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Your web site design presents two options after marketing it. Invite, browse, and leave. Or, invite and guide to revenue oriented tasks. Most web sites do the first one. The investment goes into promoting, not the user experience. Commonly Heard Feedback Selling user experience and usability services such as audits and user testing is the equivalent of making kids eat their vegetables. You tell them they are good for you…
If user experience is important to a company’s online sales, why do they continue to not invest in it? When did human-computer experience stop being an asset in product and services design? According to a recent study by Econsultancy, called User Experience Survey Report, “Almost three-quarters (74%) of businesses believe that the user experience is important for improving sales and conversions”. Believing is not the same thing as doing. The…
The buzz from SXSW regarding updates from Google’s algorithms created a stir among SEO’s but barely a stir from the usability industry. Now, more than ever before, reputation counts. You can have the best keyword rank possible, or purchase the top spot in search results, and yet what happens after the click into a web page remains the deciding factor on whether the time and investment to get there were…
For Marketers: Explaining the Importance of Usability to Site Owners – Part Four The way to capture the attention of someone browsing on the web is not by hitting the exact keyword phrase. Even search engines know this and offer variations of search phrases to help direct us to the best results. And that’s when all the nice and friendly assistance stops. After you click into a promising web page…
For Marketers: Explaining the Importance of Usability to Site Owners – Part Three Online marketing companies typically don’t offer web site usability testing for their clients because how we use web sites isn’t a priority for marketing. Search engine rank is. To their credit, some search engine marketing companies got the message from Google and Bing that user experience signals reach them. What you do online is of serious interest…
For Marketers: Explaining the Importance of Usability to Site Owners – Part Two Last week I launched this series on selling usability to site owners by offering some of my favorite eye opening pitches to prospective clients. Visual proof is always easy to do. But, it’s not enough. When a prospective client approaches a search engine marketing company for marketing help, most, if not all, of the proposed strategy is…
When I first found a web site that wouldn’t let me see the products on its homepage I was shocked and thought it was me making user errors. But it wasn’t my fault. The website really would not let me use it. It was clothing site advertising in Facebook. The picture of a shirt caught my eye and the offer sounded like a great bargain. When I clicked the ad…
This is the last in our series on The Secret to Natural Site Conversions for Usability and SEO. You now know the secret to a holistic approach is text for search engines and humans. Where do you put it? Start with your homepage and put your company or web site name in text above the page fold. It amazes me how many web sites do not put their name on…
To increase web site conversions your web site should be designed as a guide on how to do something. Web site user abandonment occurs when the way how is blocked. This is the sixth installment in our series, The Secret to Natural Site Conversions for Usability and SEO. We’re organically increasing web site conversions by taking advantage of the opportunities to answer these questions – Who, Where, What, Why, When…
Back in the year 2002 I learned a lesson about persuasive design before it was called that. I made a new web site that missed a vital part. Why choose my services? The man who scolded me from the other side of the planet was a prominent marketer whom I’d been introduced to online by another famous marketer. At the time I felt like he was the professor and I…
If you have been following this series, you know that our goal is to find logical, easy ways to optimize web pages for search engines and web site conversions. The “secret trick” to this is the WWWWWH solution. Who Where What When Why and How Details In part four, we’re going to focus on the “when” element. While I’m focusing on showing you ways to optimze your text content organically…