How to find out what your website visitors really want

What's on your visitors' wish list?

Have you ever put together a wish list for items that you would like to receive for your birthday? Then the big day comes, and everybody comes to the party with all kinds of boxes filled with presents.   Sure, some of them will be surprises, and that’s fun. But you also have high hopes to receive some gifts from your wish list.

Instead, you find that you got a few good surprises, plus several repeat items which you already owned and don’t have a use for them.  And you got nothing from your wish list. Bummer.

This is the disappointment that visitors feel when they get to a website where they were hoping to find answers and instead, they found mostly stuff that they had already found elsewhere.   And off they go somewhere else to try to find fulfillment to their wish list.

The way around disappointing visitors is to build a visitor-friendly site
If you have read my previous post on Why website visitors are so hard to catch, you know that one way to build a visitor-friendly website is to give your visitors answers to the questions that they have.

The reason why it’s important to give your visitors the answers that they want is to make your site about them and about what they need instead of giving them stuff that they don’t need or have already found elsewhere.  Through the right answers, we give them something of value and ultimately build up trust and earn their respect, which later translates into sales.

But, how do we know what answers are our visitors looking for?
Well, that depends on what kind of questions they have.  To find out the exact questions, you’ll have to ask them directly.  But, you could start by thinking about what kinds of questions YOU would have.

For example, if you were relocating to a place where you’ve never been before, where would you start? What would you want to know?  When you figure these questions out, you’ll have a good first idea of where to start.

Once you have a first inkling of what questions your visitor might want answered, it’s time to ask one of your real-life visitors and see how close you got to what she really wants.

Chances are you are close enough, but not quite there

To get there, you need to ask.

First, who do you ask?
You ask one of your real-life clients who fits the profile of the visitor that you want to help out. So if you want to focus on helping seniors, find a senior that you know; if it’s relocations, find someone who just went through it.  Or, if your focus is on a neighborhood, find someone who recently moved there.

Then, you ask her, for example:

1. Why were you moving?
2. What parts of choosing a new home were difficult to figure out?
3. What parts were easy to figure out?
4. What kind of information did you wish was easier to find?
5. In an ideal world, if you had a website which would answer all your questions – what would it have in it?

You’ll want to record and transcribe the talk
It’s important that you have a written version of it which you can analyze and study later on.  This is your visitor’s wish list. Make sure that you’re paying attention to what she wants!

Once you have the transcribed talk, what do you do with that info?
In your website copy, use the exact words that she used during the talk and directly answer the questions that she had.  More than likely, your other visitors will find that this is exactly the information that they were looking for.

But is it a good idea to just ask one person instead of sending out a survey to hundreds of people?
First of all, compiling hundreds of answers is a lot of work. Secondly, you’ll find that there will be many similar answers and that you didn’t have to survey all those people to get that basic insight.

Finally, if you don’t use the exact wording of ONE person, and instead average out what everybody said in the survey, you’ll be generalizing and speaking directly to no one.

Bottom line, it’s best to stick with one person who accurately represents what your visitors want – because that’s what’s going to keep them on your site.

What I learned from interviewing the ideal visitor to my website
When I started building the Right School, Right Home website, I thought that offering a search of homes by school was a good idea.  After that initial idea, I asked my ideal client what she thought about it and what she had gone through when her family got transferred and she had to relocate to our area.  I also asked her what she felt was missing during her search.

What I found is that she wanted something somewhat different than what I had in mind for the website.  So I listened, and ultimately created the site aiming at fulfilling her needs.

Let’s recap

Next step
If you want to keep more visitors on your website, I strongly encourage you to find an ideal visitor and set up a quick interview. You’ll see that this is the best way to find out what your visitors really want.