When SEO kills Usability

Using some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques without proper consideration of a positive user experience is the fast way to kill usability.

I’ve noted this as have others, including Google’s Chief of News, Josh Cohen, who was quoted in a Poynter. org article about SEO and user experience as saying:

“Focus on creating a more engaging experience for the users so that they spend a longer period of time per visit. Make sure the user experience comes first, not the search engine visibility.”

Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager, Google News

The issue is one of quality, or lack thereof.  SEO can be used for good purposes, by making it easier for search engines (and thus people) to find the high-quality content they seek.  SEO can unfortunately also be used for bad purposes, to manipulate the search engines to find and artificially rank sites that actually have low-quality, or worse, no content.  When SEO is applied in this dubious manner, to trick search engines, it is often accomplished by using techniques that create bad usability.

Here is the formula I like to use to define the results for usage of SEO and usability:

• SEO + Bad Usability = short visits = Bad ROI
• SEO + Good Usability = long visits = Good ROI

Ultimately, if your site is anything other than a massive advertising link farm, the positive SEO and usability your website content provides defines the number and quality of the visits, and thus the amount of revenue gained, not how many visits you can have.

This reminds me of a Tweet Nick Finck posted…

SEO Practices that Kill Usability

There are many ways certain SEO practices can kill usability, but the three most common ways I’ve seen include:

• Creating pages with minimal amounts of meaningless keyword-stuffed content
• Creating pages with massive amounts of keyword-stuffed content
• Creating pages with zero amounts of content

All of these can kill usability, because the techniques used to influence SEO create a quality of the experience that is so lacking.  This causes website visitors to want to run, not walk away, from the site.

Example 1 – Creating pages with minimal amounts of keyword-stuffed content

Let’s say you’re interested in buying a new printer, you’ve not bought one in a while, so you’d like to know the latest information about how to buy a printer.  You’d probably expect to learn about how to find the latest models, how to evaluate features, and how to compare pricing.

Starting on Bing, you might type in the search term:

How to buy a printer

On Bing’s resulting search listings you’ll find many potentially promising sites.  Having high expectations for finding good quality information you might click on some of the links in the search results, including the link for eHow.com.

Bing - How to buy a printer results

You are then taken to the eHow.com page for how to buy a printer which promises to inform you about choosing the machine that’s right for you.

However, what you actually receive in the way of your hoped-for rich high-quality content and good usability on the eHow.com page may not meet your expectations.  Right in the middle of a massive scrolling page of ads are 6 steps for finding a printer.  There are a total of 231 words of helpful advice about how to buy a printer in the body copy.

If we visually highlight the actual page content to separate it from the ads we are left with a minimal amount of content that provides a poor user experience and from a task standpoint does not achieve good usability.  There is little to no useful content, and thus the user experience and poor usability do not come close to matching expectations.

Included in the advice in the steps are such meaty content as:

“Step 2 – Decide between ink-jet and laser printers. How you’ll use the printer will guide your decision.”

eHow How to buy a printer

This example clearly demonstrates that the SEO practice of providing just enough keyword rich content (16 uses of the word ‘printer’ and variations in the body copy alone) with no regard to the quality of the content leads to bad usability, and a page filled with hundreds of ads.

SEO and Usability Rule #1 – Don’t skimp on the content!

Achieve good SEO and usability by providing your users with high-quality, useful and usable content

Example 2 – Creating pages with massive amounts of keyword-stuffed content

The opposite of minimal content is maximum keyword-stuffed content, which is an example of using SEO to stuff so many keywords into the content that the page ranks higher in search results, at the expense of usability.

For this example, let’s assume you are interested in buying a used car, and want to research more information on how to do it.  In this case you might type in:

How to buy a used car

In Bing’s listings of results are sites including the top one, carbuyingtips.com.

Bing - How to buy a used car

Clicking on carbuyingtips.com takes you to a page filled with huge amounts of content, presented in a massive scrolling page of car buying content, displayed in varying types of visual styles that lack usable organization.  Go ahead and start scrolling down the screenshot, I’ll be down below there waiting for you…

From an SEO standpoint this is the equivalent of throwing everything in, AND the kitchen sink! The usability of this page suffers from massive amounts of semi-organized content designed perhaps to overwhelm search engines, and any humans that are brave enough to try to read and digest the information.

It’s not a surprise that this page comes up in top position for the results, just based on the sheer weight of the content all by itself.  The problem however is it’s a rather unpleasant task to try to read, assimilate and comprehend all the content, leading to poor usability and a disappointing user experience.

SEO and Usability Rule #2 – Don’t stuff the content!

Create positive SEO and usability by providing your users with visually organized, easy to read, easy to comprehend, and thus easy to use content.

