A Website is Only as Pretty as the Audience it Attracts – Fix it Now

by Jessica Perkins Published on December 30, 2022

In an age when businesses are increasingly dependent on the internet to get new leads and sales, provide customer service, and conduct numerous other operations important to their growth, one thing holds true. Your website design can make or break the success of your business.

How you design your website can determine the kind of visitors your website attracts, and how many of them end up sticking around to give you more business in the future. As much as it might be aesthetically appealing, those colorful images and pretty fonts can only do so much to keep the intended audience around.

As a matter of fact, it could be attracting the wrong audience in the first place. A well-designed website should also be engaging and captivating to the specific audience that you’re targeting.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss how to identify your target audience, create an attractive website, and ensure that your website is drawing the right kind of visitors. The post will also provide tips on how to fix certain painstaking issues that could be getting in the way of attracting the right visitors to your site and ultimately propelling your business forward.

Identifying Your Target Audience and Building a Website Around That Goal

Before you create a website, one of the most crucial steps to take is to identify your target audience. Of course, this could be based on the kind of business you’re running, the industry you’re interested in, and the market you’re targeting.

All the same, identifying your target audience and building a website around that goal is a crucial step in the process of launching a website. This basically involves conducting some careful research to understand the needs and interests of the target audience, and then designing a website that meets those needs.

How to Identify Your Target Audience

While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to it, there are various ways to identify a target audience, their needs, pain points, and interests so you can design or develop a website that successfully serves its purpose. Some of these include the following.

Studying Demographics:

To make sure your site will be attracting visitors, one of the first things you’ll need to determine is your target audience’s demographic. In other words, this entails identifying the age, gender, income level, geographic location, and other characteristics of the people who are most likely to use the website. If you’re already getting some visitors, consider using a website visitor tracking tool, as this can give you an idea of the type of demographic you’re attracting.

Most importantly, you’ll want to center this around the market or industry you’re interested in, which explains the need to study your competitors.

Researching Competitors:

Competitor research is not only important before launching a website, but also after as an ongoing process. It helps you learn various things, including the kind of visitors they appeal to, how they manage to attract particular audiences, where they advertise most, and the pain points they are addressing.

A look at several competitor websites in your industry can also help you gain insight into how you can keep your own site client-centric. If you’re running or developing a new law firm website from scratch, for instance, snooping into how some of the most successful attorney websites design their own to attract their target audience can help you discover features that you can add to gain a competitive edge.

Go ahead and look at the specifics, from landing page structure to ads, and how easy it is for customers to contact them. Compare the strategies to yours and from this information, you will probably notice a weak link or something you can improve on for your benefit.

Researching the Market:

This should actually have been the first point on the list. To ensure your website attracts just the right target audience, it’s important to conduct thorough market research before launching and afterward on an ongoing basis.

This can help you answer questions like:

What’s currently being offered in the market?
Are all the pain points of my target audience being addressed?
Could there be a group of people being left out?

In other words, this can be a great way to discover market gaps that you could fill using a product or service on your website. It also helps you determine how to best sell your idea to your intended audience through your site.

Reviewing Industry Trends:

Alongside a continuous market research approach, it’s also important to stay up to date with industry trends if you want your website to attract the right audience. For instance, are your target customers spending more time on Facebook or did the Tik Tok wave divert their attention?

Could your current services or products appeal more to your target audience in certain seasons, such as Halloween or Christmas? And if so, could giving your website a theme based on the season (like Google often does) help bump up traffic to your website?

Conducting Interviews and Surveys:

If your site is already up and running, interviews with people buying from you can be a great way to discover and fix issues that could be hindering your business from achieving its highest potential.

Surveys and interviews with already existing customers can help you discover patterns in repeat purchases, and perhaps help you gain insight into features you can include on your website to convert one-time buyers into loyal customers.

The information can also help you determine things like what people like about your product/service/website, or where most of your target audience loves to hang out (e.g on social media).

