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When it comes to first-time visitors of your website, they will be forming an opinion very quickly and that opinion can have a serious impact on the success of your website. Regardless of what you are attempting to accomplish with your site, you need to have an idea of what you want to accomplish with first-time visitors in order to be able to develop a site that will make it happen.

In the past I’ve about 21 factors that influence first impressions, but knowing what you want to accomplish with those first impressions is a slightly different topic. By knowing what factors influence first impressions and by knowing what you want to happen with that first visit, you’ll be able to put that knowledge into practice to create a site that leads visitors to react in a certain way.

Some Examples of Potential Goals for First-Time Visitors

Product Sales

Selling a product on a first visit is difficult to do, but it can be accomplished. Many websites that are set up to achieve this goal are obvious sales pages. In this case, there is really no option to do anything but purchase the product or leave the page. There are usually no links to any other pages and no information that isn’t directed towards making a sale. This is the ultimate example of attempting to create a specific reaction from first-time visitors.

Most sales page sites are set up to sell one specific product. An e-commerce site on the other hand will have hundreds or thousands of different products, so the approach will obviously be a bit different. For an e-commerce site most sales will come from visitors who have been on the site several times.

Subscriptions

Most blogs have a goal of maximizing RSS subscriptions from first time visitors. For this reason you’ll see the commonly-recognized RSS icons usually high on pages where they will be seen right away. You’ll also see many blogs that use an introductory message before or after a post to encourage more subscriptions.

Blogs aren’t the only example here. Email opt-in lists are pretty similar. If your site is set up primarily to build a large opt-in list, your form that allows visitors to sign up will be one of the first things visitors see when they enter the page.

Bookmarks

Converting a first-time visitor into a repeat visitor is a goal for most websites. One effective way of doing this is by encouraging visitors to bookmark your page. If they do, chances are they will be back at least once at some point in the future. I put this approach into practice at my own blog. At the end of each post there’s a link to bookmark with Delicious. While this link isn’t given a spot high on the page that is seen right away, it is located at the end of the post so anyone who reads through to the end will see it. If they’ve read or scanned the post they’re a good candidate for a bookmark.

Contact Forms/Inquiries

Another potential goal for first time visitors is to get a lead or an inquiry. If this is the case, a contact form will be a focal point of the site and it will be easy to access. You may even see a contact form right on the homepage or in the sidebar of every page.

Ad Clicks

Some websites and blogs are set up primarily to make money though AdSense clicks, or some other type of cost-per-click program. Developing one of these sites requires that ad placement be carefully selected and tested. Ads will typically get prime screen real estate and there will usually be less external links that could distract visitors from the goal at hand.

For these sites there really is no other goal than getting an ad click from your first-time visitors. The success of the site will be determined by the number of visitors and the rate at which they click on ads, so that’s what gets priority in the design and development.

Memorable Visits

Maybe your goal for first-time visitors is to leave them with an impression that will lead them to remember your site and return at a later time. You may go about this be provided a lot of quality information, or by having a game or something entertaining on the site. In order for the first-time visitor to be able to return easily in the future, they’ll need to remember your URL. Branding plays a big role in achieving this goal.

Social Media Votes

A common goal for blogs is to get votes at various social media sites from first-time visitors (and from repeat visitors as well). Several months ago I would occasionally use a Digg button for specific blog posts on my blog for this reason. The hope was that visitors would like what they saw on the page and the button would remind them to vote and make it easy. In some cases it worked well and landed posts on the front page, and it other cases it didn’t.

Tell a Friend

If your first-time visitors aren’t going to buy anything for themselves, maybe they’ll have a friend that they think will be interested. This is not going to be your number 1 priority for your visitors, but can be something that you’ll want to consider.

How This Impacts Your Design

Obviously, if you want visitors to react in a certain way, you’ll also want to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. If you have several different things that you want to accomplish from first-time visits (such as subscribers, bookmarks, and memorable visits), you’ll need to develop a site that will allow all to be accomplished and to work together for greater success.

If you have on goal that trumps all others (such as is the case with sales letter pages), you’ll want to design a page that makes that one goal very obvious to visitors and gives them few distractions of doing anything else.

