There is an established model in marketing known as AIDA:

• Attention (aka Awareness) - attract the attention of your target audience
• Interest - raise their interest by demonstrating benefits, using testimonials/stories
• Desire - persuade them that they need your product / service / advice / information
• Action - lead them to a desired action

This model has been around since 1925 - talk about "established"!  But the thing is, it is still relevant today and especially in writing and optimising content for the web.  

As you can imagine, we see hundreds, well more like thousands of web pages each year and so many of them don't even attempt to satisfy a prospect, client or web visitor's needs let alone try to move them in the direction of a desired outcome. 

Services like search engine optimisation and search engine marketing in general are usually employed to build traffic to a site.  We do this by ensuring that sites are appearing in prominent positions for sets of relevant keywords on various search engines.   But here at Vertical Leap, we also monitor conversion for the traffic that comes from these search engines so that we can ensure that our clients are meeting their ultimate goal - to generate business or some other action from that traffic.   But its amazing, well staggering, how many sites -  from companies large and small - don't consider this proven model for structuring their content and designing their web-site.

We help of course - part of our optimisation process is to ensure that a certain "structure" is in place..  this includes modification to some of the content to attract a web visitors' attention when the site achieves its high rankings (sort of an AIDA does SEO approach); but more can always be done by the web designers and original copywriters when they were first hired I think - after all, if it is such an established concept, shouldn't it be a "first principle" and in use by every marketing and design company?

I think so - how about you? Is your site AIDA compliant?  If not, let us know and we could put you in touch with some people who know some people.