Understanding Your Target Audience’s Pain Points

Once a target audience has been identified, the next important step is to understand what their needs and interests are in terms of website design. You can use some of the strategies mentioned earlier, including interviews and surveys.

For obvious reasons, your target audience is more likely to prefer a website that is easy to navigate and access from various devices. You can then structure or adjust the site to meet those needs as much as possible.

Creating a Great Site for Your Target Audience:

Understanding the needs and interests of your target audience might be the most important thing, but that’s not all there is in making sure your website successfully meets those needs. It’s also important to make sure the site has the right content, relevant, engaging, informative, and up-to-date.

A successful website also ensures that the design elements and features will appeal to the target audience and that the website is easy to navigate and use. Here are some tips to make sure your site is designed for your target audience.

The Right Content:

To make your website more attractive to the right people, you will want to create content that your target audience finds relevant and engaging. Keep content fresh and updated, and make sure it is optimized for search engines.

Also, keep in mind that most of today’s readers are more likely to be busy and short of time. With this in mind, it is best to avoid long paragraphs, complicated phrases, and fluffy content. If need be, providing backlinks to statistics and further reading resources can be a huge plus.

Intuitive UI/UX:

Regardless of how pretty your website is, it can make very little difference in terms of your monthly traffic and conversions. Instead of using large image files, complex graphics, and other flashy elements, it’s best to put the visitor’s needs first. An intuitive UI/UX design means making sure the site is easy for users to find what they are looking for or might be interested in. If you’re looking for free, high-quality photos, be sure to check out websites like Freepik, which offer a vast collection of images that can be used for various purposes.

At the same time, it’s important to differentiate between graphic design and UX design. Graphic design is more focused on the visual elements of a website, such as the colors, fonts, and images. UX design, on the other hand, is focused on how easy it is for the user to interact with the website. While both elements are important in creating a successful website, it’s important to understand the difference between the two. Moreover, both graphic and UI/UX design should be converted properly into website code. Professional Figma to HTML services will be beneficial if you don’t have development experience.

Mobile Friendliness:

By now, you may or may not have understood the importance of a responsive or mobile-friendly website. Well, recent statistics show that there are more than 4.3 billion active users of mobile internet, and the number is growing. Needless to explain, it’s easier to look up information online from a mobile device even while on the go.

A mobile-friendly site also loads faster and can easily be viewed from a portable internet device without distortion of content. So, unless your target audiences are strictly computer users, making your website mobile-friendly should not be negotiable in the age and day.

Leveraging the Power of SEO, Paid Advertising, and Social Media Presence

SEO is almost always king when it comes to ensuring your website appears in search engine results for key terms related to your target audience. Besides building a successful SEO strategy so your potential customers can easily find your website, fixing SEO issues can drastically improve your website traffic and rankings on Google.

Investing in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and other types of paid advertising also helps you reach a wider audience and encourage more people to visit your website.

On the other hand, social media platforms are a great place to promote your website and build a connection with your target audience. Consider posting content that is relevant to your audience, engaging with people who comment, and offering incentives for them to share your content.

Testing and Evaluating Your Website

Finally, the website needs to be tested and evaluated to ensure that it is attracting the right people and meeting the needs of your target audience. Testing and evaluation might involve conducting usability testing, user surveys, and other evaluation methods.

While many premium versions are available, many small businesses turn to free website usability and performance tools like Google Analytics, GTmetrix, UserPlus, and Optimizely, among others. Just to name a few, such tools can help pinpoint problems that need fixing, including SEO issues, page loading times, CSS and JavaScript challenges, and Images that need to be optimized.

The goal here is to ensure that the website is providing a good user experience and that it is meeting the goals of the target audience. By using analytics tools to track your website’s performance and identify which strategies are working best, you can always refine your approach and ensure you are attracting the right audience.

In conclusion, having a pretty website is one thing, but ensuring it’s attracting the right audience is definitely another. With the above few points in mind, you can pretty much do both. You can ensure your website serves its purpose in appealing to your audience and generating revenue for your business.