During the course of a campaign we often have to defend ourselves, whether it`s against an unexpected drop in the rankings or a lack of sales through the website you are working on. This is to be expected in this day and age, especially as we are a country still recovering from an economical disaster and everyone is looking at expenditures and whether certain outgoings are needed. Due to the nature of organic SEO this can sometimes go against us, with immediate results a rarity but there are some useful elements to consider and explain to your client to keep them happy and to enable you to maybe even further improve their ROI.

One of the most important elements of an SEO campaign is the keyword choice and sometimes this requires a re-fresh from time to time. Many campaigns suffer from becoming stale, particularly if a keyword is either not performing due to a low search volume or the opposite, that it is performing so well that time would be better spent focusing on a new keyword and bringing in more traffic via an added keyword. There`s no point in continuing with keywords that are not getting your client any traffic and this can clearly be monitored through Google Analytics. So try investigating what keywords are actually being used by customers looking for that service by using the Google Adwords Tool and focus on a more relevant keyphrase which could bring more traffic.

Another idea for improving ROI for the client is to investigate the website itself. When a site is first built it may suit the expected needs of the client but after 3-4 months of traffic you can gain a picture from Analytics whether the site is getting many click throughs. You can take an objective look at the website and see if anything needs changing. Various areas can be looked at such as ensuring that the contact numbers are clearly marked and displayed, payment methods (if applicable on an e-commerce site) are visible from the Homepage and that the text and information is big enough to read. That the information is relevant to the service your client is selling and that the click throughs for the services are clear to the customer. By checking these areas, you can show you are also considering the website itself as well as the SEO and the website is afterall what stands between a customer picking up a phone and calling or ordering their products online.

Other considerations to be made should include the meta description tag and making sure it is well written, precise and tells the customer what you want them to know. Although the meta descriptions won`t necessarily be attributed to the overall ranking position of the site, it is the first real text your customers will see in relation to the site in the SERPS before clicking through and should therefore be given attention.

Website accessibility and usability is also important and can decide whether a customer stays for long or gives up and goes somewhere else. It is vital to make sure the site is easy to use, clear and navigationally correct and that it makes sense and what is being sold is easy to find. Ask yourself, would you like to use it at home if you were looking for this service?

So when a campaign looks to be going a little stale, or performance is low on a particular keyword don`t be afraid to investigate why and ask what you can do to improve things for the client, whether it be for the website or the SEO. They will thank you for it in the long run if it brings additional business to them.

My colleague Hannah sent me this article last week, I’m going to believe it’s because she respects my authority on conversion rate optimisation rather than her being lazy. It goes on about how your mother is a good guide as to whether your site is usable or not.

It’s right.  Your mother is a good guide as to whether your site is usable or not.

END BLOG.

Oh…I have to keep writing…okay.

Your website is your shop, and like a shop in the real world you want people to be able find what they’re looking for and then find the checkout and pay. In the real world you can watch customers come into, and wander around, the shop whereupon you can observe their actions.

Why did they go over there? Why didn’t they look at that display? Don’t they realise there’s another room in’t back?

‘shelling out for a usability analysis isn’t always (ok, is almost never) feasible.’

To observe a customer on your website you could consider paying for usability testing (heat maps, mouse trackers, A/B testing etc) and like Jennifer says in her article it’s not that economical for most people/businesses. So the cheaper alternative is to ask your mother (or somebody elses) to take some time and use your site.

Trying to explain or show something computer based to my parents can drive me to the brink of sanity but I know they can buy things on the internet and use it to find useless tat so I would be prepared to ask them to test a website that wasn’t converting its traffic.

The older generations don’t spend hours on computers and haven’t grown up with them so many things that younger people find second nature are harder for the baby boomers and former hippies.

The basics of the mum test (I will not write ‘mom’, I can’t stand that word, it’s just so American) are to ask the mum to perform a task; if your website is a shop ask her to buy something, if you provide a service ask her to find out if you cover Minchinhampton, ask her to subscribe to the newsletter and so on. Then sit back and see how she does. If see can’t find the checkout, has no idea which areas you cover or doesn’t know where to subscribe you need to make some changes.

Usability testing is a great place to start when you’re analysing the conversion rate of your website as it can be cheap (if not free) to check.

All products and services have a target audience but no matter what the education or intelligence of that audience make your site as easy and instinctive to use as possible, otherwise people will find another site that offers your product or service and offers no frustration.

With SEO you can become obsessed with getting your keywords to page 1 position 1, but never forget how important the site’s look, layout and usability are.

I was going to write an article about optimising your Google Maps listing, but a recent video on WebProNews alerted me to something called hCard Microformats. This is something I’d never heard of before, and feeling a little daft for not knowing something I asked around the office, and it seems I wasn’t the only one living in ignorance.

So what is hCard Microformat?

