Going beyond SEO for website success

Published on Monday, 20 June 2011 14:50

By Kevin Judkins

Beyond the SEO

You will always hear talk of SEO (Search engine optimisation) and how important it is to perform a good SEO campaign in webdesign forums and in the offices of web designers, but how much of this is true?

Will a good SEO campaign guarantee a successful website? Well…no not really.  Good SEO will indeed help to increase ranking and traffic to your website but is it enough to keep your visitor engaged in order to create a conversion?

You can’t completely rely on SEO to fill the size nine boots a website is expected to fit in to. There is a lot more to it than just that, some SEO specialists seem to have devoted so much to SEO they have started to forget the fundamentals.

SEO specialists are always trying to fill the client’s head with the importance of SEO without bearing in mind that the goal is all about getting the user to contact you and purchase their products.

Firstly, make good use of the visual pane. For those who are not familiar, the visual pane is the area of the webpage that the visitor first sees above the fold.

You have to research and establish what the users want. Ask 10 potential visitors what they want to see and your answer will almost be the same across the board, to be able to find the information quickly. You can make this happen by utilising the visual pane and ensuring what they need to know in the first instance is in there.

All that said, the visual pane is also a good place to feature a latest product, contact information and any other piece of information that you think the user might need to know.

Some of the essentials for the visual pane are your call to action, navigation and contact information. Always ensure your contact information is readily available, some visitors will only be there to find out how to contact you.

So, what is the call to action? The call to action is a statement in two parts, these two parts are answers to the questions that your user is most likely to ask; it guides and suggests what the user should do next.

In short, it should answer these two questions: ‘Why am I here?’ and ‘Where should I go next?’

I can never stress enough the importance of getting an early engagement. Research indicates that you have three seconds to gain the attention of the user, not much at all really so always ensure your call to action is the focus of the home page and is about the user and their needs.

Ensure when you are writing your call to action you keep in mind what you want the user to do next and how you plan to get them to do this.

Most importantly don’t forget the importance of making the website as user friendly as possible, remember that you are creating these pages for them.

The longer you can keep the user on the site you have a better chance of making them a customer, if they can’t find what they are looking for easily don’t be surprised if your customer base is minimal because they will have gone and found somewhere that they don’t have to struggle to find what they are looking for.

Always ensure the content is relevant, brief and to the point. Make sure you know the selling language, keep the content simple and about the needs of the user.  Make sure that you show the customer that their needs are important to you and not just the sale that they represent.

If your site is all about selling and you use a shopping cart system then you need to ensure that the process is easy for them to use and not a major effort.  No one likes to have a hard time when they are spending their hard earned cash.

The best way to test a new website is to watch how users engage. It is always good to ask some people to have a look around the website and let you know what they found easy and what was difficult, if the message was clear and were they genuinely interested in the overall message it sent out.

Yes, SEO is important to a website’s ranking and search results but it is equally important to make sure that the site is up to the challenge once the SEO has done its job.

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