SEO with Usability: What The People Want
By Kim Krause Berg
If you are in the business of optimizing web pages and promoting web
sites in search engines, in all likelihood, you’ve never personally
experienced the product or service you’re paid to market.
And yet, your client expects you to make them rich. At the very least,
they want their company to rank well in search engine results. They
expect you to find the exact keywords their customers are using to find
their product or service, but you don’t have access to those customers,
do you? You rely on tools and server logs to do your job.
You may be given data to analyze but seriously, if you had the choice,
wouldn’t you rather experience the big 10 person party hot tub
yourself rather than read dry data on who has purchased it?
Wouldn’t the feel of the warm water, the night sky bursting with
stars and the teasing touch of skin nearby just nail the reason for
wanting to buy one? Would you know how to target the different sizes
of hot tubs and their uses? What if a Bed and Breakfast wants to buy
one? Are their needs different than the family of five who want one
in their backyard?
How do you advertise what you don’t know about?
SEO’s are demanded to do this. Blind folded. Web site developers
are asked to design ways to order products they’ve never held
in their hands. Usability consultants are asked to make sure everybody
did their job properly, knowing full well in many cases, site designers
were never given guidelines, requirements or anything other than a Wish
List by the site’s owner.
Does the Search Engine Marketing industry need to know more about Usability
and do User Experience designers need to understand that someone has
to market their creation and make it findable and appealing enough to
use or buy?
Experience and Marketing
There’s a hilarious scene in the movie, What Women Want,
where Mel Gibson is competing with a top woman executive for the best
marketing campaign for various women’s products. Everyone on the
project has been asked to come up with slogans for the self-care products.
Mel Gibson doesn’t like the new woman, played by Helen Hunt, who
came on board to take over the job position he believed he was entitled
to. He decides to outdo her.
So he takes the products home and while guzzling wine, begins to use
them. He waxes his legs, paints his fingernails, nearly gets killed
with a blow-dryer and my favorite part, puts on women’s pantyhose.
The experience of the hell women go through to be attractive slowly
dawns on him.
Add to this the fact that he can suddenly read the minds of women and
you get a marketers dream. His character uncovers their raw emotions,
their hidden thoughts, even fantasies and desires that he never knew
women had.
While still not as intimately educated on the products as a woman would
be, he was able to get enough of a glimpse so he could understand how
best to sell not only the products, but the EXPERIENCE of using them.
He had direct access to user experiences and created the marketing
campaign based on what he learned.
Marketing Without Blinders On
My son recently asked why horses that pull Amish buggies wear “blinders”.
I told him this is because they can see on the side of their heads and
they can spook easily, such as when cars come whizzing by on the road.
It’s a common practice to blindfold horses when leading them away
from fire or other emergency situations because not seeing danger calms
them. Once, I needed to tie a shirt over a horse’s eyes just to
get him to walk over a bridge. A horse will not go where it doesn’t
feel safe.
This same theory applies to customers who make purchases online. Promotional
descriptions nearly always focus on an aspect of the product to get
the first click through. Once on a page, several things happen at once.
1. The searcher’s expectation for what they think they’ll
find must be met.
2. More information must be presented to enable a decision or make choices.
3. The next steps must be clear, such as learn more, change your mind
but keep searching on that site, where to go next and where to get customer
assistance.
4. The entire experience must feel safe, secure, authentic and believable.
Therefore, it’s important to promote and follow up with a persuasive,
logical presentation.
Funny thing is, many SEO’s feel this order
sequence also means their part supersedes usability in importance. However,
chances are the optimization elements were entered AFTER the design,
rather than during. The usability and accessibility heuristics were
likely there first, at least in some basic form like site guidelines.
If they were not, and the site is truly not usable, then an SEO has
an uphill battle they may not wish to climb.
Listening to Feedback and Using the Information
The foundation for your web site may not be strong enough to withstand
variables in human behavior, cultural differences, advances in computer
technology, new search engines and directories and competitors whose
Internet marketing tactics out perform yours.
This is another reason why usability and accessibility design begin
from the ground up. You want to meet standards. You want to be armed
and ready with a fortified site. It’s also why preparation during
the conceptual stages and testing during the build process are valuable
to you.
For example, does your web site need a plug-in and if so, can someone
who needs assistive technology use it or find a workaround? If your
web site relies on customer experience to help sell products or services,
how many human assisted search engines or directories have actual access
to the product or service and can place the site or product page in
the correct place so it will be found?
This is not the same as a directory editor looking at content and finding
the correct category to place a site. It’s about searchers asking
for help in making better searches by seeking the help of people who
work for a search engine. New search engines that offer human help offer
a new kind of personalized search experience. A representative, who
has personally worked on rebuilding car engines, for example, knows
best where to guide someone searching for specific parts vs. just getting
pages back based on paid keyword analysis or keywords chosen based on
category or popularity.
The user experience plays into marketing either by personal experience
with a product or service or user studies. Their feedback may be applied
to the overall site design and functionality. For Internet promotion,
a blog post written with details on how a new customer felt about the
new iPhone will come up in searches. The phone’s manufacturer
may find certain keywords in that customer’s story that can be
used to sell it better, and also be used in the product's web site design
itself in navigation or link labels, image alt attribute text, product
descriptions and names of categories.
The customer teaches us how to market to them if we listen to what
they have to say.
There’s a reason the “Long Tail” and Word of Mouth
marketing helps us. The information offers clues into how we think.
How we think matters to design. Design matters to sales and traffic.
Snap Decisions and Impulse
How often have you visited a web site and been turned off in a few
seconds?
We react. We make snap decisions. If you watch people use websites,
you will notice they will sometimes make what seems like intuitive decisions.
