There are basically two objectives to select from when deciding which one should be the primary focus for your website;

1. Getting found
2. Making an impression

Let’s use an example to make the distinction clear. If you are a new or relatively unknown company and have a unique or unfamiliar product to sell, your objective will most likely be getting found. You can’t sell your product until someone knows about it, so you need to attract potential customers to your website. In this example, you may choose to invest in optimizing your website for search rather than, for example, custom graphics or expensive animation.

In contrast, if you are an established, well known company that must maintain a high image profile, such as an ad agency, you may choose to invest in graphics and design rather than search. Your potential customers most likely know your name, and so you prefer to impress them rather than be found by them.

In reality, most companies will select elements of both objectives, and the objectives may change over time as the marketing objectives change. For example, you don’t want a website that is not professionally designed and that alienates visitors.

In visual terms, think of your Web objective as a slider: one side of the scale is search optimized, the other side is image optimized.

For small businesses just beginning their Web programs, it will be advantageous to devote resources primarily to one objective and that objective will most likely be getting found.

The simple and effective way to increase marketing’s ROI is to pair creative work (traditional and online, such as print ads and web pages)  with science and analytics.

This is what Marketing Experiments does and impressively so. Marketing Experiments’ mission is to “discover what really works in optimization.” This may sound like it’s highly confined to home page optimization, but it goes well beyond to email, landing pages, and more. Further, the principles used can and should be used for all media, outbound as well as inbound.

The core idea is to experiment. Try something new, test it, and determine what works best. Learn and Repeat.

Sign up for regular seminars, and scour their site for valuable research. Today, for example, the title of their webinar is: “Maximize your Agency ROI: How adding science to the creative process reveals a 26% gain.”

Scrolling to their research briefs, find “Clarity Trumps Persuasion: How changing the first seven seconds of user experience drove a 201% gain.”

See you there.