Clinics Track, Thursday 12:30 – 1:45 PM
Usability & SEO: Two Wins for the Price of One
Moderator: Gordon Hotchkiss, President & CEO, Enquiro Search Solutions
Shari Thurow, SEO, Omni Marketing Interactive
Matthew Bailey, President, Site Logic Marketing
Shari Thurow says you have to strike a balance between business goals and user goals when looking at usability. Developing personas and profiles includes looking at how these individuals perform their searches. After searching, users want to be sure they find their keywords on the page they land on.
Usability ensures site/page relevancy and encourages users to click the site. Title tags and snippets are a component of both. Show a viewer a page for eight seconds and take it way. If they cannot tell you what your keywords are then you have not branded the page with your keywords well enough.
Matt Bailey says that search and usability goes hand in hand and that SEO is a child of usability and architecture. Getting people to your site is not enough. Focus your content and navigation to assist the user through the site. Options must be clearly presented to ensure you don’t confuse visitors. Matt showed screen shots of several sites with sever usability issues.
Matt points out that too often SEOs look to link campaigns while neglecting their internal links. Not everybody tinks the same so it’s smart to have multiple ways for users to find the same thing. Content needs to be benefit focused, appealing to the emotions of the reader.
This was a great brush up looking at some real-life usability issues. One thing people tend to do is not plan, but just jump in with SEO and putting keywords on the page. Planning for optimization must include palling for usability and careful consideration of the users and how to meet their needs.