SEO ROI » Usability

13 Resources For Mobile Landing Pages And Website Design

Gabriel Goldenberg — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 16:19:21 +0000

Guides

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/designing-for-mobile-web
http://mashable.com/2009/11/26/mobile-web-design/
http://abduzeedo.com/mobile-web-design
http://www.scribd.com/doc/20946338/Great-Mobile-Landing-Pages – A useful presentation for beginners. The authors created Movitas, which has the most affordable WYSIWYG mobile page creator I found. (Besides the free, uber-basic Movylo.)

Mobile Web Design Galleries
http://www.mobileawesomeness.com/mobile-web-resources/ – A blog and design gallery with useful resources linked
http://www.mobisitegalore.com/index.html – Another gallery

WYSIWYGs

https://movitas.com/Movitas/pricingComparison.aspx
http://www.tekora.com/en/ – Another mobile WYSIWYG
Very basic: http://www.movylo.com/
Really pricey: http://mobify.me/features/

Slice Shops Turn PSD and AI Graphics Into XHTML, WML etc

http://www.mobilizetoday.com/xhtml-conversion – Seemed to have pretty affordable pricing for slicing up graphics into mobile landers, but it wasn’t clear if they’d do WML either…
https://w3-markup.com/ – A site that will slice your graphics into a working lander, but they don’t do WML. Use them if your target is newer devices that can support 320px wide graphics etc.
http://www.zestadz.com/help/help_landing_page_tool – Unclear if you need to use Zestadz to get their tool, however.

If you liked this post on mobile tools and resources, add my rss feed to your reader!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

13 Resources For Mobile Landing Pages And Website Design

Easy Usability Tip For Registration Page Conversion Lifts

Gabriel Goldenberg — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 14:51:49 +0000

When asking people to fill in the fields, be clear on the format of the answer you expect. Specify what characters can be used, and what characters can’t be used.

Don’t wait to correct people until after they’ve clicked continue, because you’ll be using up your visitor’s supply of patience. Advise them at the outset of the right process. Try combining this with AJAX error notifications that don’t wait until people click continue, in order to be more efficient.

The more you dip into that reservoir of patience, the fewer conversions you get.

If you require people to use both letters and numbers in their passwords, say so in the form. If you want it a certain length, say so.

Password must include numbers and letters – why didn’t you say so to begin with??

Similarly, how was I supposed to know that a field labelled “City / State / Country” would not accept forward-slashes?

You’re begging for slashes by naming the field like that – it suggests the format people should answer in.

Ironically, in the very same form, I saw the following very clear, and commendable instructions:

Fill in your name as it appears on your passport. Clear. Concise. Avoids nicknames, initials and other abbreviations. Effective!

If you liked this post on usability, add my rss feed to your reader and check out my book with 30 tactics for advanced SEOs.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Easy Usability Tip For Registration Page Conversion Lifts

The Sadly Short Story Of The Isolated Product Developer

Gabriel Goldenberg — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:28:15 +0000

Jake was a quick-witted entrepreneur oozing with creativity.

He made decent money working for others at the agency that employed him. Somewhere along the way, Jake decided that he should come up with his own product.

So he did. Jake spent all his free time for the better part of a summer in quiet isolation. While he kept up his day job, as soon as the clock struck 5:00 everyday, the fire in Jake’s seat at his desk burned him right out the door to his hatchback.

He sped home (always following the posted speed limits, naturally; his disposable income was for PPC testing, not speeding tickets) and cracked open the laptop.

‘Tippity-tap, tippity-tap’ he tippity-tapped at his keyboard. Slowly, slowly, a remarkable product emerged.

By the end of the summer, Jake’s product was done. He’d had a professional proofreader weed out the grammar mistakes, a humorist eliminated the worst jokes, and a friend informed he needed to shower. (Typing away like that one might get carried away…)

The big day finally came. Crossing his fingers, and tying his dog’s legs crooked for good measure (it was a stuffed puppy; Jake was no sadist… just a taxidermist) Jake launched his product!

