Winning In Tough Economic Environments – Part 1 What Good is SEO?

August 23, 2011

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This blog covers local SEO which is dominated by Google, Google Places and the need for citations. The blog also covers just about any thing related to Google search results and related topics. I hope that you might glean some useful resources while you are here.

Winning In Tough Economic Environments – Part 1 What Go Is SEO

This was originally posted back in early 2009.

That’s right we are an SEO provider and we are asking “What good is SEO?” By now, you might be wondering where this is going, right? Well, the whole question goes like this, what good is SEO if your website is not user friendly. The answer is simple; it doesn’t do you much good at all.

Let’s consider two websites as examples to illustrate the point here. The good example is Google. It is simple, clean, straight forward and easy to use. Our, not so good example is E-bay. Finding answers on this site can be a monumental undertaking. If you have ever used this site you know exactly what I am talking about. There isn’t much easy about E-Bay for most users it requires a large learning curve if you want to use the site for selling. If you are bidding the process is much easier.

So how does this relate to your own website? Well if your site is not user friendly it effects your profits and conversions. The first clue that you might have some problems can be found easily if you are using Google Analytics. This software will tell you where someone entered your website. It also records what pages are visited, where they leave the site, how they found you, and lots of other useful information.

The process of recording where a visitor lands and where they leave the site is known as bounce rate. If your visitor only visits one page and leaves this is considered a bounce. A high bounce rate can indicate that the user didn’t like your website, it was difficult to use, or they found what the needed on your home page and left. So it is critical that the bounce rate is as low as possible. (This is now a ranking factor with the new Panda updates.)

However, this is not often the case. You should be really concerned if your bounce rate is above 50%. There are two problems to be considered here. The first is perhaps the easiest to fix. Your content may not match your targeted keyword phrase very well. You may have targeted old blue widgets and your visitor may be only interested in new blue widgets. It is possible that they are finding your site by searching for simply blue widgets and your widgets are not what they want. So they leave. This is the easy fix.

Any good analytic’s program will record what site the visitor came from and what keyword phrase was used. Now, lets say that your SEO efforts produced the targeted traffic that you were seeking, but you still have a high bounce rate. Well, this is a sign that your website is causing a negative user experience.

This is the not so easy part to fix. You will need to determine if your website is suffering from any of the following and make changes accordingly.

1. Not enough content to interest the visitor.
2. Too much content that overloads the user or bores them.
3. The user can’t find what they are looking for at first glance.
4. There are two many distractions such as dancing icons or too many images.
5. The site loads way too slow.
6. They find things that don’t work such as broken links.
7. They can’t easily locate your contact information.
8. You don’t use a contact form.
9. Your color schemes are not good and make reading difficult.
10. Your site uses different colored links or strange fonts.
11. You use any kind of attention getting devices like dancing images.
12. You website has glaring grammatical errors.
13. Your website lacked a features and benefits presentation with a call to action.
14. Your page links lack a back button. (this happens even on large sites social sites)
15. It is not intuitive in nature.
16. Content was not what the visitor wanted.

You have control over 15 out of 16 of these items. There isn’t much you can do if the searcher used the wrong query for what they had hoped to find. This is quite a common occurrence. However, all of these other items can and should be addressed before you consider SEO or a link building program.

The hard part of this is being able to do an honest evaluation of your own website. Very few people can actually pull this off as they are to close to the site or they have emotional attachments. Perhaps, a friend or lover built the site and they are afraid to offend someone. I see this one a lot.

There is easy way to address this problem. You could hire a professional to provide you with a website audit or review. I charge $250.00 for our detailed website review for a website that has 25 or fewer pages. I have saved clients tens of thousands of dollars with our reviews. I believe that it doesn’t make sense to bring traffic to a broken website.

The point here is that SEO is only part of the solution for creating a successful website. You can drive visitors to your site and just as easily drive them away. That is why we will not provide SEO to a website until the underlying problems have been addressed. It just makes no sense to bring traffic to a broken website.

In these tough economic times you can not afford to turn anyone away from your website especially, if these defects can easily be addressed and fixed. In many cases you can implement these changes rather easily. However, sometimes your website will require a complete re-design.

Is your website broken? Do You know what your bounce rate is, or why people leave your website? Answer these question and you will begin to see increased profits.

What say you?

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