Website Usability: Get The Most Out Of Search Engine Visitors

Getting the most value out of your visitors is the goal of website usability. There certainly is a difference between paid search visitors and those that arrive at your site through the natural or “organic” SERPS. Using data gathered from your website analytics is the best way to harness the power of the Internet. Knowing your visitors and what they need or want, and then providing that product, service, or information is the formula for success online.

Gain Value From Your Search Engine Visitors

Having gone over ways to best optimize your home page for usability, as well as internal page usability in deep link navigation sites, I’m not going to go over it again. I suggest you read the above articles for in depth opinions. The fact is we have to utilize advanced tactics if we are going to succeed in gaining ground over our competitors. This is especially true in paid visitors. You are actively shelling out real money for a throw of the dice in paid ads. One of my clients is a data recovery company and some of their terms go for $5.00 to $15.00 a click. We employ optimized landing pages to track the conversion of their paid visitors. You should too!

The fact is unless you represent only a couple of products or services, you have very little time and screen real estate to get your message across, let alone get the first time visitor to the page with the product or service that they are searching for. I use some distinct tactics to get out what must be said, here are some of my tried and true methods of conversion:

• Flytrap Content – one of my most successful SEO initiatives is to create simple yet succinct pages that have a clear headline and a clear message as to what the page is about. Using the same headline in an unordered list on the home page allows the first time visitor to scan the list and find what they are looking for. These type of landing pages are optimized with specific content and often do well in the SERPS since they are highly focused, keyword dense and utilize proper heading tags.
• Related Topics – also knows as the good ole “see also” embellishment, I often employ sidebar linking that clearly shows related topics to the subject matter of the page the user is on. You must keep in mind that most visitors could care less about your site and what it has to offer outside of what it is going to do for them, NOW! If you have succeeded in getting into an interior page, then it is your next step to show them other parts of your site that might interest them. Having clearly defined “see also” links give the visitor an understanding that your site has more to offer that was expected. I have often seen experienced site publishers (this is especially rampant in the real estate blogging community) that say you shouldn’t “sell” in a blog. What BS, most visitors are more turned off by Google AdWords all over the place then self promotion of products. I often employ “see related products” at the end of blog posts to educate visitors on the fact that we offer more than free information. Again my data recovery client has gotten great results from this practice.
• Insight & Analysis – often times information is dry. A website that has not only information but a perspective and an analysis of the raw information will always do much better than a purely informational site trying to sell a product. One of the things I love most about Web 2,0 apps and social network marketing in general, is the flow of data from author to visitors. This allows for a vibrant and interactive environment that can turn a visitor into a prospect!
• Newsletter - old tried and true, the e-newsletter has been around for a long long time and is still one of the most potent forms of marketing. Of course I am only referring to opt-in readers. If a visitor freely gives their email address then you can be assured of an attentive audience. This goes hand in hand with the last item “insight and analysis”, since a visitor that signs up for a newsletter is obviously interested in your opinion. If you have read any of the content on this site then you know of my use of RSS and Feedburner for syndication. While this is in fact the strongest indication of visitor loyalty for a blog, it isn’t as personal a triumph as is having scores of newsletter subscribers. An e-mail newsletter sets up a closer and more personal relationship than mere page viewing.

In my last post about analytics and website usability I wrote about unique visitor tracking as being an important part of the statistical package. While I stand by that statement, I also want to drive home that the tracking of your visitors loyalty is of utmost importance. This is particularly true when it comes to search engine acquired visitors. Knowing the keywords they typed in to find you and seeing that they came back is the best way to know if your content and linking structure is solid and working.

Website Usability and Search Engine Traffic

How To Design Usability Specific To Visitors From Search Engines

In my last post we talked about search engines and how Google is getting into the portal marketplace. Today I am going to go into detail about how people are using search engines, and how their user patterns have changed over the last couple of years. You might wonder how users search can effect your site usability, but believe it!

The fact is more and more users are turning to search engines for direct answers, not for links to websites. Furthermore as we delve into online behavior it is clear that search engine users are NOT looking for sites to explore and use in depth, but looking directly for an answer to a problem, or a product or service. Sites like Google and Yahoo have extensive e-commerce and shopping features built in, that means that more and more users are dealing direct with the search engines and not the website!

Taking these facts into consideration makes it even more important to get your messages across as clear and as fast as you can. The primary way to accomplish this is by controlling what the search engines say about your site in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). The title and description are the primary means for identifying your site and what it is about. Read my article about Meta Tags for detailed instructions.

The meta title is the most important aspect of your pages. When a user does a search they will scan the SERPS for what they are looking for and more time than not they are looking at the titles. Here is the catch; the search engines themselves use the title to determine what your page is about and how relevant the page is. How many inbound links there are to that page with the keywords that are in the anchor text and how they relate to the meta title and the keyword density of the page is part of the algorithm that determine placement within the SERPS.

Walking the thin line between giving a human what they need to see to click on your site and giving the search engines what they need to place your site is the real challenge. It is important to find a combination that appeases both. When looking at your keywords it is important to isolate you most important keyword phrase and THAT needs to be the beginning of your title!

Website Usability and Search Engine Optimization

Using Search Engine Optimization And Website Usability Together

All week I have been working on how to test usability, what is important for the home page and how it is different from interior pages. Before I start drilling down to very specific usability issues on a website, I wanted to talk about Search Engine Usability. It is important for everyone to understand how visitors arrive at your site and what behaviors they are likely to exhibit, prior to implementing a site-wide usability makeover.

Search engines more than likely account for at least 80% of your traffic. Whether it is paid or organic search, unless you have non search engine affiliate campaigns, its through an engine that people find your site. If you are at all familiar with my site you know that I am always preaching to get your eggs out of the SEO basket click to read SEO World’s interview with me: SEO is Dead Long Live SEO! which gets right to the heart of the matter.

SEO is a great tool and along with Paid Advertisement, can account for a lot of traffic. But what happens with your income if you get caught in a Google Dance or Yahoo bans your site? What if your PPC budget gets cut because your site isn’t producing enough leads. What if both things happen at once! That is why I have invested a lot of time in alternative traffic options. Right now the best option for most of us is blogging. The thing about blogging is once you decide to use blogs as a traffic gathering option, you need to keep up on it.

Now that we have gone over the different traffic gathering options, lets get focused on search engine traffic. I am going to break search engine traffic down into the 2 primary categories: Organic Search & Paid Search.

Organic Search Usability Overview

When talking about search engines and users it needs to be understood that there are huge differences between Google and Yahoo (or Microsoft Live). Google is a pure search engine with a clean interface that is centered around just searching. That being said they are definitely moving into the portal space that has been “owned” by Yahoo, MSN and even AOL. The image below shows how the Google home page is before customization.

Looking at the above graphic I have highlighted 2 areas that are important, I also moved the “Personalize this page” and “Sign in” links from the top right hand side of Google into my graphic so you can see it. Looking at the above graphic and knowing what Google looks like, the core reason for it’s success has always been due to its simplicity and lack of fluff. I think that they have created the customized home page not only to compete with Yahoo, but also based on the vast amount of searches they get from the Google toolbar.

The graphic below shows a snapshot of my browser with the Google toolbar installed. Nothing is easier than just typing in what you are looking for and hitting go! As a bonus there is also spellcheck, pop-up blocker and even a translation tool (even though it actually is pretty lame.) The page rank bar is handy for site owners who want to know how important Google thinks your site is by fetching the page rank.

OK so Google is moving from a clean pure search to having portal type functions. The next graphic shows my customized home page in Google. You can get just about anything you need as far as news, weather and items of interest on your home page. I still use Yahoo because I can track my fantasy sports as well, and I haven’t seen a good local movie theater widget for Google. So it would fit in this post I changed the window to 500PX wide that is why it looks crushed together, but you get the point.

As you can see I have my blogs’ syndicated feeds on my home page, I also add other peoples feeds that interest me. On my blog if you click on the button on the lower right sidebar it will add this sites feed into your Google home page, it also works for Yahoo.

The next article is going to start looking at how people USE the search engines and how it directly relates to your site and more importantly your site’s conversion rate. Knowing these facts and behaviors will allow you to make solid usability changes to your website.

Website Usability: Interior Page Behaviors

Home Page & Interior Pages Usability Comparison

In this article we will be focused on the usability of a website’s interior pages. We have ascertained that in deep link navigation sites that use good SEO practices, as much as 40% of entry traffic happens outside of the home page. Another important factor is users normally read interior pages as opposed to scanning which is what happens on the home page. In fact one of the primary reasons I always create deep links is because website visitors read substantially more content on interior pages than they do on the home page. Again I am relying on the ever so important stat: “Average Time Spent”.

Looking at our 2 groups (check out Website Usability Testing if you don’t know what I mean by test groups) of usability testers, low experience users spend 35 seconds on the home page, but a full minute on interior pages! With the more experienced users it was 25 seconds on the home page and 45 seconds on interior pages. Keep in mind that the more experienced a website visitor is on the Internet, the quicker they leave if they don’t find what they are looking for ASAP.

