‘Usability Can Complement SEO to Up Conversions’

An article entitled, “Usability ‘can complement SEO to up conversions‘” just appeared this month in the UK‘s DirectNews news source. Similar articles are popping up all over as organizations begin to realize that the two are somehow related. This article caught my eye though because of a reported quote by Herndon Hasty, a senior SEO evangelist at Range Online Media.

Herndon Hasty, senior SEO evangelist at Range Online Media, claimed that a site with a high search engine ranking and low usability is on a par with a site that offers good usability but cannot be indexed by search engines at all, Online Media Daily reports.

An article in MediaPost News reports that Hasty and Chris Knoch, a search engine marketing specialist at Omniture, presented and fielded questions during a Search Marketing Now Webinar, “SEO and Conversion Rates: Hand-in-hand.”

A site that ranks well in search engines but can’t convert customers from browsers to buyers is just as bad as a site that provides a great user experience but search engines cannot index it, Hasty said.

It’s a great connection organizations often overlook. Throw in Web standards too for that measure.

Usability + Accessibility + Web Standards = A Winning Plan + Optimized SEO

Usability + Accessibility + Web Standards – that’s the winning combination for me. They promote better SEO from what I’ve seen. I’ll add in SEO in parentheses since shooting for usability, accessibility, and Web standards compliance often get you a good chunk of the way towards SEO. Adherence to Web standards like XHTML + CSS improve your odds by helping you ensure your site is as crawlable as possible. If you’re a believer when it comes to Web standards and accessibility, you’ll probably do things like:

• Include alternative text for images, and make sure there’s some alternative text for your ads and messaging that’s locked in Flash elements
• Use semantics and headings to give weighting to key concepts throughout your site
• Label links clearly and unambiguously — avoiding the Read More, Click Here, and PDF link labels, for instance — so it’s clear to someone scanning a list of links out of context — or a search engine crawling your site blindly — where those links point
• Remove all non-data table tags that were in version 1.0 of your Web site for formatting and layout, and by doing so, up the odds that a search engine can wade through your site

How Does Usability Fit Into SEO and the Equation?

I’ve had some interesting debates with colleagues and friends about what usability means, so let me clarify. To me, usability’s the goal. To have that as your goal, you need to do several things:

• Talk with your customers and users to find out what they want, look for, and consider in using information or services
• Describe your products and offerings and what you want to sell / provide clearly and in a short, easy-to-digest blurb
• Organize your products and offerings on your Web site to make them easy for people to find
• Apply conventions and standards such as page titles, headings, and structural elements to make things easy to scan and understand
• Use active voice content and unambiguous language to promote readability and understandability (also helps ready your site for translations into other languages)
• Design your site to highlight key areas your visitors will want to find quickly so they don’t need to spend a lot of time thinking first about it — this is where a great designer builds in visual elements and breaks up the monotony of text with images, icons, and other elements
• Design your site to be appealing to the target audience and have an immediate curb appeal so they’ll want to stick around or look further

Case Study: Usability + Accessibility + Web Standards = Better Findability of Product Site

I worked on a large, international, publicly-traded company’s Web site redesign recently. A key goal of the site was to pull in all the product and subsites the company’s product managers and divisions had amassed over the years. A challenging task for sure, especially when being the one to work one-on-one with those product and division managers who’d been told they would no longer own their own sites.

During that redesign, I sat down with one product owner who had the biggest concerns. She was worried the integration of sites would kill her search engine rankings. Instead of product.com, she’d now be found at company.com/product. She was not pleased and wanted me to promise her a certain ranking in Google results before she’d cooperate, and adwords and search engine campaigns if she did cooperate and her ranking dropped. I’ll keep secret my Jedi Mind Magic for convincing her we had a winning plan…but I did assure her that what we were doing would most likely improve her rankings for the phrases and product name she wanted optimized.

As it turned out, our plan worked. Even better than expected. Her site went from #8 to #2 for the key phrase potential customers would use to find relevant products. That ranking as well as the #1 ranking for the product name (yes, this should be assumed, but if your site’s not designed well and your product’s been featured in reviews by top journals, you may find your product slipping in rankings). Those rankings have held steady for a year or so now.

Her old site was ok, it wasn’t too bad really though it needed a facelift. But the old product site hadn’t paid much attention to what people wanted to know about the product or how they would look for her type of product, let alone organize the content and site around it — with keywords and phrases that customers would use in headings and link labels. There were images scattered everywhere that included the product or concept names which weren’t accessible as they lacked alt tags, so for a search engine, it would be like finding a page whose title and key concepts read something like this — Blank / Untitled / ” “.

Summing Up: What’s Worth a Bigger ROI — Usability or Adwords?

I’ve seen a lot of sites and situations in the past 12 years as search engines have evolved and Google’s become the de facto standard and benchmark. What I’ve seen is that a well-designed site and one that has considered usability and accessibility, and more recently, has adhered to Web standards, will be findable, and as Hasty argued, promote conversion. People find the site by searching on phrases and keywords that make sense to them, that have been included in the site’s labels, links, headings, and content structure. Then they reach it and say, “Wow, this looks cool…oh, and there’s what I need, great.”

And they come back, and better yet, they recommend it to friends. A quote from someone I met while conducting a usability test of a site sums it up —

I’m going to tell my colleagues about this site — I had no idea there was a site with all this information. I used to Google sites looking for this information. Now I’ll just come here. I would definitely recommend this site to people looking for [this topic].

So as you set out on your next big Web site redesign or SEO campaign, give some thought to whether adwords will get you where you’ll need. Or, if, better yet, usability will get you further.