Think of Your User First and the Rest Will Follow

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Written By Robert Dunford
I am a Marketing Consulting in the Great Toronto Area with over 25 years experience in building and implementing marketing plans for small business.

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Many SEO pros tend to solely focus on checking the boxes off their Google checklist, while forgetting the other side of the process – the human side. While keeping up to date with the technical aspects of a website is essential, keeping the user in mind is crucial. After all, the desired result is user interaction and conversion. Imagine having a website that meets all the marks technically speaking, but is underwhelming to users, or vice versa. Finding a balance between the technical aspects that affect website ranking and a user-friendly layout is the formula for maximizing your organic reach. How does one go about becoming more user-friendly?

Look into the Design

Try to learn more about what goes into designing your site. The end goal is not to have a career change, but to get a better understanding of the main factors that distinguish good design from bad design. Grasping this concept will allow you to customize your site in a more user-friendly way and improve your UX.

When you start educating yourself on design, try to focus more on the why behind the choices. Get mentors or instructors that can dive deep into the topic and explain the psychological principles that shape the process. Knowing what drives people and playing on that can affect website ranking.

See How Visitors Interact with the Site

The great thing about content marketing and websites is that there are infinite amounts of data that you can gather to help you. A great tool, to begin with, is Google Analytics. When this incredible tool is properly set up, it plays a vital role in website marketing. One of its useful features is tracking and marking pages that lose the most visitors.

Once these pages have been identified, go into them and figure out the cause of this exaggerated bounce rate. Utilize heat-mapping and recording software to see exactly how users interact and where you lose them. Examine the data and see what points of the website can be improved.

Test It Out

Once you have collected various forms of data, it is time to see if any improvement can be made. Data is fundamental in helping identify potential problems, but it does not mean that they are quick fixes. Take the time to test out a change and monitor the results. The best way to do this is to set up A/B testing.

For those who are new to the concept, it is a system in which you test out a change by creating two variations of a page and dividing the traffic between them. Over time you collect data to see which of the two pages performs better. This is a great way to test out potential changes and see if they are beneficial for your website.

Optimizing more toward people might seem like a tedious job to those that have grown accustomed to the technical parts of SEO. However, it is always good to at least try to take a step forward in that direction.

After all, SEO is a broad field of study, and any improvement you can make is sure to bring some benefit. If you wish to start enjoying good results for your business faster, don’t hesitate to contact me. I’d love to discuss your marketing strategy and help in any way I can.

Rob Dunford is a Marketing Consultant in the Great Toronto Area with over 20 years of experience in implementing marketing plans for small businesses.

 

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