Let’s talk about outdoing your competition on website usability while applying search engine optimization principles and techniques, shall we? (If you haven’t already, that is.)
I know…you’re asking what does SEO and usability have to do with one another? Oh, plenty – read on.
First, let’s go over a nice little definition of usability, just so we’re all on the same page or screen, in this case.
Let’s make usability real simple: it’s how easy your website is to navigate and be used by your target audience. It’s designing the layout, links, content and navigation such that your visitors are happy to stay, happy to bookmark your wonderful site, and by gosh and by golly, tell others to come visit your site to see for themselves!
What are some usability issues that impact your SEO and vice versa? Let’s look at a few for a hot minute or two.
- Links – You hear this a lot at Search Engine Academy: internal linking is a great thing. Google loves it and your visitors do too. Be helpful – plan your site layout and navigation with links along the top, left, bottom and most importantly – in the content as text links. Make it very, very easy for your visitors to find your most important pages – you know, those money-maker pages, umkay? Great.
- Text – make it an easy to read font. Don’t use Times New Roman; save it for the office report. Use Verdana or Tahoma. Heck, Arial works just fine, too. Definitely don’t use fancy script.
- Page background – there is no acceptable color, other than white or something that’s so close to white your eyeballs and mine can’t tell the difference. And by the way, ditch the cutsie background patterns. Nothing makes for a poor user experience when trying to read information like a background that features dancing kittycats or flying teacups.
- Extremely onerous registration forms – wow, who just loves to fill out page after page of information about your third cousin’s second brother’s daughter? Yeah, count me in. Want to lose paying customers? Ask for crapulous information on the sales form. Keep it to what matters, which is contact information and credit card numbers.
By the way, do you know how you can easily tell where your visitors are bailing out of your site? Go to your Google Analytics account and set up funnels. Stay tuned, SEO comrades. We’ll talk about that one day down the road.
- Lack of information – otherwise known as “content.” You know, that stuff that really matters – the words and verbs that tell me what I need to know about your products, goods or services – especially the price. Put it right out there, podna. Don’t be afraid of your price point. Don’t make me go through multiple pages; I’m gonna get more and more upset the further you force me into your site without revealing the goodies. Just sayin’.
OK, I’ve covered some of the more common usability issues that as an SEO expert you should be on the lookout for. Just put yourself in your web visitor’s shoes and imagine what their experience would be like navigating your site.
Until next time…check your usability and keep on optimizing.
