What is your web site focus?

How should I judge my own web site?

Question 2

What is the focus of your website?

This is a much trickier and more difficult question than it seems. It again requires some brutal honesty and a good understanding of your business, your industry and your existing customers.

Following the misleading advice from novice SEO 'professionals' many web sites become a repository for every scrap of information a business or organisation has ever produced. This does not work.

A good analogy

A search light beam used at night to send a glowing tube of light up into the night sky. Imagine now the circle of light illuminating the bottom of a blanket of high clouds. These light beams have a focus control to expand or reduce the size of the beam. What happens when we play with the focus control.

Firstly, as we broaden the focus, the circle of light expands becoming weaker and weaker until finally the cloud bottoms are no more illuminated than when the light is off!

What happens when we narrow the focus? The circle of light narrows and finally illuminates brightly only a tiny portion of the night sky cloud cover, a tight pencil beam.

The surfing millions are represented by the cloud cover. With a broad beam you will attract a tiny fraction of the whole of the cloud cover. This will be reflected in large traffic numbers but a very low page-read rate, possibly one or two pages at most, where visitors bounce in, don't find what they are really looking for, and bounce back out.

A narrow focus attracts lower traffic rates (usually but that is not a rule) but from a more focussed area of the cloud. If you aim your pencil beam correctly, you will hit areas where your potential customers 'hang out'. Your choice of focus is yours, but your web site needs a pencil like focus if it is to be successful.

Put more simply perhaps

Do you want a thousand visitors and one sale, or a hundred visitors and ten sales?

Customers want clear guidance, unequivocal answers and to be guided despite having choices (or guided choices). Your website should focus on just one job or task, and focus on that job or task without question.

What is the focus of your website?

Write it down in one simple sentence underneath your answer to question 1. Now you have the purpose of your web site and your web site focus. A good start at least.

Back to Five Great Questions.