MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

How do you stand out from the crowd as an SEM agency? The competition is getting tough and we have to up our tactics if we want to stay ahead of the masses. The best way to do that is high quality of work and service, service, service…

The customer or user in this case is, to be politically correct, king or queen. The trends show that SEO/SEM firms are gradually focusing their attention on the user, specifically offering website usability as a service. I feel that it is very important to acknowledge that usability requires its own skills set and shouldn’t be confused with SEO. Usability addresses human interaction with a web site while SEO addresses the search engine interaction with the web site. Saying that, all SEOs should have knowledge of usability and every SEM agency should look at adding SEO to its repertoire.

The two need to complement each other and both require a great deal of attention and dedication independently of each other. It’s critical that a web developer/content developer understands usability and actively thinks about it as they optimise the pages.

Thurow claims that many SEOs and SEM agencies have no clue as to what usability really means, even though they use these words in their sales pitches to make the client feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It’s misleading!

The key is to know what it is you are doing and to make sure that you are doing it correctly. There are too many examples of SEM agencies that sacrifice the user experience for things like keyword density, and that in turn is the very opposite of what one wants to achieve within usability.

What exactly is usability and what should SEOs know?

By definition, Wikipedia states that usability is:

“In human-computer interaction and computer science, usability usually refers to the elegance and clarity with which the interaction with a computer program or a web site is designed.”

Certain people, for example information architects, should “by default” understand usability and actually have the knowledge to perform usability tests.

Peter Morville, President of Semantic Studios, states how important the below three circles are in explaining how and why we must strike a unique balance on each project between business goals and context, user needs and behaviour, and the available mix of content.

The Three Circles of Information Architecture – Peter Morville

The circles illustrate the distinction between user experience and “user-focused” design. Everyone involved in the development and design of a website should strive to create useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, and credible products that will ultimately benefit the user.

The most important factor to note from Morville`s article is findability, and he rightfully questions:

“Can your users find your website? Can they find their way around your website? And, can they find your products and services despite your website? When you start asking these sorts of questions, it becomes obvious there’s no bright line separating usability, findability, information architecture, and SEO.”

A site analysis or heuristic evaluation is invaluable in the process of indentifying any usability problems early in the design of a website. This phase needs to be performed correctly by an SEM agency that actually knows what is potting and is experienced enough to identify all the issues, bugs and problems. There are too many SEOs who don’t know what they are doing, that are offering Site Analysis as a service to create that warm fuzzy feeling again. It’s counter effective, and they are just going to end up looking daft.

To conclude, I would like to mention that everyone in this industry needs to actively think about SEO and its relationship to usability. It’s not only design, as content is just as important. You must have both, and need a skilled person onboard to ensure you can handle any conflicts that may exist between the two.

The focus of design and content and layout needs to be on the compatibility of user and interface, and not on SEO, as SEO needs to work around the user experience and not the other way around. The user comes first and if that’s respected, everything else will fall into place.