If you have multiple goals for first-time visitors, they should complement each other, not hinder one another. For example, if your primary goal is to sell products, you’re not going to want to also have a goal of getting ad clicks from first time visitors. In this scenario the ad clicks would prevent you from making sales because the visitor has left your page.

What’s Your Experience?

How do you incorporate your goals for first-time visitors into your designs?

Building a successful website obviously involves attracting visitors to the site. There are any number of ways to draw visitors to your site, but if you’re not having success it’s important to know what is causing the problems. Here we’ll take a look at 9 common reasons that websites aren’t getting visitors, as well as what can be done to correct the issue.

1 – Poorly Optimized

The leading traffic source for most websites is search engines, particularly Google. In order to maximize the quantity and quality of visitors a site receives, it should be built to be search engine-friendly. A poorly constructed site can cripple its chances of getting visitors from search engines, while a well-constructed site can reach targeted visitors every day by earning high rankings in the SERPs.

SEO of course goes far beyond simple on-page optimization, but without that foundation other efforts, such as link building will be a waste of time. A spider simulator can help you to find issues that may cause problems for search engines as they crawl your site. If you’re not familiar with basic on-page SEO, see The Web Developers SEO Cheat Sheet.

2 – Targeting the Wrong Keywords

In order to maximize search engine traffic your site should be targeting specific keywords and phrases. Ideally you’ll find words and phrases that have a high search volume and low competition. Of course this is easier said than done, but some solid keyword research can really help to boost your effectiveness with search engines. For more information and resources see 30 Keyword Tools to Use for Your Website.

3 – No Inbound Links

Link building is a key to gaining traffic from click-throughs and from search engines. Because search engines use the number and quality of inbound links in their determination of the search rankings, link building should be a priority for every website owner.

Building links is a huge topic that could warrant a number of blog posts, but if you’re looking for more information see Andy Hagan’s Ultimate Guide to Linkbaiting and SMM.

4 – Lack of Content

Very small websites with only a few pages and very little content will have a difficult time drawing significant traffic through search engines, and it will also give other website owners and bloggers less of a reason to link to them. Because content is so valuable for drawing traffic, blogs are a great addition to just about any website. The content published through the blog will add up over a period of time and should continually lead to increased traffic.

5 – Visitors Have No Reason to Keep Coming Back

One of the keys to increasing overall traffic numbers is to get more of your visitors to come back on a regular basis. In order to achieve this you’ll need to give visitors a reason to keep coming back. In many cases this is done with new content being added. Other methods may include a game, poll, video, user interaction, etc.

Think about your site from the perspective of a first-time visitor. Is there anything that would make you want to bookmark the site in order to find it in the future? Blogs are also great for this purpose as a blog with a decent subscriber base should always be receiving some repeat traffic.

6 – Not Updated Frequently

Part of giving visitors a reason to come back is updated the site on a consistent and frequent basis. Simply having a lot of content may not be enough. I think we’ve all been to websites that haven’t been updated in 5 years, and that kills any chance of getting repeat traffic.

7 – No Audience/Very Small Niche

If you’ve read anything about building a successful and profitable website you’ve probably heard that you should target a smaller, less competitive niche to avoid competition with larger websites with more resources. While this is true to some extent, you also need to be careful that you don’t choose a niche that is too narrow. If there are only 100 people in the world that are actively searching for what you’re providing, it will be almost impossible to ever get any type of significant and targeted traffic.

8 – No Marketing Plan

Every website owner that wants to create a profitable site needs to have some type of plan for promoting the site. This can be an informal plan or it can be a very detailed plan that covers all aspects of marketing. Each website owner will have different needs here, but the important thing is that you have some kind of plan. Don’t simply rely in creating a great site and having visitors just find you on their own.

9 – Visitors Can’t Remember Your Domain Name

As your site is around for a while longer, hopefully direct traffic will increase as some of your visitors will begin to arrive at your site by simply typing your URL into their browser. In order to benefit from this, you’ll need to have a domain that they can remember. For help with choosing a domain, see The 7 Characteristics of Good Domain Names.

What’s Your Opinion?

What issues do you see causing you the most difficulty? Are there others that you feel should be added to this list?