February 12th, 2009 by Stephanie Chan
SEO & Usability – SMX West 2009
Speakers/Panelists:
Lance Loveday, Founder, President and CEO, Closed Loop Marketing
Eric Papczun, Director of Natural Search Optimization, Performics
Conference Notes/Description:
- 1/3 of searches are ready for purchase
- 77% are for research
- 50-70% bounce rate for landing pages
awareness > consideration (clicks) > (post-click) preference > purchase
Holiday pages:
- Valentine’s day offer – after valentine change to story about valentine’s day surrounding the gift purchased = fresh content and keeping content
- sitemap = search engine customer service
- 800 # gives sense of: not beging afraid to talk to me, reputable, established
ROI = Visibility x Effectiveness
ROI = Traffic x Conversion
ROI = SEO x Usability
SEO, Design, Usability
It is possible to have all 3, it’s just more work & planning
Goes hand in hand.
Flash
Progressive Enhancement – still allow SE to see flash elements
ie. Flash on left side, and static scenes and descriptions on right hand side
Usability
Good usability does not make the user think. Everything is spelled out and easy to find.
- 25%-400% increase in conversion from usability enhancement
- functional tagline: tell people what you do
- Men and Women navigate through the site differently:
- Men scan the nav bar first
- Women more interested in looking at images and read content
- Length of URL does matter
- long URL = complex and a turn off (2.5 times less likely to click on than short URLs)
User judges your website within 1/20th of a second
- 75% of web users admit making judgments about the credibility of an organization based on the design of its web site.
-Fogg BJ Standford Guidelines- lack of clutter; openness
- navigation
- professional design
Resources
- Book: Web Design for ROI