“BOOOOOOM!” he announced as he lit his rocket, aiming for the stratosphere. The PPC ads were roaring, his copy was soaring and the Twitterverse was all… well, atwitter.

“fizzle-whimper,” answered the market, in energetic boredom.

“What’s the matter here?” asked Jake. “I’ve worked hard, see! You should be more compliant with what I’m trying to do, geez!”

“Did you ask me what I wanted?” quipped the market. “Why should I care about your product, when you don’t care what I need?”

“Cuz I’m motherf****** Jake with a motherf***** iFrame!” stomped Jake! (He thought he was the next motherf****** Jobs.)

Said the market, “Whatever, perv…”

Moral of the story: Ask what people want. Then develop. It’s funny how this is true in both SEO (keyword research first… building links backwards), product development, and the ways markets develop in general.

Here are some links to illustrate, and below that is a link to download a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced SEO. I’m asking my subscribers now for suggestions on what they’d like to see in it…

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/interview-jakob-nielsen

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/build-links-backwards/21179/

http://wiep.net/talk/link-building/the-4-different-types-of-authority-links-and-11-ways-to-get-them/

http://www.thelaunchcoach.com/survey-tips

http://seoroi.com/keyword-research/buy-comes-before-sell/

If you liked this post on marketing and creativity, you might want to download a chapter from my upcoming book on advanced SEO.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.

ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.

Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

The Sadly Short Story Of The Isolated Product Developer

Ecommerce Shopping Carts and Shipping Rates: Don’t Wait Til Checkout!

Gabriel Goldenberg — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 18:42:52 +0000

While working on some ecommerce affiliate sites, I tried to find the ecommerce merchant’s shipping prices. Unfortunately, it’s a remarkable pain in the neck to find shipping info at most mom-n-pop ecommerce stores.

I think it’s because they place a blind reliance in their ecommerce store’s shopping cart. The problem is that the cart was usually created by a programmer – not a customer service rep. So the priorities in design were easy coding, not easy buying. As a result, lots of shopping carts cause SMBs to lose sales.

Photo credit: Dan Chace, aka Lacrymosa

Here are some examples of what not to do, and why they’re bad ideas. If the ecommerce cart you want acts this way, switch!

1) Worst idea EVER: Ask for my credit card info before telling me the shipping price.

I don’t care about/believe your reassurance the card isn’t going to be charged until I click confirm.

I don’t know you. And your site looks like a 4 year old made it.

Quality graphics build trust – this is a well-known finding in survey after survey and usability test after test, as to what consumers use to gauge a site’s trustworthiness.

Asking for card information before telling me what shipping is going to cost would never even occur to someone offline. Imagine you go into a used car dealership and the salesman says, “give me your credit card info, then I’ll tell you the price!” – No thanks!

2) Aggravating, close second: Delay presenting shipping rate information until I get to the page where I type my shipping info.

While this may be logical, it assumes two things, incorrectly:

a) First, that I’m going to add to cart and go through a step or two in the process without knowing the total price. That’s almost the same as above.
b) Second, that you can’t just include a simple shipping calculator on product detail pages. It just needs to ask the Zip code and return a price. Simple database job that doesn’t cost more than $100 to program.

3) Third worst idea: Making money off shipping.

Yes, lots of people do it online. No, most consumers won’t find out. Buuuuuuuut…

What happens when you get caught cheating customers on shipping?

I’m not the first affiliate to create a price comparison site. Heaven knows there’s lots of them around.
It doesn’t cost much to have a virtual assistant browse the web and do the legwork to find product prices and shipping rates.
And affiliates, including myself, are increasingly SEO savvy, as well as usability savvy.

What happens is that you end up with a reputation management problem that costs you sales of that product. How?
People click on the price comparison result in Google and find you’re more expensive.
Guess who gets the sale?

If it happens frequently enough or blatantly enough, you develop a bad reputation and word gets around. Then you don’t just lose sales on that one product, but across the board. Ouch.

So think long term, rather than trying to take in a few extra bucks at [what turns out to be] your own expense.

A) Excellent approach: For low-ticket items (e.g. below ~$200), offer flat rate shipping countrywide, or statewide/provincewide. Present shipping rates in a chart. If you need to adjust a few dimes/dollars upwards for states further away, you can do so.

