Search Usability
Posted by Celeste Yates on 13 Nov 2007 at 04:45 pm | Tagged as: Common SEO Topics
The term “search usability” has a variety of meanings and has become a broad term to describe a selection of things. However, the term has lost a lot of it’s meaning and has become misunderstood with each expansion.
Professionals in Web design/development, SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) use the term in the wrong context. They use it in presentations to clients and in conferences, although they don’t seem to know what it means either.
SEO Director at Omni Marketing Interactive, Shari Thurow, explains the term in her article by relating it to the concept of Berry Picking. In 1989, UCLA professor Marcia Bates wrote a paper regarding search behaviour, titled: The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface. Although when the article was written, Yahoo and Google were not invented yet, the paper was orientated around commercial web search engines.
She lists the behaviours, including Querying, Refining, Expanding, Browsing/Surfing, Pogo-sticking, Foraging, Scanning and Reading. In the paper Bates explains that search usability applies to all search behaviour and not just to one trait.
The complication comes in when most SEO professionals focus on the Querying, Refining and Expanding behaviours of search usability. Whereas Usability professionals tend to focus on Browsing/Surfing, Pogosticking, Foraging, Scanning and Reading.
Web Designers tend to look only into the interface of a website to determine the usability of the site. They run interface testing, checking to see if the search box, results page and defensive design of the interface is user friendly. They don’t think to check if the site is usable to search engines.
SEO professionals ensure that during the site design, the content is easily indexed by search engines. For example, if you want your website to show up in the top ten ranks of Google, then you engineer the design so that it is Google friendly.
You have to concentrate on all behaviour when looking into search usability. Not just ones that suit you or suit the industry that you are in. The search phrase is a combination of querying behaviour and browsing behaviour. It has to be user-friendly as well as search-engine friendly.
Clients are aware that they need to change their site to be as searchable as possible, from all aspects and behavioural viewpoints. You can’t only judge your site by the amount of traffic you get and decide from that whether your site is search usable or not.
You need to find out how long users are staying on the site as well. It’s one thing for users to find your site, but they need to be able to interact and browse through it. Check how many page clicks there are internally on a site to determine whether your site is user-friendly. It is with these two combined that a website becomes search usable. A good balance between an eye catching, easy to use website from the designers and creating the site search engine friendly is the key to true search usability.
