Improving Website Usability

No matter how much effort you put into SEO and online marketing, your website must be user friendly in order to get the most out of your new traffic. In addition to this, having a website that aids the user in their needs will also help the SEO process as great content will always attract natural links. Therefore, anyone undertaking SEO work should be aware of website usability and try to ensure that some basic measures are put in place.

Window Of Opportunity

So many people fall into the trap of designing their website to display what they want to display, and not what their target users are looking for. If you look at any analytical software you will see that most traffic from the search engines will only stick around for about 15 seconds; unless of course they find exactly what they are looking for. This is a very small window of opportunity and needs to be carefully thought through to gain success.

Research

As with any other type of SEO work, you should always start with some keyword research. This will show you exactly what your potential visitors will be looking for, and help you to identify what words and phrases they will need to see on your website. When conducting your research, think long and hard about exactly what it is you’re offering on your website. If you have a website offering ‘luxury airport pick ups’, titles such as ‘airport pick ups’ might be too vague. Use ‘luxury airport pick ups’ and you know this will precisely target the market you are looking for.


Content

Writing content for your website can be quite hard from an insider’s perspective. It’s all too easy to waffle on and on, after all you know your business better than anyone else. It’s always advisable to have a third party check over your content to make sure the message gets across quick enough. Remember, give your users exactly the information they want and need; nothing more, nothing less. It might help when writing content to think about the ‘four W’s’: What, Where, When, Why. Try to be as focused as possible always remembering that you only have about 15 seconds at the most to capture a potential client.

Navigation

Once you have your traffic hooked into your website, it is vital that they can navigate their way through the website in a clear and structured manner. Many websites fail by being too complicated with different bits of information everywhere. Drawing out a plan will help you to decide on the layout of the website from the user’s perspective. Be as ruthless as possible in your approach, if a page isn’t needed...remove it.

Website Features

You should also be thinking about a couple of features that you could have on your website that are aimed at trying to increase return visits. These features could be anything that’s helpful to the user, and they don’t have to be fancy or expensive. A simple, well written blog can keep people returning, or in a similar vein, a regularly updated news page should also do the trick. If you want to go a bit further you could offer free tools or widgets to your users, this will certainly keep traffic returning and at the same help your link building efforts.