This isn’t ‘making money on shipping’ – it’s increasing convenience to customers. You can explain it, and people will understand. Consumers aren’t against profit, they’re against abuse.

Takeaway tips on ecommerce shopping carts and shipping rate information:

1) Offer shipping information on the detail page.
2) If possible, offer flat-rate shipping nationwide. Otherwise, you can present state-by-state (or province-by-province, in Canada) shipping rates in a table. Figure out your average price to ship to that state and use it.
3) If the order is large enough and you can afford it, upgrade the shipping so it gets to customers faster than expected. Amazon is famous for this practice – which they preferred over TV ads – and look how well it’s helped them do.

If you liked this post on ecommerce usability and conversion optimization, add my rss feed to your reader!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Ecommerce Shopping Carts and Shipping Rates: Don’t Wait Til Checkout!

30 Second Tip For Phone Number Integrity In Local SEO Listings

Gabriel Goldenberg — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:02:26 +0000

Reading the curiosity-arousing article on SEL, “The Phone, Calling,” I noticed that the use and presence of call tracking numbers, toll-free numbers and other non-main-line phone numbers could cause trouble for search engines.

“First, these numbers throw a monkey wrench in business identification. Second, they could expire, inadvertently creating a dead-end for a consumer. Publishers today struggle with how to accurately identify an actual business when many phone numbers are involved.”

The easiest solution, imho, is to show humans one thing (the non-main-line phone number) and search engines another thing (porn, viagra, and all the good content [read: auto-generated] search engines love).

“But that’s evil blackhat, Gab!” Actually, all I mean is to recommend mediocre usability and coding in this exceptional case.

How?

In a image-editing/creation program, you type the phone number that you don’t want search engines and local listings publishers using. And then you post it – without alt text – on your site.

If you’re really paranoid about search engines using fancy optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract the phone number from the image, you can go further.

Step 1: Create an html frame.
Step 2: Block search engines from accessing it with Robots.txt and any fun cloak-and-redirect set up you want.
Step 3: Place the image of the phone number in the frame.
Step 4: Embed the frame wherever your phone number needs to appear.

If you liked this local SEO / greyhat seo tip, you’ll probably enjoy my upcoming advanced SEO book, which teaches the principles of such creative/critical thinking and offers 30 advanced tactics. Download a free chapter here. (There’s also a link to the download page in upper left, if you browse away from this page.)

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

30 Second Tip For Phone Number Integrity In Local SEO Listings

Usabilla Review at SEL

Gabriel Goldenberg — Mon, 03 May 2010 14:14:11 +0000

Read my latest usability column for Search Engine Land, a review of usability testing tool Usabilla.

On a related note, I published a review of UserTesting.com not long ago. Before that, I’d written about Feng-GUI’s predictive heatmapping tool, which helps you figure out if your graphics are drawing users’ eyes to the right points on the page. There will hopefully be more such reviews in this series.

If you like learning about usability and conversion optimization, add my rss feed to your reader for more.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Usabilla Review at SEL

P* Comment Spam?

Gabriel Goldenberg — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:47:57 +0000

I’ve written some posts on A/B testing and split testing that have seen spam from people purporting to be from P*able. Personally, I find it surprising that a VC backed company would bother with poor quality blackhat tactics like such obvious comment spam, so I’m wondering if it’s not someone with an axe to grind against them. They’re not even in public beta yet though, so perhaps some marketing director there just purchased a really crummy SEO package trying to save some bucks.

Anyways, I hope someone responsible there sees this and adapts accordingly.

Update: I’ve had email followup from P’s founder and VP of Customer Development, Craig Bloem. After initially asking to speak over the phone or in person (impossible given my location overseas), he writes:

“I am not going to beat around the bush. We had a community development manager who should have been writing more constructive thought provoking posts and engaging with the community in a positive manner. A mistake on our part that he was writing comments that could
be considered spam. I take responsibility for that. I appreciate you brining it to our attention and it is being fixed.”

