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The Search Marketing Advisor Newsletter Article:
April 2005, Volume 4, Issue 4

search engine marketing

Conversion Corner: Creating Information Scent

by Sage Peterson, Vice President of New Product Sales, iProspect

Have you ever winced when reviewing your log files? At one time or another, you may have felt that awful disappointment when you learned that 98% of the visitors to your website were leaving abruptly, in spite of your new site design or your latest ad campaign. Visitors arrived, they looked, and they left. Yet they chose to visit your site. After all, a click-through from any origin (search engine, PPC, banner, affiliate link) indicates a certain level of intent on the part of the visitor. So why do so many people voluntarily arrive and then quickly depart? Were they in the wrong place? Did your website not offer what they wanted? Or, could they not find what they were looking for?

Most visitors to your website have a specific goal or objective in mind. Long gone are the days of leisurely surfing. If the information they want is not immediately obvious, they may dig for it by clicking to a few more pages, but if it’s not found, they will leave. According to Onestat, 80% of all visitors will leave within the first three pages. Care to venture a guess as to why websites lose more visitors than they convert?

Lack of Scent

“Lack of Scent” is the term usability experts use for “irrelevance.” I quote Jakob Nielson:
“Information scent refers to the extent to which users can predict what they will find if they pursue a certain path through a website.”
Our challenge is to market to the individual in a world of differences. So if your goal is to motivate and persuade your users to keep clicking, you need to attain a more in-depth understanding of them and how their attitudes, beliefs, and values relate to their purchasing choices. How do they initiate relationships, gather information and ultimately decide to make a decision? Since people are different, a “one size fits all” website will most likely only convert those few users that relate to it. So how do you make your website appeal to more groups of people?

Learning More About Your Website Visitors

How a visitor navigates your site and makes a purchasing choice is based on who they are as a personality. You can turn that personality into more defined and actionable information and construct archetypes that represent your customers. Once developed, these representations, or “personas,” give you complete portraits of what your potential customers look like, which tells you how to design your site to encourage conversion.

In the persuasion architecture process, extensive research is conducted to reveal and learn everything possible about your best customers. The process takes into account: You must first be armed with this information to begin plotting an “information scent trail” for your personas. A visitor's motivations reveal likely search terms, keywords, and trigger words that communicate a sufficiently strong scent to motivate, propel, and guide your prospect through the conversion process.

If you can answer the question, “What is most relevant to the customer?” then it is incumbent on you to make sure your website contains not only the relevant product or solution, but also relevant scent and content to get the customer to it.

Want the good news? Once you really know what is most important to your visitors, you can use this information to create scent in all of your messaging. The closer you can present your solutions to a prospect in their words and decision process, the more people you will convert.

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Learn more about iProspect's Website Conversion Auditsm Service.



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