Usability and search engine optimisation (SEO), or the big end of the funnel, part two
SEO companies are growing. I heard a story yesterday of a company who has shut down almost all their marketing activities (as an effect of the current financial climate), but still increased their SEO spend.
The rationale is a good one. You bring more people to the site and more people convert – all at a relatively low cost per acquisition.
I know that good user centered design focused around design enhancements (informed by usability research and solid task models) can drastically improve conversion once people are on the site.
The best projects I’ve worked on , the ones where you are doubling or trebling online sales, are the ones where the search engine optimisation teams, the usability teams, the design teams and the technical teams are all working together to a common purpose.
The trick here is to plan early and to plan together. For a usability company it’s about involving these teams throughout the user centered design process – looking for ways to incorporate their insights into the information architecture, wireframes and ultimately design.
If SEO can get more people into the big end of the funnel, then usability can make the smaller end bigger!
About the author
Richard is a managing director at cxpartners. He works with brands to develop engaging user experiences for different devices, and loves creative problem solving. Richard does a lot of baking, and loves to make bread. Email Richard, or call +44 (0)117 946 3930
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Rich
Of course I agree with your point of view – and this is how we worked on the FC relaunch.
Nevertheless, the *hard* bit from the client’s side of things is how to manage all these different parties and relationships while maintaining a sharp focus on the end goal. With so many different skill sets, companies, locations involved it can become quite tricky to keep the ship going in the correct direction, and in an efficient manner.
Do you have any clues as to what might help?
Cheers
DJ
Yeah without a doubt that’s hard. We’ve been really fortunate here and I’ve been meaning to write some musings around successful collaboration. In particular around:
- Sharing a vision
- Mutual respect (including when to back down from a particular point of view)
- Participatory design
- Unpacking the relevance of wireframes
- Selecting teams on the ability for them to get along with each other
- Owning a knowledge area, but understanding another view can help unpack and refine it.
Interesting that these are all about people qualities and relationship building rather than just around expertise.
Sharing a vision is an important one and also understanding who and how it feels to be the customer. SEO will not help marketing teams who write copy that uses buzz words and no one wants to read in the first place.
I think I might have a decent case study on “sharing a vision” come the end of this year…
We shall see!