Which of the following describes the visitors to your website?
- Random internet netizen
- A member of a community
- One of a select few members of your website’s community
Sure, that may be an easy question to answer if you offer a service that individuals become members of or subscribe to, but any website can offer that same level of familiarity, even when the starting user is a first time visitor; it’s all in how you adapt for their experience.
Let’s start with ‘A member of a community’. This is one of the simplest methods of initiating and many are already doing it. For instance, if a user visits your site from Google by using the search “best PHP tutorial,” your site may customize the landing page to reflect their search terms. You’ve now converted a random netizen to a Google user who has found their way to your site along with many others, giving a sense of familiarity. This has been covered previously here on SEOmoz when discussing landing pages.
Now, what makes a user become not just a member of an external community, but part of your website’s community? Let’s sidestep a minute and look at a recent study by “a team led by Noah Goldstein, now at the University of California, Los Angeles” and an article on Peer Pressure in Scientific American. To summarize, the researchers found that patrons of a hotel room word notably more likely to reuse their towels when the sign in the room stated that other visitors who stayed in that specific room had reused their towels, creating a greater than 25% increase in re-usage by guests in that room, though all the rooms were alike.
How is that relevant to SEO? In the ultimate in shameless self-promotion, I will use the example from my site, which is a purchase page providing links to external websites where visitors can purchase a copy of my book. The most familiar link is Amazon.com, which by sheer brand familiarity, gets a lot of links. However, the very first link provides the author (me) 241% more revenue with each sale. The following is the evolution of the link (oldest to future versions):
- Lulu.com (Preferred)
- Lulu.com (241% more author revenue)
- Lulu.com (XX% visitor purchases)
Consider what your website could be doing to provide peer pressure while including your visitors into your website’s community when they first arrive. Conversion is more than just having a good product. What other uses can you think of?