Sometimes they want more time and data because some choices require
longer consideration. However, studies show if you provide too much
information, the ability to make a decision runs a higher risk of causing
errors or inability to process the information. This is one reason why
application development is so tricky. To buy a computer online requires
a lot of content to help with decision making, but too many steps in
the process, pages to read, decisions to make, factors to consider and
guess what? User fatigue.
Your marketing investment has to consider the user experience or you’re
throwing money away.
A new book called Blink, written by Malcolm Gladwell,
is about “the power of thinking without thinking” and
the ability to do “thin slicing”, which is making
accurate conclusions based on little information. It’s a fascinating
read for anyone wanting to understand how people make decisions. It
offers insight into our intuitive process. The book may help with both
user centered design and marketing by forcing us to think harder about
what really happens out there.
One story in the book talks about how Tom Hanks was hired to play an
astronaut in Apollo 13. Hollywood producer, Brian Grazer,
explained that everybody failed to envision Tom Hanks as an astronaut.
But the movie was about a spacecraft in danger, and he explained, what
actor do we want to see saved the most? Tom Hanks. The producer knew
audiences loved him too much to watch him die. They already had the
emotional connection based on how we “know” him from his
various other characters.
What we think we know triggers decisions. Words have powerful associations.
They can change our behavior. Visuals trigger certain responses. If
clothing models don’t look like you, this may prevent you from
buying or remaining on the web site. Word meanings vary. One study,
illustrated in Blink, showed this clearly. When asked
to put words into categories, it took longer to put the word “Entrepreneur”
into the “Career” category when “Career” was
first paired with “Female” than when “Career”
was paired with “Male”.
Prior association influences how we interpret words. It also plays
into how we navigate web sites, click on ads and develop confidence
in a web site’s design.
Do Software Developers Need SEO, Usability and Accessibility?
If the application, such as shopping cart, online reservations, sales
lead or order form is intended for use by people who can not use a mouse,
hear, are blind or suffer from anything that requires assistive technology
to allow them to use the Internet, the answer is “yes”.
Removing tables, incorporating CSS and adding text all are helpful organic
SEO practices for application design. While you may not think a shopping
cart needs to rank high in search engines, a contact or order form page
has a good chance of doing that if optimized well. In this way, a search
for “contact acme” will bring up the Contact page
for the company rather than the homepage that requires an extra click
and time to find where the Contact page is.
This small gesture is optimizing with usability in mind.
Dell is notorious for making buying a computer online frustrating. It
still is, despite their continued efforts to improve. The expectation
for “Build Your Computer” means just that. It means
showing options and choices. It means comparing all the Vista software
and offering use cases for each to help customers make a valid choice.
It means explaining why higher a CPU may be helpful or why it may not
be necessary. Are images optimized so that they appear in search engine
image searches? Can someone who needs a Braille keyboard use one with
a Dell product?
All of this information has to be easy to find and use, while not interrupting
the purchase process.
Word of mouth marketing and usability are buddies.
While in the hospital for knee surgery, a nurse complained to my husband
and me about the computer software she was using to monitor me with.
My husband works for the software’s competitor, so he thought
this was great information. He was getting user feedback on the competitor
that he could take to his company. However, his company doesn’t
do usability testing on their product. How these two companies sell
their software is a mystery.
Bad user experiences may hurt sales eventually when the truth finally
comes out. Is it worth the risk of not user testing your product? Can
your company support the wrath of broken contracts, lawsuits and diminishing
sales? Are you an SEO asked to market a product nobody cares about or
wants?
What People Want is for Usability and SEO to Work Together
Search Engine Optimization
is focused on findability. Search Engine Marketing
is targeted advertising via paid positioning and ads. Both utilize traditional
media, social media, blogs and user generated content. Both conduct
keyword research and require content written to inspire and motivate.
The Usability field has many arms but the unifying
goal is user focused. All roads lead back to how we use something, or
better yet, how we want to use it. Usability satisfies user expectations,
accessibility, creating momentum, and enabling tasks.
The User Experience arm concerns itself with how we
conduct those tasks once we arrive to the site, likely via search, personal
recommendation or a link. It includes how we learn a site’s navigation,
how we read and understand content and user instructions, and whether
we successfully arrive at the conclusion of a task.
Persuasive Design feeds in human behavior from a marketers’
perspective. Everything is tested to make sure something as simple as
a color or word performs exactly as desired. Just because a keyword
may be popular doesn’t necessarily equate to converting to sales
or increased traffic.
Captology gets into how designs change what people
believe or what they can do. Can your web site motivate someone to stop
an unhealthy habit? Does it offer comfort to families suffering trauma,
while also offering information and resources? Does your feedback form
just beg to be used?
Does your website create a desire to visit when it is found in search
engines or does it just take orders from "General Algorithm"
and stand front and center when someone types in a word or two?
When your public announcement led everyone to your new web application,
did they pounce on it and destroy the place or did they feel welcome,
wanted, catered to and most of all did everything work? Or did things
not go as you had hoped?
Try on those stockings.
Understand how it feels to use your web site. Promote it with confidence.
We’re in this together, usability and seo.
We may even want the same things.
Related:
Your 10 Rules To Follow To Ensure Usability
Search Engine Marketing is Bogus for Sites That Simply Don’t Function
More Articles / Return to Cre8pc Blog
Bio and Copyright
Usability Consultant, Kimberly Krause Berg, is the owner of UsabilityEffect.com
(www.usabilityeffect.com), Cre8pc.com
(www.cre8pc.com), and Cre8asiteForums
(www.cre8asiteforums.com/). Her background in organic search engine
optimization, combined with web site usability consulting, offers
unique insight into web site development.
Copyright 2007 Cre8pc.com. All Rights Reserved. Reprint rights by Permission
of the Author