Usable Words

How do you handle rejection?

If your answer is along the lines of “I curl up into a ball and whimper”, it’s probably just as well you can’t see what happens when people look at your website or see it listed in search engines. Because most of the time they take one look, shrug their shoulders and go “Next!”.

It’s a truism that web users have short attention spans. Perhaps this is exaggerated sometimes. But when it comes to searching for a product or service and “shortlisting” a few possible websites, you really do only have a few seconds to convince someone that they really, really need you.

So what can you do to make sure they make the right decision?

The first step, and it sounds obvious until you realise how many of your competitors don’t do it, is: hit them up front with a blazingly clear description of what you do – the products you sell, or the services you deliver. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t try to be cryptic. And most of all, don’t try to sound all business-y and corporate. If you sell ethernet cables, tell ‘em “We sell ethernet cables”, not “We deliver connectivity solutions“. People will still take you seriously, I promise!

You had me at the SERP

So where do you put this blazingly clear description? If you answered “above the fold on my home page”, you get a gold star. You get extra points for saying that your home page should follow the traditional journalistic form of the “inverted pyramid” – get the key points across first, go into detail later.

But there’s somewhere else you should be thinking about too. Remember that many of your potential customers will first come across you via a Search Engine Results Page (or SERP, as those in the biz call it).

A SERP listing usually has two components. The first is a link to the destination page. The text for this link consists of the title of the page it links to. You knew that already, right? If not, you’re missing out on your biggest single opportunity to optimise your pages for search engines. (Go and read this post on Title Tags for Dummies if you want to know more.)

But it’s the second part of the SERP listing, the “snippet” of information below the link, that I’m more interested in right now. Depending on what people are searching for, this “snippet” sometimes comes from the visible content on your website itself. But other times, it’s taken from somewhere that’s not visible on your website but rather buried within its HTML code: what’s called the “meta description”. A meta description is essentially just a short description of what a page is about.

Did you know that the first impression a visitor gets about your business might be your meta description? Do you know what your meta description actually says? If not, do you think it might be a good idea to check? Remember, this little bit of text might mean the difference between “wow, ethernet cables huh, that’s just what I need!” and “nah…too vague…too confusing…they don’t sound like they’re really for me…forget it.”

(You should be able to edit your meta description in your CMS, if you have one…if in doubt, ask your web developer. And don’t confuse the meta description with “meta keywords”, which are just that, a simple list of keywords, nowadays fairly pointless as search engines have learnt to ignore them.)

Rejection is good

One final thought: I’ve never had too much sympathy for celebrities who complain about the number of infatuated fans chasing after them. But I do know that if you have a website (unless you’re Amazon), you actually don’t want to capture every single person who happens to stop by. It gets boring. If you’re selling ethernet cables, you don’t really want to hear from customers who are looking for online dating services, or social networks, or telephone systems. Yet another reason not to say you’re into “connectivity solutions”, because that could potentially refer to any of these things.

So: embrace rejection. Focus on honing in with laser-like accuracy on your target market. Because then you know the traffic you’re getting is more likely to be from Mr or Ms Right…the customer whose needs you are most perfectly equipped to meet.

Image: victoriapeckham