Impressive, professional and responsible. I like it. I’ve removed the company’s name from the title of the post and from the body content so it won’t show up in search engines (or at least show up lower) and won’t cause them further reputation management issues.

For the record, I’m preserving one of the spam comments I got:

AB Tests
no.com
no@no.com
70.130.169.187

Submitted on 2010/04/22 at 11:07am

Be sure to visit A/B Tests dot com soon or check out/sign up for P*. Also follow us on twitter @abtests and @P*

no@no.com

AB Tests

http://no.com

On a related note, I’m very impressed by the feature set of the shopping cart known as Pinnacle Cart. Anyone know if you can edit the shopping cart and/or split test it or MVT test the cart and other parts of their ecommerce site building system? E.g. Can I split test product or category page designs, for example? Can I MVT test the billing info page in the checkout? Etc…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

P* Comment Spam?

Saving Space Above The Fold In Web Page Headers

Gabriel Goldenberg — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 12:58:35 +0000

I recently visited two sites that I really liked, but only one of them designed their header space efficiently, such that they maximized the utility of the space above the fold. For those who don’t know, the space above the fold gets the most visual attention from visitors since it is by definition the space visible without scrolling. While screen sizes vary, a site’s header is above the fold in 99% of the cases.

One site was my friend Keri Morgret’s model battleship parts site, Strike Models. As you can tell, the site is based on the Thesis WP theme and they’ve got a huge header area focused on branding.

Regardless of whether you’re commercial or nonprofit (or just hiding your commercial nature to maximize linkability), there’s a great reason NOT to use such a header. Namely, that you’re wasting prime real estate that can help you move visitors to take the actions you desire.

Consider the case of Ethnio, a user recruiting service developed by Bolt | Peters. Their logo takes up just enough space to identify the site, and the rest of the header is a simple but sufficient band to enable navigation.

They get a lot more done in about half the space!

Some valuable uses for your above the fold space in design:

1) Promote your services.

2) Highlight quality blog posts to get visitors to convert to subscribers as fast as possible (eg fewer visits/less time).

3) Feature an email subscription signup box to build a list.

4) Sell premium ads.

5) Encourage people to join your site/group/organization.

6) Invite users to search your catalog. (Assuming you have strong in-site search – see this review of a few merchants and affiliates as to what constitutes a quality insite search engine.)

eBay used to have an incredibly obvious, eye-catching search bar as the feature of their home page, and I’m certain that’s because they had a strong search functionality. Today the browsing options are more prominent, but the search bar is still there smack in the middle of the page.

It’s especially crucial to get this right on your homepage, because the homepage needs to quickly identify the site and its purpose and then funnel users deeper into the site. Making efficient use of your the space above the fold by limiting the size of your header is an excellent design decision.

- If you have some other variations on this to share or questions/suggestions about the fold, header space etc, please let me know in the comments.

- If you liked this post on usability, add my RSS feed to your reader (that link also lets you subcribe by email if you prefer). Either choice is free .

A last word about the space above the fold, space below the fold and what you need to know. “The fold” comes from newspaper terminology – the space above the fold appears on newsstands and features the stories editors think will sell paper and/or are most important. That terminology has carried over to the web, where it is sometimes known as the space above the scroll. There’s some history to it and some great studies/reading on the topic at the following pages:

1. History of the fold and blasting the myth that people don’t scroll past it

2. Myth of the fold disproved by user testing, and how to encourage/discourage scrolling.

3. Clicktale has some large scale data disproving the non-scrolling myth, and some nice takeaways at the end.

4. More valuable takeaways on product detail pages that provide nuance to ClickTale’s data – even if people scroll, it doesn’t mean they’re doing more than skimming.

Some

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Saving Space Above The Fold In Web Page Headers

Did You Make This Beginner Web Design Mistake Too?

Gabriel Goldenberg — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:23:08 +0000

When I created my first websites, I have to admit that I was pretty naive about the graphic/visual side of things. SEO ROI is a good example.

When I was creating the specs for the site, I wanted a few things in particular made custom:

- The ability to change the logo

- The ability to edit and add to the call to action area in the upper left

- The ability to hand edit the top, sidebar and footer navigation

- An option to opt-in posts to the homepage of the blog so everyone who hit the homepage would see my best posts. (That’s the SEO ROI Quality category.)

- Similar options for news and testimonials lower down on the homepage. (Latest News and Testimonials categories, respectively.)

- A fluid width layout that would adjust to screen sizes.

- Top navigation with the appearance of buttons, but that was actually text.

Within those specs, I more or less gave the graphic designers free reign to do as it pleased, and then I chose the design which looked the best to my then-girlfriend and I, and best repeated my corporate colours for brand-recall purposes).

Not particularly business savvy, you’ll agree.

What did this amount to?

- I haven’t once changed the logo. So that was extra coding for nothing and money down the drain. I don’t even remember why this was important to me at the time.

- I’ve spent countless hours updating the call to action areas, with mixed results. Since I was working with basic html and a limited space, I could only do so much…

- Likewise my experiments with the navigation have shown some improvements but also some significant screwups.

- Opting in posts was a worthwhile idea – except it made me overlook initially that I lacked a general blog page where all posts would be seen.

- I doubt very much that anyone cares about the news or testimonials sections, and anyways the way they appear and are updated isn’t really practical. (What RSS or email subscriber wants to see a new testimonial as a ‘blog post’ – accordingly I’ve had to backdate the testimonial posts so they wouldn’t be noticed when I add them.)

- Hassles with IE7 and my navigation buttons in terms of the fluid width layout messing stuff up on narrower screens (there’s no minimum range at which the site stops adjusting to window size).

More importantly, what did it NOT amount to?

1. Effective use of my homepage to drive interest in my SEO and usability services.

2. Lines that are too wide on most screens for optimally comfortable reading.

3. Poor monetization of my blog posts that is basically limited to the sidebar, which most people ignore.

The story has a happy ending though. I’m currently working with a client on redesigning one of their sites with conversion and usability top of mind. Since many of their goals for the site align with many of mine for this site, I get to test-run my ideas (and some of yours!) for redesigning this site before finally (after much, much delay) going into production on my own redesign (coming sometime before 2099…).

If you liked this post on usability, add my rss feed to your reader.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Did You Make This Beginner Web Design Mistake Too?

Usability Testing Tool Review: UserTesting.com

Gabriel Goldenberg — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 10:22:19 +0000

I knew for a while that I wanted to try out UserTesting.com, based on the referrals from my friends at Closed Loop Marketing and various blogs on usability I read (Future Now, Usability Post), but I never really had the opportunity to go ahead and get on it.

A former client wanted to to hire me again for SEO, despite the higher return provided by usability / conversion optimization, so I decided I’d go ahead and put the site to the test and see if it might not convince him of the value in usability testing.

(They’re a former client because I let them go once they were ranking well and I wanted to work on other projects.)

The site in question is for this downtown Montreal hotel, the Hotel de Paris. (Yes, I realize Montreal is not Paris; that’s the original name.)

Rather than drone on about how incredibly valuable the service was, I’m going to share the raw data of 1 of the users I tested and let that speak for itself.

And the written summary provided by Tatiana, the tester:

What would have caused you to leave this site?

* I really wanted to see the special offers for this site, but clicking on that didn’t bring anything up.

* The text was also hard to read as there wasn’t much contrast between the background and the text colour on most of the pages, and all of the lists were horizontal (prose format) instead of vertical (bulleted lists) which saves space but makes it hard to quickly compare different choices.

* Having to agree to a policy that is written with abbreviations that I can’t decipher would have made me leave for a site where I didn’t have to guess what I was agreeing to.

* I don’t really like the idea of making an account on a site that I may only use once or at most once per year. I have enough accounts to keep track of online as it is.

What other ideas do you have about how this site could be improved?

* I had a real problem making comparisons between options on this site because of the way the information was formatted which started to become quite frustrating. Maybe adding icons or reformatting the lists so that they can be easily scanned would help.

[Me: Reformatting in a vertical table format for easy scanning would probably be a positive change; icons can help too if the legend explaining them is obvious enough.]

