The more time you spend thinking about what your customers want, and how the search for it, the more successful your website will be as a selling site. SEO and value mapping are two techniques that work together to help you increase and organize your knowledge of your customers.

Developing, or redeveloping, your website to get better search rankings isn't about trickery. It's about relevance. Search engines judge your webpages according to how relevant they are to the search terms used by human searchers. Before you can make your pages relevant to those searchers, you have to know what they are searching for. Luckily, we have tools that take the guesswork out of this process.

Of course, getting people to your site is only part of the battle. Once they get there, you want them to become customers, and eventually loyal repeat customers. to convert them, you have to understand not just what they are searching for, but what information they need in order to make a buying decision.

Finding that information is definitely harder, but if you've really considered your customers in your product development life cycle, then you should be able to come up with the answers you need. What's needed is a discovery process that forces you to map your product's value to your customers' needs and underlying issues.

This process is known as value mapping, and it will help you turn browsers into customers.

Mapping Your Value to Your Customers' Needs

When you build a selling website, there are three generic goals to be met:

1. Attract prospects from your various target markets via search engines
2. Provide all of the information each type prospect needs to make an informed buying decision
3. Convert each type of prospect to a qualified lead through calls to action

These goals are universal to selling websites. You need to flesh them out for your specific situation through a process of discovery that links your strategic objectives and your product's features with the needs and key issues of the users, buyers and influencers in your target audiences. The process is sometimes called value mapping. You map the needs and underlying issues of your customers to the features and value of your products. Through this process, you gain an understanding of what information you need to publish, and how to organize it to show your value and benefits, and to make the sale.

What we are really talking about here is behavioral marketing. You need to understand your customers' motives and decision-making styles. You create value scenarios for markets and the stakeholders within those markets, and use those scenarios to create extended selling conversation with your customers on your website. Here's how we look at with regard to our customers: