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.