You’d be amazed at the fickle way web site visitors flick from one site to another in order to find what they want as quickly as possible. If you spend a lot of time looking at stats as I do, you’ll know that you have to grab the attention of your visitors very quickly.
I did a search for bespoke joinery the other day. A quick drill down the page gave me an instant idea of what it was that the companies thought their potential customers might find important about them. Some felt I should know that they’d been in the joinery business for decades, others wanted me to know that they specialised in staircases and some just wanted to tell me that they considered themselves to be turning out work of the highest quality. Remember – at this point I hadn’t even clicked onto a site. The information I was receiving came from the search engine’s page content – the page description.
I was able, just by scrolling down the first couple of pages of search results to select the most likely joinery companies for the job and eliminate the rest without even visiting their web sites. Those I rejected hadn’t even had the chance to show me their home pages.
It sounds terribly unfair, but the search jungle is such that unless every element of your web site – and that includes the header text which contributes to what’s in those search page listings – is up to scratch, you will inevitably miss out on visits which you might otherwise have received.
People whose business to promote your website will often tell you that optimisation isn’t that important these days; it’s all about links. Well that’s not really true. Optimisation content isn’t just for the benefit of robots. If what appears in the head section of your web site and therefore within the search engine listings doesn’t contain the information to hook your visitor, the game’s lost. Header information is incredibly important as my foray into the world of bespoke joiners shows.
