What do visitors want, really, really want from a website

I often get asked what can I do to raise the traffic on my website, how can I get the visitor numbers up and make things really successful.  So I thought over the next few weeks I’m going to attempt to explain!

Perhaps the biggest reason to come to a website is content.  It’s not flashy graphics, or videos or facebook likes.  It’s content.  CONTENT!!!!

Imagine if you removed all the images from your site and left only text.  What would be left?  Would it be interesting?  Would you want to visit?  Now think of the big sites you might have interacted with on the web: Facebook, Google, Twitter or perhaps the news sites like the BBC or technology sites like The Register or even Wikipedia.  Have a good look at them and you’ll find one thing in common they are all about content.  Text for people to read.  Stuff for people to do.

Sure popular site use other mechanisms to make them more interesting but and I think it’s a big BUT the majority of what interests people in these sites is the text.

I’ve deliberately left the space here – it’s the main thing to take away from this blog post.  Visitors want text to read.  If you do that well then people will come to your website and your traffic numbers will grow.  It might seem obvious but think about how often you put up new and interesting information.   Take the following options:

1. once a month
2. once a week
3. once a day
4. once an hour
5. more than once an hour

So which of these does your site fall into.  For most websites it’s the first one.  Perhaps for others once a week works out but they are starting to be rarer and then you get the top sites.  There are only a few but they put up content more than once an hour.  Some are doing it minute by minute.  I’ve illustrated this below:

You can see at the top the sites like Google with millions of visitors and of course on-going hourly updates.  At the other end there are the sites that only have a few visitors a day who don’t update their content very often.

So where does your site lie on this scale?  Towards the top or towards the bottom?

If you’re at the bottom don’t worry.  Even at 10 visitors a day that’s 10×365=3650 visitors in a year which is still a lot of people coming for a look so don’t be disheartened, your site is making a difference.

If however you want to take it to the next level then you need to look at ways to increase the content updates and frequency of those updates.

Okay so that’s it for now in the next post I’ll discuss a few options for generating content and how you can go about doing it simply.