Example 3 – Creating pages with zero amount content

Using the same search results for “how to buy a used car,” another site shows the third bad SEO example of providing zero keywords in the content of the page when the website visitor clicks through to it.

As is demonstrated below, clicking on the “Howtobuyanything.com” link takes the visitor to a page that has absolutely no content on that page about the specific searched-for topic.  This leads to bad usability due to the frustration of not finding the content that was promised.

How to buy anything

From an SEO standpoint this is using a keyword shell-game to achieve results in the rankings, but in the meantime providing the website visitor with absolutely none of the searched-for keywords and content.

Duping unsuspecting website visitors by using SEO to promise a page with content, but then not delivering said content on the page leads to bad usability and a negative user experience.

In the above example the website would have been much better suited to provide content about the used car buying guide.  This would more closely align with the user’s expectations and thus provide better usability, through a more positive user experience.

SEO and Usability Rule #3 – Don’t make false promises!

Achieve good SEO and usability by providing your users with the content you promised them.

Conclusion: When SEO Kills Usability

Unsuspecting website owners may not realize the significance of the way bad SEO practices can kill usability, but kill it, it does.  The reality is the owners of these and other such websites would be much better served by improving their usability and user experience, which would lead to better SEO.

This strategy of providing quality content and good usability will over time provide a greater benefit than resorting to bad SEO tactics to temporarily attract visitors.  That’s because the vast majority of visitors who are duped to come to these bad sites, finding terrible usability and poor content will immediately leave anyway.  So the question is, why would anyone spend money on bad SEO techniques that kill usability, only to receive a 1 or 2 second visit and bad ROI?  Was it really worth the expense?  I doubt it.

Instead of SEO killing usability, work on quality content, a good user experience and helpful SEO tactics.  This will in the long run help your website take care of itself in the search rankings.  That way, your website wins, your visitors win, and you win with increased ROI.

The 3 Pillars of Successful Web Sites

There are three pillars that comprise the foundation of any successful web site, including your web site.  For your web site to be effective it must perform well before the visit (at the awareness stage), during the visit (the evaluation phase) and during the finding, ordering or buying phase (the action phase).

I call these the 3 Pillars of Success, take any one of these three pillars away and your website will not perform to its full potential:

The 3 Pillars of Web Site Success

To be successful, your web site must be:

1. Findable – SEO, paid advertising, links, quality content
2. Trustable – Persuasion, emotion and trust
3. Usable – Usability, web metrics

1. Findable – SEO, Paid Advertising, Links, Quality Content:

For your web site to be effective, it must be Findable.  This includes using search engine optimization best practices to ensure the site can be found and indexed by search engines.  This is a critical and often overlooked component of web site success.

“If Google can’t find your site, your site does not exist.”

SEO guru Bruce Clay and Susan Esparza wrote an excellent book detailing how to perform search engine optimization: Search Engine Optimization All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies.  Applying search engine optimization best practices means your web site is easy for search engines to find, index and qualify from a quality standpoint.

Being findable also includes paid advertising with tools such as email, SEM, using Pay Per Click or Pay for Performance online advertising media, impression based ads and related online marketing tools such as affiliate networks and social media conversations.  Traditional advertising also applies, including radio, TV, direct mail and more.

Another component of being Findable is using a good quality linking strategy and set of tactics.  Remember that the web (internet) is exactly like a spider web, in that spiders use interlinked threads to create the structure of their web, and to enable navigating quickly and efficiently to any area in the web they need to go.

So too the internet uses connected threads of information to link similar topics and concepts.  The links to your site on the internet is the structure and the navigation system, which in this case is used by all of your web site visitors, including the all-important search engines.  The more high-quality links to your web site, the more Findable you are.

Finally, the last, but perhaps most important element of being Findable is having high quality content on your web site.  Your site must be worthy of being found, which means it must provide high-quality information that is helpful and useful.

Don’t underestimate the power of other web sites (even competitors!) linking or pointing to your high quality content as a powerful mechanism for your web site being found.

Findable tools:

• SEO – Easy for search engines to find & navigate
• SEM – Advertising where your prospects are
• Paid Media – Pay for performance including affiliates
• Social Media – Connected conversations
• Links – Highways to your site
• High-quality Unique Content – Worthy of being found

2. Trustable- Using Persuasion, Emotion and Trust to Influence Behavior

Once you have web site visitors, you must influence them to take action, this is the Trustable component.  To influence your visitor’s decisions and get them to commit (order, buy, contact you, whatever your web site success metric is) they must trust you and your web site.

By utilizing the science of persuasion to optimize the content, graphics, positioning and related elements of your web site, you will be influencing your web site visitor’s behavior.  Done well, this makes your site more Trustable, believable and will influence more of your visitors to take more actions.

Human Factors International calls this PET; for Persuasion, Emotion and Trust and offers persuasive techniques courses to teach you how to design using persuasive methods.

Trustable and the Psychology of Persuasion

A leading expert in the field of Persuasion and how to influence people is Robert Cialdini, former Professor of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University.

Cialdini’s study of psychology and how influence is used to change human behavior resulted in a popular book, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.”

In essence, his research defined 6 elements of influence that can be manipulated to persuade and influence people’s behavior.  Using these elements on your web site effectively will enable you to influence your web site visitor’s behavior, resulting in more actions and thus more web site profit.

Trustable Tools – Cialdini’s 6 elements of persuasion and influence:

1. Reciprocity – People have a tendency to return a favor.  If I scratch your back, you’ll scratch my back, or as in LinkedIn, if I give you a recommendation you’ll most likely give me one.
2. Commitment and Consistency – When a person commits, either in written or audio form, he or she will be far more likely to follow-through with their commitment.  Once we commit, we seek to fulfill that commitment (some call it honor) because failing to do so causes us cognitive dissonance, which is when our actions do not match our desired goal.  As an example, agreeing to quit smoking is a commitment which if later broken, causes us ill feelings about ourselves (cognitive dissonance).
3. Social Proof – All of us are to a certain extent followers, if you see people around you suddenly start running in one direction, it’s highly likely you’ll start running too.  Amazon uses social proof very effectively with their “People who bought this item also bought.”
4. Authority – Authority figures such as police or firemen are obeyed because you have built-in authority following tendencies.  Even when you may know an order is wrong, or goes against your beliefs, you are likely to follow the order consider the disaster that was Enron as an example of following authority figures.
5. Liking – The odds are your friends can easily influence you to do things that a stranger or acquaintance could not do.  Pyramid marketing schemes like Amway are founded on this principle; that your friend can influence you and a group of others to buy products that a stranger at your door could never do.
6. Scarcity – Limited time offers, limited quantities or other forms of scarcity have a tendency to cause you to take action.  An example of this being the special sales that occur for only a few hours early in the morning the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S., causing large numbers of shoppers to stand in lines waiting for stores to open at unlikely times like 4 or 5 AM, something they would normally never do.

3. Usable – Applying usability and metrics analysis

Once Trust and a desire for action have been instilled in your web site visitor, the 3^rd pillar, Usability comes into play.  Usability means making the tasks of finding things, ordering or buying on your web site as easy and simple as possible.

You must apply usability best practices to make it as easy and fast as possible to take action, and complete the transaction or ordering or purchasing with no errors or confusion.  Usability best practices are applied at this point to make sure task flows have minimal problems.

Usability testing of the order flow is crucial, anything that interferes or causes user confusion must be eliminated, else abandonments and lost sales.  Usability testing of the rest of the site is also important, if your web site visitors have trouble getting to the order flow, there is no order flow.

The usability author Steve Krug wrote a book that defines the goal, Dont Make Me Think.

Put simply, make it brain-dead simple for your web site visitors to accomplish their tasks, especially the tasks of ordering or buying from your web site.

Web metrics is the other tool that is required to find and address any usability issues.  Tracking critical KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) as well as funnel abandonments, time-on-task, error rates and related performance indicators will point to places of poor or under-performing  tasks.

An excellent source for information about metrics and analysis is Avinash Kaushik, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day.  But just tracking is not enough, the analysis of the metrics must lead to follow-up actions, otherwise there’s no point in tracking the metrics.  And this leads us into my next point:

A final note – Testing

In no event should you consider the above 3 pillars to be one-time only events.  It is critical that on-going testing be conducted, including methods such as A/B testing and multivariate testing to try new ways to make it easier for your web site visitors to become customers.

An excellent resource for further information about A/B and multivariate testing is Bryan Eisenberg’s Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer which although focused on Google’s A/B tool can be applied to any web site tool for testing purposes.

Conclusion – 3 Pillars of Successful Web sites

For your web site to be successful, it must have the 3 pillars, and must do these better than the competition.  To be successful, your web site must be:

1. Findable – SEO, paid advertising, links, quality content
2. Trustable – Persuasion, emotion and trust
3. Usable – Usability, web metrics

The continuous process of evaluating, testing and optimizing these 3 pillars is what separates the successful (and profitable) web sites from the unsuccessful web sites.

For more information about the 3 pillars of web site success, or for an evaluation of your web site’s 3 pillars, just contact me.  As a consultant I’m glad to help you increase your web site profits by evaluating and recommending improvements to your 3 pillars.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Usability share common traits, including 7 ways search engines are very like humans as demonstrated with the SEO & Usability Matrix

SEO is an important way for you to make your web site as friendly as possible to search engines. This is important because being friendly to search engines (and the spiders – aka automated programs used to find & index your content) ensures the content of your web site is discovered and indexed correctly.

This makes it easier for your content to be ranked appropriately in search engine results, making it easier for your potential web site visitors to find your site in the natural search engine rankings.

This of course means more web site visitors, and the really good news is those visitors are all “free” (in the sense that you didn’t use paid advertising to get them to your site).

Usability is also important for your web site. Once SEO has done its job and your web site visitors have found your site, if you place confusing content or navigation or functionality in their way, they’ll leave, usually never to return.

The interesting thing is generally what’s good for SEO and search engines is also good for usability and the humans who use your site (and buy your products). There have been several good articles posted about good SEO equaling good usability.

A few that come immediately to my mind are:

“Why Usability and SEO Go Hand-in-Hand” by the indomitable Jill Whalen
“The Biggest Web Site Usability Mistakes You Can Make” by the incredible Kim Krause Berg
“Hey Usability Professionals: Get With The SEO Program” by the inspirational Shari Thurow

However, I have not yet seen a comparison matrix that simply defines and describes the ways SEO and usability are similar, and how what’s good for search engine spiders is also good for the humans that visit your site.

Now I don’t profess to being an SEO guru (although I think I’m slightly taller than Bruce Clay), nor do I profess to being a usability guru (although I think I have slightly more hair than Jakob Nielsen). I know enough to be dangerous, and have been working with SEO and usability since 1996. So please understand this is not a detailed nor comprehensive overview of the similarities, but rather a working definition I’ve created that helps me from time to time in my dealings with conducting SEO and usability for companies – I hope you’ll find them helpful as well.

So with no further ado, (drum-roll please) I present to you the “SEO & Usability Matrix.”

SEO & Usability Matrix

The SEO and usability matrix is designed as a quick visual learning tool, to compare the similarities between search engines and humans when trying to use a web site.

I’ve also created this matrix in a format you can use as a print out to check off each of the web site core shared elements – to ensure you’ve identified that they are indeed optimized for search engines and humans.

#1 – Information architecture

SEO: Search engines find it easier to classify content when it is organized into cohesive and logical buckets of information, following a defined pattern and flow.

Usability: Humans find it easier to use web sites when the content is organized into groupings or buckets of information that fit their “mental map” of how the content should be organized.

#2 – Labeling

SEO: Search engines rely on labels to help classify content and sort it with other similar content groupings.

Usability: Humans rely on labels to help classify the content, and just like in a store they use those labels to determine if they are in the right place, or not.

#3 – Linking

SEO: Using hypertext links that search engines can follow from content areas to other pages enables search engines to easily explore and index your site plus provides additional classification information based on context.

Usability: Using hypertext links from content enables humans to visually identify where your content is, how it is structured, and enables them to easily explore your site and find the content they are looking for.

#4 – Navigation

SEO: Simple but effective navigation techniques enable search engines to find all the pages of your site.

Usability: Simple but effective navigation techniques enable humans to find the pages of the site they are interested in with minimal errors and maximum efficiency.

#5 – Siloing

SEO: A sub-set of information architecture, Siloing, ala Bruce Clay, is the concept of grouping related information into distinct sections and sub-sections within a web site, all of which define and support the central theme of the site. Search engines will define the theme and thus web site keyword rankings based on how appropriately the silos of content match the theme of the web site.

Usability: Siloing is to a certain extent a sub-set of information architecture, but for humans also relates to the relevance of various sub pages underneath higher-level pages, helping them find the “scent” as it’s been sometimes termed of their desired content. For example, this siloing hierarchy probably makes more sense to humans: Cars > Sports Cars > Corvette and this less: Cars > Corvette > Sports Cars

#6 – Site Map

SEO: A site map placed at the root level of a site ensures search engines have an additional and easy way to find and classify the content of your site.

Usability: A site map placed in an easy to find area of your web site ensures humans have another method they can use to easily find the content of interest to them, especially if they are lost or confused.

#7 – Technology

SEO: Using flash, bleeding-edge technology or many multiple-levels of dynamic pages can cause search engines to have difficulty finding and indexing your content.

Usability: Using flash, bleeding edge technology or many multiple-levels of dynamic pages can cause humans to have difficulty in finding the content they seek, especially if they are unable or unwilling to have the latest version of a required technology to access the site. The appropriate use of technology to help accomplish user goals can be a motivator and reason to visit the site – or it can cause users to flee and thus eliminate visits.

Conclusion – SEO & Usability Share 7 Common Traits

As I’ve demonstrated, SEO and Usability have many shared common traits, including the 7 I’ve highlighted above. There are other ways SEO and usability are the same, and this list is not comprehensive nor detailed. But hopefully it’ll be of help to you the next time you have to evaluate your web site for SEO and/or usability purposes.