Iced Coffee Served Without a Straw is like SEO without User Experience Design

Today I stopped by a favourite local bakery (Uprising Breads) to get an iced latte and Avocado and Hummus sandwich. The people there are always friendly and that sandwich always terrific. The problem arose when the barista served me my coffee. There was my coffee, in the plastic cup, ice, non-fat milk, looking cool and delicious, and he’s put one of those domed lids on it, and no straw. So I look at my barista and ask, ‘so with that lid and no straw how am I supposed to drink it?’. The response was awesome, ‘we don’t have any straws’.

For me, this is the problem with a lot of the work people pay for around SEO (Search Engine Optimization). They pay good money, they get their site ranking very highly in Google and other search engines, but the experience for users once they get there is sub-optimal. They get the iced latte but is packaged in such a way as it is impossible to drink.

I recently sat with a group of business people who were all talking about SEO, how important it was and how high their sites were ranking. Not one of them mentioned bounce rate, nor conversions. When a probed a little further, one mentioned that his whole site was designed from an SEO perspective, another said what their SEO person told them was that the contact us form on the site was ‘all wrong’. One asked if the best place to start thinking about their website was SEO, and most of the group agreed. Not one considered if their sites were meeting their user’s needs, answering their questions, or for that matter, delivering on their business objectives.

Given both my personality, and the work we do, it’s not surprising to those that know me that I did not agree. That group’s emphasis on SEO is a testament to how effective the people who work with SEO have been at getting their message out and to the dominance of search in our lives. And truly, SEO is important, if your customers can’t find you on the web, and how they find you is by using a search engine, then you do need to put some attention here. What kills me is the focus on SEO to the detriment of the user experience. Why on earth would you serve me a drink in a way that makes it impossible to drink it? The same applies to SEO and the user experience of your website, why on earth would you lead me to a site that is hard to use?

This begs the question how do you do design for a great user experience, usability, and SEO, on a limited budget? Here is some basic advice that will go a long way to helping you achieve both good rankings as well as have a site that brings you business:

1. Consider really who your users are. I say really because all too often I have heard clients say everyone will use their site. While it may be true that people from all walks of life may visit your site, there are one or two groups who are your core.
2. Now ask yourself, what is it the people from these core groups really want from my site or application? Not what is it that I want to show them or make them do. This is an important distinction. For some, its a very subtle distinction.
3. Next, focus your strategy on that understanding and design the experience from there. It is tempting to look at another successful site for a bigger company and simply copy their design using the rationale that if it works for them, it will work for us. For instance, many small e-commerce-based companies with who maybe have 20 to 100 SKUs want to have exactly the same design as Amazon.com with their many thousands of SKUs.
4. Design happens at both the visual level (colours and form), as well as the structural level (functionality, how things fit together). That both work together and deliver what your audience needs and not what you like is critical. Try not to put your personal aesthetic into the mix. Again it is very tempting to look at the visual design for a different site and tell your designer, make my site look like that.
5. Make sure you focus the interaction and the effort on the groups that have the most to benefit, this will be the most engaged part of your audience, so make those people happy and the rest will follow.
6. 6) Make sure you have good content that is clear, uses plain language as well as your key terms. This content needs to be written so it can be scanned quickly, is focused on chunks of content (a good rule of thumb is one page per big idea), and it needs to be structured so that stuff is easy to browse for on your site.
7. Make sure your navigation labels are clear and simple to understand, and that these are not displayed on the site as graphics but as live text.
8. Make sure all the images on your site have so-called alt tags that are likewise clear and simple to understand
9. Make sure you link out to other reputable sites (especially if you are blogging)
10. Make sure that you link in from other reputable sites (like LinkedIn, Facebook, Your clients)

There are many more things you can do, of course. But with a limited budget, limited time, this is a great start.