Why Making Everything About SEO may be Hurting Your Site

Not Everything in a Successful Website is About SEO

Not everything on the internet is about SEO - Search Engine Optimisation. The SEO industry is reluctant to admit this, but it's true.

Sometimes the reason your site is failing is because, simply, it's failing.

There are many reasons your customers aren't doing the things you want them to do on your site.

These reasons fall roughly into the categories of use(ability), buy(ability) and like(ability).

Usability

• Page Load Time

  Links and keyword phrases are certainly important factors when it comes to talking about SEO but they are not the be-all and end-all.

  There's an even more important factor in getting and keeping people on your site.

  It's important to note that more than 40% of people will abandon a site if the page takes more than three seconds to load. 3 seconds!

  That's fast!

  SEO "gurus" will tell Well, Yes. That's part of what we do with SEO. Sure, page load time is as much about SEO as keywords and links, but has anything been done about it?

  So get your IT and webmaster at it to get those page load times down.

• Site Structure

  Another under-rated factor that's supposed to be part of the SEO landscape and is again important in other ways, is Site Structure. The way you create the hierarchy of webpages in your website, which in turn impacts on the URLs.

  Site owners who mindlessly add pages wherever they land create a kind of labyrinthine site structure that makes it difficult for customers or search engines to get anywhere.

  Think about it in terms of shopping – if a supermarket were to randomly jumble products next to each other (long-life milk, next to dishwashing liquid, next to strawberries, next to pet litter) down twisting aisles, you'd be less likely to shop there. At the very least you'd be frustrated and it would take you ages to find all the things you want.

  Is it time for you to rethink your website structure?

Buyability

• Reacting to Reality

  Reality does intrude, even on the internet. If you're a local business in Wiseman, Alaska selling bikinis and it's another rainy day you're not going to make big volume sales, regardless of the fact that it happens to be summer.

  As a business person and website owner, be aware of the everyday realities affecting your business and respond accordingly.

  Just because the Internet gives you access to a worldwide market, doesn't mean you'll automatically be making online sales. Different places have different cultural preferences, different aesthetics appeal more widely in parts of the world. Then there's simple things like local competitors you've never heard of, language, currency and tax differences to overcome.

  Be a sharp operator and sensible to the real world of business.

• Conversion Funnels

  Conversion funnels can be tricky things, and easy to get wrong. One of the reasons a website might be performing poorly is because the conversion funnel has been misjudged.

  Your customers might feel they're being pushed toward a sale too swiftly, leading to them jumping off the website and out of your sphere of influence. Sometimes it's the opposite. The engagement process is too slow which allows doubt to enter the buyers mind, so they get distracted and wander away.

  Discover how your prospects make their buying decisions and build your conversion funnels to fit that.

• Sales Data Collection

  One of the greatest things about e-sales is the potential to gather data. There is so much more information you can gather via an online sale than would be reasonable to ask for at the point of sale in a physical store.

  It can also a bad thing.

  Plenty of companies get greedy for data on their customers and ask for too much at the sales point. That's just creepy; stalker creepy!

  Imagine being the customer asked to fill out 3 screen forms before you can buy a product. Seriously, you'd want to know that this was a genuine company with secure systems and not some dark net identity stealing underworld syndicate pretending to be legitimate.

  If you're expected to collect certain information because it's the law, then absolutely ask away. Otherwise, consider not just your data addiction but the implications of data protection responsibility your organisation will have if your juicy database makes you a hackers target.

  If a teenager you really care about was being asked to fill in your sales data form, would you be anxious or suspicious? Maybe it's time to re-evaluate what your sales team actually needs.

Likeability

• Colour Choice

  This may sound strange, but colours really do affect the way people behave – even on the Internet.

  Huge consumer companies such as L'Oreal and LVMH spend enormous sums of money to make sure their products have the right packaging (from package shape, to pictures, wording and fonts and all importantly colours) for the different consumer markets they are aiming at. A quick look through the different logos and websites these companies represent, you'll quickly see that there is a lot of intentional design going on.

  That means, if you're running a grief counselling service in Newcastle, Australia but your website is in red (because it's your favourite colour), you might end up disappointed at how few clients your website gets for you. While a Nanjing, China wedding photographers website that's red, floods it's owner with new clients.

  Different colours definitely have different associations – beyond your personal preferences, you need to check that you're sending the right messages with your choices.

  Confirm that your colour choices are sending the right message and if not, find ways to harmonise your brand colours so that they will work.

• Layout

  Just as colours need to match your customers' needs, the layout of your web page has to as well. Layout is different to website structure. Layout is about where information appears on the screen when the web pages of your website are viewed.

  All those pretty images on your website may look good to you, but to your customer they get in the way of actually accomplishing something.

  Layout problems is a noticeable trend at the moment.

  Many companies are going with a clean, uncluttered, menu-free scrolling site because it's mobile friendly... this design style has a name, it's called Parallax.

  This type of website layout doesn't suit every industry, in fact it only suits a small handful. For example, imagine you're someone who wants to browse a clothing retail website that's using this type of layout. You'd have to scroll endlessly to compare items and then try making a choice if you can never see anything side-by-side.

  Take advice from User Interaction (UX) designers rather than graphic designers when it comes to the layout of your website. The mysterious world of UX has it's own science and boffins who think about website layout in a very "inside your mind", "over your shoulder" kind of way.

  Are you wasting website visitors time by having extravagantly large meaningless images where menus or information needs to be?

Website optimisation takes into account these factors (and many more). Bear in mind, next time your web developer tells you its about SEO 'cause it ain't necessarily so.

Get in touch us about SEO, Optimisation and your Website and we'll do a review to give you some action items that will absolutely positively change the performance of your website.