Loading ...At the end of a successful search engine optimisation campaign, a website should be full of tempting treats for search engine spiders. The right keywords for the company should be in all the right places. Tags should be optimised and fresh content in plentiful supply. Links should flow into the site from highly respectable sources and relevant pages. All of this should help toward the site’s ranking, but if there’s one thing that’s missing, the whole plan can crash and burn. That one thing is a usable site.
Usability is vital for a successful site. Regardless of the campaign you’re running, whether it is paid advertising, link building or SEO, if your site is difficult to get around, internet users are going to turn around and go back to the site they came from.
Making your site usable doesn’t generally require too much hard work, but it is a hard task nonetheless. This is because it’s often very difficult to see where the problems are with usability. When a site owner has had a hand in a site’s development, or when the site has been in use for some time, usability becomes the invisible problem. It’s often difficult to even detect that internet users have any issue with the site’s workings.
This is where a search engine optimisation campaign can come in handy, particularly if you’re using the services of an SEO firm. Every good SEO campaign should begin with an analysis of the site being optimised. This analysis is intended to pick out potential problem areas that need to be dealt with during the optimisation, but it can also pick up on issues like usability. Talk to our consultants at SEO Consult Australia about how SEO analysis works.
Improving your site’s usability may involve some shifting of elements on your pages, and this can be uncomfortable. No site owner likes to see their site ripped apart, but it is essential if you want to please your site’s users – and if you want your rankings to improve. Many site owners don’t realise that usability can affect the success of their search engine optimisation campaign, as well.
Usability impacts twice on a site’s SEO. The first is in the initial calculation of ranking after a site has been optimised. A site where internet users can find pages and follow paths very easily tends to be a site that search engine spiders can crawl more freely. This means that there is an increased likelihood of the search engines finding the information you need them to find to improve your ranking.
The second impact usability has on SEO comes a little later, as users begin to roam through your optimised site. The search engines take careful note of the bounce rate and time-on-page rates of a site, and work these factors in when aligning a site’s ranking. Not many site owners think about this angle. If users are often frustrated with elements of your site, it will eventually show in your rankings. Pleasing users pleases the search engines too.
Related posts:
- Step-by-step simple site analysis
- It’s official – site speed affects rankings
- Launching your new site
- Three SEO Facts You Need To Know
- Examine your site’s usability
Tags: content, Keywords, SEO campaign, seo firm, spiders
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