection tool.

The article provides an example of the advantage that an online store can have over a big box showroom in defining site objectives:

The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are…

So when it comes to optimizing a large site that sells goods for search engines, instead of focusing upon a few broad and popular terms to rank well with, it might be better to try to make sure that individual product names rank well in the search engines.

That may mean making sure that a search engine indexing program can successfully index a large dynamic site and that each page has its unique page title, headlines, and content that reflects those product names.

It can also possibly mean that some articles should accompany those products to provide visitors enough information to make an informed purchasing decision and give search engines something to index.

So, what other SEO strategies might be used for defining site objectives that I mentioned above?