I was inspired by a recent User Experience Magazine article written by Amy Buckner called “From Good to Great: blending market research with usability methods for overall marketing effectiveness”. Amy talks about how market research underscores usability methods and it got me thinking about the role of SEO research in website production.
The no-brainer is – if your customer can’t find you, then you can’t make a sale – and so we strive to make our businesses findable (locatable, navigable, and credible) to make it easy for customers to reach our goods and services. As Interactive people, we extend this to the need for organic and paid search, and of course Google – which captures 75% of the Canadian searches on the Internet. It’s not good enough anymore to say that we build websites that are usable; they need to be findable. You wouldn’t fail to put up a sign in front of your store on the street or else no one would be able to find it. The same goes for people searching and browsing online for your company. The core concepts of findability apply in both offline and online examples.
Findability is a goal of user experience design which lends itself to best practices in search engine marketing. The user’s experience with the interface of your website touches the areas of search engine optimization (SEO), information architecture and usability and credibility, among others. Helping your customers search for you by making your website both navigable and locatable requires a great deal of planning. This is where usability research comes in:
… the worst usability problem on the Web is that people can’t find what they need. There are huge opportunities for companies to make money and save money by improving their search, navigation and wayfinding systems.
– Peter Morville, Digital Web Magazine
Websites that are findable are ultimately better for humans – but the same holds true for search engine crawlers, which in the end assist humans by pointing them in the direction of what they need. Search engines like Google are having an impact on the way we search, find and judge the credibility of information. The way that Google indexes your website (and your brand) impacts the way that humans will find or not find your company’s products and services. Designing your website for the end user taking into account some of the tenets of findability is a way to achieve successful user experiences.
Usability research lays the foundation
User experience research can take on many forms: usability testing, paper prototyping, competitor reviews, heuristic evaluations etc. I prefer using persona research as a way to combine many types of research and then articulate different user experiences based on what the findings show. More, persona research helps webmasters design information in a way that satisfies human needs. Here’s a proven and useful approach:
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Segment the website according to persona.
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Know your customer, who they are and what they need (designing search for customers and clients is different than designing information systems for intranets or internal portals).
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Funnel search results through the various landing pages (created for the personas).
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Use the Steve Krug principle of “Don’t Make Me Think” (if you can present something in a single page then do it).
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Design SEO strategy with personas in mind.
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Acknowledge that user needs may change and strategy will have to change with it.
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Repeat this exercise often. Persona research isn’t a set it and forget it exercise – refresh this research periodically as many factors change the search landscape.
Search engine optimization is like turning over the “OPEN” sign
Search engine algorithms have to be pleased and appeased to achieve true findability, so design your website, structure your information, and code in a way that lets the crawlers know that you mean business. SEO on-page and off-page tactics sometimes clash with the visual design but in every project there is a quest for a happy medium.
I mentioned to Joey deVilla last week that one way create a findable website is to build off-page SEO best practices into your development process so that you don’t end up with something that can’t be crawled or indexed in natural search. When budget becomes available, essential on-page tactics like copy optimization and link-building can occur in the next iteration of the website. This way, your website is findable and your job is to optimize additional components. The best way to get all of this work into the queue is to work together with your team to prioritize the tactics and then build them out according the time and budget. I love what Adaptive Path’s Dan Saffer wrote – that user experience is everyone’s responsibility – and indeed, web teams all have a stake in ensuring usable, findable websites. In the end, it comes down to better performance as the common agenda and focus.
Information architecture – giving your client the keys to the hierarchy
Investing in your website’s information architecture is one core component to achieving findability. To quote Christina Wodtke: “findability … is the capacity of an object to be found through search or browsing”. She points out that the onus is on the thing to be found rather than the customer’s ability to come up with the right one or two word query for a search engine to return results. With this mind, helping your customer discover your site by using best practice SEO when they arrive at your site through a search engine results page – insures that they can find the information or product. Structuring your site in a way that it navigable is crucial, including the intuitive use of navigation labels that make sense to your customer and not just to the people within your organization. It’s important to make sure there is the scent of information in your labeling, content and calls to action to entice and encourage the user into the deeper regions of content. Finally, way-finding techniques like navigation on states, breadcrumbs and related content boxes show the user where they are in the website if they arrive on a deep linked page via a search engine results page. All of these contribute to a positive experience which will enhance the credibility of your website.
Indeed, website credibility encompasses many things. The obvious are the brand value of a product, the reputation of a company, the reach of offline advertising and the currency and relevancy of information on a site – its usefulness. What’s also important to web credibility is the design of its information and site structure and getting this right will achieve findability and connect with your audience.
Want to hear more about usability, SEO and accessibility? Join Joseph Dolson, Chris Adams and me at Search Engine Strategies on June 18 for a panel discussion moderated by Anne Kennedy.
Increase Your Findability
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Plan for your website to make it findable. Make the search optimization of the website a priority.
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Don’t treat keyword research, link building and other SEO activities as an afterthought. Gather the requirements before you commit to code, design mock ups, etc.
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Invest in your site’s information architecture. Remember that a well-constructed site architecture will lend itself to usability, accessibility (for humans and search engines) and credibility as well as findability.
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Involve your whole team in the quest to build a findable website. Be an evangelist in your company to advocate for the creation of usable, locatable, navigable and credible websites. Interdisciplinary teams all have a part to play. Listen and learn from your colleagues.
Read & Learn for Yourself
About Jane
Jane Motz Hayes is an information designer and SEO Consultant
at WebFeat with eight years of web production experience. She
has a Masters of Library Science degree from the Faculty
of Information Studies at the University of Toronto – training
that has helped her better understand how to design information
interfaces for both humans and search engine crawlers. Jane
will be speaking again at this year’s Search
Engine Strategies Toronto on June 18 in a “Practical
& Actionable” track session called "Accessibility,
Usability and SEO".