The experienced group was also consistent in how little they were willing to scroll to find what they are looking for. These types of statistics are gathered strictly by recording the usability sessions, or from the testing document users created when recording wasn’t available. It is possible to gather some basic scroll stats using Google Analytics’ Site Overlay feature. There is a screenshot of it on my post: Website Usability And The Home Page. When looking at the overlay it shows which links were clicked on by users. By looking at links further down the page it is possible to get an idea of how many users click on links down there. Except for footer links (most experienced users expect there to be links in a sites footer and will scroll down to hit them) very rarely are lower content links clicked on.

One reason for the “average time spent on” to be higher on an interior page is due to the relevance of the page in the SERPS. Google and Yahoo will place interior pages higher than home pages especially when they are keyword heavy for a specific topic. That means that a visitor will actually read the page because it was more related to their task. This is yet another reason why it is critical that EVERY page on your site lets visitors know where they are, who you are, what the site does, what the page (or site on the homepage) is about and how it will benefit them.

Another interesting thing I saw in Google Analytics that was backed up by usability groups, was how so much more action happened in the content section of the interior pages. Most sites employ either a 2 or 3 column page structure with the center of the page being reserved for content. THAT is where users are looking for their answers. Most site visitors spend their time on the interior pages looking for something very specific and how to find it if it isn’t right in front of them. As a matter of fact putting together 2 reports on usability I did last year, I was amazed to find that almost 4700 out of 5000 interior clicks happened in the content area and NOT through the navigation!

Taking these ideas and implementing them is going to be the focus on the next articles. Now that we know how and why users look at the home page and interior pages, as well as utilize deep link navigation, we can start applying these lessons to real life scenarios.

Website Usability: The Home Page

Home Page Usability: So Much To Say So Little Time To Say It!

OK. We’ve covered deep link usability and in that post I told you that if done right, your interior pages will be bringing in 40% of your traffic. That leaves the majority of your visitors coming in through the front door. Another quick stat to throw out there is: the users that come in from somewhere else on your site, 75% of them will end up hitting your home page. This stat is lower on sites that have a root blog since more people are likely to hang out in the blog, but I measure the success of a blog directly to the number of visitors that DO go into the static site after hitting the blog.

I hope we have now agreed that the home page is important, in fact it is the most important page on your site. Today I am going to lay out some strategies to make the most out of your home page. One of the most fascinating stats I follow in analytics is “average time spent on”. Whether it is the time spent on the site or a page, this is a significant measuring stick of how usable your site is. I use Google Analytics now more than ever. In fact I used to resell Web Side Story and have been using that for years, but Google Analytics (it used to be Urchin before they bought it out) has really hit their stride. If for some crazy reason you aren’t tracking your website stats you really need to!

Looking back to my post about usability testing I told you how I break users down into 2 groups: experienced and not experienced. In plowing through 5 years of different usability tests in preparation for a major project (and for this blog series) I found some interesting facts. The average home page visit for an experienced user was 1o seconds less it was for the lesser experienced user! That means that the more a user uses the Internet the less patience they have with bad usability.

Looking at some general statistics available on the web as well as my own, I feel comfortable with the stat: 30 seconds is all you get! This isn’t TV after all, people are using the Internet as a tool more and more as their experience grows. Visitors don’t log on to space out after a hard day. Most content experts agree that all your pages, but more importantly your home page needs to be set up so visitors can scan a page, because they don’t READ it. My game plan is to keep the upper 700 pixels clear and concise, then put the paragraphs below for the search engines. Keep in mind that there is a limit to how much a page will be spidered.

30 seconds: A Home Page Usability Lifetime

Alright so you have half a minute, what are you going to do with it? Here are some of the primary things I try to communicate to a new visitor:

1. What website they are on. (I know that sounds ridiculous, but you would be surprised at what I’ve seen!)
2. What does this site have that will benefit the visitor.
3. A quick feeling about the company or site, who are you, what do you do, and most important what is new!
4. What choices do the user have and how do they get to the section that is relevant to them.

Keeping long winded paragraphs down to the bottom of the page is a good plan, but what do you put at the top of the site? Sure a nice graphic or Flash element is eye-catching, but you do have limited screen real estate so don’t waste a ton of it on something flashy. The fact is most people spend the majority of their 30 seconds figuring out where to go next, not reading the content, and certainly not reading it word for word. In number 3 in the above list I bolded “what do you do”, because it is important to get that message across, and get it across fast and furious!

One of the best parts of Google Analytics is the site overlay. It shows a picture of your site with little boxes over the links. These boxes show you what links the user clicks on to leave the home page. Here’s a screenshot of my site:

In conclusion it is best to take the most important parts of your online message and convey them clearly on your home page!

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