SEO Site Design Improves User Experience and Site Performance
Eric Enge shows you the value of improving the user experience by implementing SEO in your site design while testing design elements with analytics.
Eric Enge shows you the value of improving the user experience by implementing SEO in your site design while testing design elements with analytics.
I love old-fashioned, technical SEO, and it’s better still when combined with common-sense marketing. It involves the sound execution of fundamental principles of Web site design.
Today’s case study looks at a Web site that has some technical SEO implementation problems and other marketing problems, then shows you what happened when these problems were fixed. This case study is brought to us courtesy of Blizzard Internet Marketing, a Colorado-based hospitality marketing firm.
While the search engines tell us to “design for users and not for search engines,” the reality is there are certain things you need to do to make your site search-engine friendly. Of course, when the search engines tell you to design for users, they really mean don’t spend your time figuring out how to “game the algorithm.” They will all acknowledge that smart SEO implementation will help them do their job better.
At the same time, you must provide a rich and easy-to-use experience for the users on your site. Want an immediate boost to your revenue without waiting for some search engine to update its index? Improve the user experience on the site and you can see instant results.
Miami Beach-based Newport Beachside Resort is a luxury hotel and resort offering a wide range of amenities and activities. The resort sensed that it could be getting better results from its online marketing efforts and brought Blizzard in to help them with that challenge. The initial site was attractive, but it had been designed without SEO in mind. So there were a host of different problems from an SEO perspective, including:
Blizzard took on the task of a site redesign, taking a number of critical steps:
After the site redesign was completed and launched, the results were dramatic and immediate. That’s the beauty of improving the user experience on a site! Here is what Newport Beachside Resort saw when comparing its February 2007 stats to the February 2006 stats.
The incoming call quality remained excellent as well, with an average duration of 3 minutes and 22 seconds. Hospitality industry statistics generally indicate that a call lasting more than 3 minutes results in a reservation.
The real lesson from this case study is that SEO is great, but don’t overlook the other aspects of your site design, either. As I mentioned above, improving the user experience can provide instant results. Sometimes, the way to do this may not be intuitively obvious, but this is where web analytics come in. If you test out different page designs, different calls-to-action, different messaging, and even changes in color schemes, you will likely see different results.
It’s a discipline worth pursuing. After all, what are the chances that your first instinctive guess on how to design a page is the absolute best it can be? Yep, that’s right. The chances are pretty much zero.