Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

In the world of business, marketing and advertising is everything. Marketing is at least as important as the products or services you sell. Without marketing, you have no one to demonstrate the superiority of what you offer!

There is a reason people build businesses in cities surrounded by people, rather than in a desert surrounded by cactus! You need people to market to, and you need customers coming in your door. The success of your business relies on how well you market your product or service first, and second by how well you deliver it. Very few businesses survive on word of mouth alone. But what many small business owners fail to realize is that while marketing is everything, everything you do is marketing!

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Engaging in online marketing is all about customer acquisition, ROI and profits. If you see growth in these three areas, you can be reasonably confident that your online marketing efforts are paying off in some form or another.

But things might not always be as they appear. While it’s never a bad thing to grow in profits, ROI or a growing customer base, you may actually be paying good money to lose great customers.

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There are a lot of phases to the buying cycle. Searchers begin with a thought and then start researching answers via their favorite search engine. As they learn more about their query, they move into shopping and buying modes that hopefully lead them to a satisfied purchase.

In each phase of this cycle, the searcher is typing in a unique set or words or phrases. Each search is designed to provide more relevant information than the last. As the searcher learns, the search phrases reflect what they know and what new information they need.

There is value in building a website that provides information to each of these searchers, but the value in each isn’t the same. By understanding the full marketing value and potential of your website, you can build an effective sales funnel that provides each and every visitor the information they need to make the decision you are hoping for.

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I’ve worked with a number of website designers and developers over the years, many of them good people with a plethora of skills I couldn’t even dream of having. But one thing gets under my skin: when developers claim to know SEO when they clearly don’t.

Many developers do have a solid grasp and understanding of SEO concepts and some even dig in to become tried and true SEOs as well. Those that fit this latter group are few and far between, and those from the former group know as much about managing an SEO campaign as a community organizer knows about managing a country.

Many (but not all) developers know what it means to create a search engine friendly (SEF) website. But that is not the same thing as optimizing a website for top search engine ranking performance. Think of building a website as building a car. You may have created a high-performance machine, but it’s not ready to compete in the Indy 500 when it rolls off factory assembly line!

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What makes a good SEO? Is it just about having knowledge of search engine algorithms, being able to tweak code for the biggest ranking impact, or inserting keywords into a page to give it a better keyword focus? Is SEO all about search engine rankings or is there more to this than meets the eye?

Several years ago I wrote, “Gone are they days when SEO focused exclusively on top search engine rankings.” I wish I was right about that, but unfortunately, we still see a lot of SEOs doing just that today. Not the good ones, mind you, but still, far too many.

Today’s top-tier SEOs are getting out of the search engine ranking business entirely. Well, maybe not entirely, but they understand that there is so much more to online success than a top position for your keywords. Many clients still need convincing.

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So far, we’ve looked at pattern analysis and failure analysis as ways you can use your internal site search data to improve your website (which you should be doing!).  But, there’s more than just search queries to look at.  There are also search sessions that you may be able to look into for more insights.  A search session occurs when a searcher executes multiple queries in one session while trying to address a single information need.  As they interact with your search results and content, it should tell you a lot about how your site is servicing them.

Gain Insight Into the Searcher’s True Need

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Simple errors such as a “404 page not found” in large quantities can make search engines believe a site is not complete or under construction. As a result, they may determine the site is not worthy of strong search engine visibility.  When a nonexistent page is requested from the server, the server should respond with a special “HTTP Status” header value of “404 not found,” which may also be followed by custom error-page body content.

Incorrectly configured Web servers that respond with a status header value of 200, 302 or any other erroneous value can trigger duplicate content issues for search engines because identical content (in this case, the error page content) would be available under a potentially infinite number of URLs.

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When you deal with big projects, it is often easy to overlook small things along the way. It’s not that anyone is cutting corners, but rather some small detail gets overlooked. Sometimes even the smallest details can matter a great deal!

Web developers and SEOs often focus on the bigger picture but forget to do what we learned in Algebra: check your work.

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While it’s great to know what people want, when you give them what they want, you only give them a partial solution. The want is the symptom. But, when you address the need, you are addressing the underlying problem and providing a much more holistic solution.

In Part 2 of this series, I started discussing a customers wants versus their needs. I continue this list here.

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Coupons are a great way to entice new visitors to purchase something from your site or to reward frequent customers. The popularity of Groupon is a great testament to the power (and desire) of coupons.

But, sometimes coupons can backfire. Not for those who have them, but for those that don’t.

Have you ever been to a site where, you’ve shopped around, found what you wanted, and when you went to check-out they asked you to enter your coupon code number? WTH! You don’t HAVE a coupon! But, you know that, somewhere out there, a coupon can be found!

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