Answering the question, "can you help me?"

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"Can you help me?" is a basic question that takes many forms: "Do you sell x-y-z?" "Where can I find t-u-v?" "What's your price on a-b-c?"

Each time it is asked, the question has three basic parts:

1. Can you help me understand x-y-z?
2. Can you help me solve my x-y-z problem?
3. Can you help me improve my x-y-z situation?

These three elements are shown in Figure 2.

Some of you might be asking "What does 'understanding' have to do with women's orange sweaters?" The answers would be things like size, fabric, designer, shipping options and return policy.

The point to be made here is not that there are three questions so much as that you make sure you give visitors three answer paths, each answer path corresponding to what Charles Wentworth -- a 30-year veteran of market research -- calls the three distinct buying behaviors: "unsure, evaluating and acceptable. "

People say that they prefer yes and no answers to "can you help me" questions, but studies show such binary responses are off-putting to all but a small minority of people. Given a polarity situation, most people momentarily stop, not knowing which way to go, and enter a state of confusion. Three choices, each aligned to a specific buying behavior, help visitors avoid this.

Buying behaviors as answer paths
Your site not coming up in a search is a "no" response to whatever question the searcher is asking.

Your site coming up in a search is a "yes," and when the searcher clicks on your link you want the widest possible audience capture with your response.

Are they shoppers getting information towards a purchase? Then "Learn" is the landing page option they'll follow; if your information is good and understandable, then you'll make the conversion.

Are they buyers with special requirements? Then "Solve" is the path they'll investigate.

Have they already purchased and are looking to do more? They'll click on the "Improve" link.

Your specific site requirements might not be Learn, Solve or Improve, but designing along the lines of unsure, evaluating and acceptable goes a long way toward keeping visitors engaged, active and focused on your site.

Showing tourists what you're offering
This brings us to Tourists, those visitors who aren't yet in the sales funnel and are probably still in the search funnel. They came to your site as tirekickers or grazers.

Grazers are people who found your site by accident, although a search might have been involved. In traditional parlance, grazers are the people walking through the mall, looking in different windows but never going into any one store.

Tirekickers are walking through the mall and going into all the sports stores, gathering information about golf clubs. They might not really want golf clubs, but they're looking at them anyway.

Let's use these familiar concepts to create web analogs.

You want tirekicking Tourists to stay in your store and on your site long enough to brand them. You want them to come back if they do make a purchase. The way to do that is to state your value proposition in plain English, as shown in Figure 3:

Tourists are still in the search funnel, and the goal is to have their search funnel empty into your sales funnel. This is done by providing a compelling reason for them to either stop their search completely or to pause long enough for you to make a lasting impression on them.

Again, this is best performed by answering the question, "Can you help me?"

However, this time the site must answer it in a direct and very clear way: "Yes, we can save you 30 percent and we back it with 100 percent commitment."

Summary
Learning to listen and learning to see are important tools to have in your skill set, although they are seldom recognized as such. Here, we demonstrated how to listen to questions being asked via searches and how to respond to them, as well as how to see where visitors are in the decision cycle and provide answer paths to them.

Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. Read full bio here.