Basically hCard Microformat is a way of coding contact information to make it accessible for other parsing tools to extract the information. In other words, with hCard microformatting your web browser can easily recognise and then extract this information to transfer into your address book, or even mobile telephone. How useful is that?

There is some evidence that Google recognises hCard microformatting when crawling websites, though this has never been confirmed. However, we do know that in 2007, Google Maps started to use the technology, to enable you to export a Google Maps search result to your address book.

Why use hCard Microformat?

There are many reasons why you should be using this technology. It increases usability, which should never be ignored. In my opinion, if it makes contacting a business or company easier for the end user then it should be used, regardless of whether it makes any difference to your Google listings.

But, it could make a difference to your Google Maps listing, inasmuch as an hCard can tell Google without any ambiguity that this address is the exact address of your business.

So, what code do I need?

Well, this is the tricky part. The code is quite complicated (well, for me anyhow…) which is why I am so grateful that someone much cleverer than me has built an hCard Creator. How easy is that? The one thing to remember is that hCards require the name property, so you will have to change things slightly.

I did it for Creare Communications:

<div id=”" class=”vcard”>
<a class=”url fn org” href=”http://www.seo-creare.co.uk/”>Creare Communications</a>
<div class=”adr”>
<div class=”street-address”>16a Church Street</div>
<span class=”locality”>Lutterworth</span>,
<span class=”region”>Leicestershire</span>,
<span class=”postal-code”>LE17 4AT</span>
<span class=”country-name”>UK</span>
</div>
<div class=”tel”>0116 250 5455</div>
</div>

Creating this output:

Simples…

To make all this truly useful you can download Ooomph: A Microformats Toolkit from Mix Online.

This means that you don’t have to rely on the end user having add-ons installed on their browser. Follow the instructions for downloading the Source Code, and away you go.

For more information about hCard Microformatting visit microformats.org.

Script:

Nick - Welcome to our SEO Video Blog, This week I am joined by my colleague Amelia while James is on holiday and today we are going to discuss SEO vs Usability. Amelia has experience in this field so it will be good to get her input.

Amelia - We are going to discuss the various aspects of a web page that a user sees while browsing a website and how SEO can effect this.

Nick - The problem starts when a webmaster or SEO tries to over optimise a page, meaning they try and add too many phrases. Cramming keywords can confuse your users and search engines.

Amelia - Search engines are designed to provide their users with the best possible search result. The content reflected on the web page must be related to the initial search query and be of a high standard. Nick and James mentioned ‘the basics of SEO’ on a previous video which discusses some simple SEO practices to gain success in popular search engines.

Nick - The initial contact that your user has with your site is usually the page title and meta description that is displayed in the search result, a meta description is an opportunity to attract potential users by writing something descriptive and relevant, where as your page title should be related to the search query.

Amelia - Then, once your user is on the page, the headings will be the first thing they look for. Be consistent with your SEO. This should be relatively simple and if you have done your research when picking keywords the distribution should fit naturally to your website.

Nick - The imagery of you site should again be consistent with your service or products and ensure that you include honest and descriptive alternative tags, This vergers onto accessibility which we will leave for another video blog.

Amelia - Copy -  your copy should be related and well written. It should be short, snappy and to the point. It should also include ways of emphasising keywords, with strong tags (which makes text Bold) and secondary headings. You can also offer more information to the user through the use of anchored text, making sure the links land on pages that can further their reading.

Nick - Once a user is done reading a page, they then will look to move on, so a clear, obvious and concise navigation is vital. It also should be before the fold and be made using unordered or ordered lists (bullet points).

Amelia - We have linked our example page on the Creare Communications blog post at www.seo-creare.co.uk/news, please feel free to add any comments to the blog post, thanks for watching.

Resource Links:

http://www.seo-creare.co.uk/tutorials/seo-vs-usability/

When considering the effectiveness of an SEO campaign, something that often gets overlooked is the usability of the site itself. Recent investigations indicate that bounce rate can have an influence in page rank.

With this in mind, its vital that designers and seo consultants work together to ensure that the site is both seo compliant and attractive and easy to use for visitors. Some things to consider when making a site usable would be the following:-

Navigation-Is it easy to use? Can you find all the buttons? Is it the same on each page?

Colour Scheme-Are you blinded by the display of luminous pinks and greens? If you are, so are your users. Yes it might be eye catching, but if there’s a chance you could permanently blind everyone who comes to your site, why do it? Show some restraint in your colour choices.

Content-Is the content on your site up to scratch? There’s no point advertising your site as having information that the user wants, only for them to come there and find that there’s nothing useful there at all. Make sure your content is relevant and useful.

Link Destination?-Make sure that all of the links on your site take the user to the advertised section. Leading users on a magical mystery tour of the internet is unlikely to get you much sympathy. Make sure your links take the user where they want to go.

These are simple points, ones that we can all make sure that we are following, but if you want to make the user experience of your site a pleasant one, AND keep them on your page, then they all have to be considered.