* The pictures on the front page were nice, but it wasn’t clear what the second picture was. It looked like a restaurant of some sort but didn’t say where. A label of some kind would have helped.

What did you like about the site?

* I liked that you could book online (although some of the dropdown menus didn’t work) and that availability was shown on the calendar.
* I liked that I could see the price breakdown before I paid. Especially since that seems to be the only place to find out about the taxes being charged and because the price looked wrong and it was a good way to check the calculations.

Anything else you would like to say to the owner of the site?

* I may have this wrong, but to me ‘double occupancy @ $89′ always meant that the price listed was per person (so the price for the room was 2x$89). But on your site when I book a room for two people, the price breakdown at ordering time shows 1x$89 for that same room for two people.

This seems wrong and the discrepancy affected which room I booked.

My Conclusion: I love the service and plan to use it much more in the future!

While I’d picked up some things like the non-working special offers button and limited amount of room pictures, other problems she raised were novel to me.

To wit:

- I hadn’t considered that outsiders to the hotel wouldn’t know there’s a little restaurant/bistro on the premises. Tatiana’s confusion about the bistro picture shows a need for clearer captions than “Experience the charm of Montreal.”

To the same effect, the separate explanation about the bistro on the Hotel Highlights page is clearly insufficient.

- The pricing clarity is obviously an essential issue for any online transaction, but as I’m single and only book rooms for one person, the per person/double occupancy pricing problem never occurred to me.

Other problems I noticed myself while reviewing the site, but this test clarified their importance.

- I guessed that the abbreviation Cxl probably meant cancel. But outsiders to the hospitality industry can’t be expected to know insider jargon.

(This is also true for mystery meat navigation, like date based blog archives.) Furthermore, as Tatiana’s video and written report highlight, this is something that could lose the sale.

- In the same vein, the pricing clarity thing is immensely important because you’re affecting your average order size if people think the rates are per person instead of the rate for the room.

The bottom line is that UserTesting.com is an easy way to double your bottom line.

If you liked this case study and usability tool review, add my rss feed to your reader.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Usability Testing Tool Review: UserTesting.com

Google Does Something Right (OMG! Stop The Presses ;) )

Gabriel Goldenberg — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 05:17:07 +0000

You all know how strong of a critic I am towards Google, but I thought this user research and testing was pretty unique, cutting edge, and can potentially lead to some great benefits for Sub-Saharan Africans (like finding health info, as mentioned…). http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/designing-useful-mobile-services-for.html

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Google Does Something Right (OMG! Stop The Presses ;) )

3 Guest Posts Of Mine

Gabriel Goldenberg — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:14:44 +0000

@Search Engine Land: How predictive heatmap tools work and how they can lift your conversion rates. I write for SEL’s Just Behave (Usability/Conversion Optimization) column once a month.

@Wolf-Howl: Why Google HQ Really LOVES Thin Affiliates . I write at Mike Gray’s site periodically, when I have something that will fit with his audience.

@Wildfire Marketing’s Marketing Tips: An Interview on Link Building With Yours Truly

If you liked those, you should add my rss feed to your reader because some of the best stuff I write gets published here before it gets cited or repurposed in other contexts elsewhere…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

3 Guest Posts Of Mine

If I Could Go Back In Time, I’d Kill Date Based Navigation

Gabriel Goldenberg — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:53:50 +0000

Time and date based navigation offer terrible usability and even worse SEO. Have you ever heard of mystery meat navigation? Maybe not, but you’ve probably seen archive navigation that meets the following description:

“Mystery meat navigation (also abbreviated MMN) is a term coined by usability expert Vincent Flanders to describe user interfaces in which it is inordinately difficult for users to discern the destinations of navigational hyperlinks—or, in severe cases, even to determine where the hyperlinks are.

“The typical form of MMN is represented by menus composed of unrevealing icons [...]”

Now, just because the typical forms of mystery meat navigation are unrevealing icons, that doesn’t mean people can’t get creative and find other ways to make crummy navigation.

Here’s one particular example that still exists on a number of blogs.

What will I go to if I click on 2? Or 3? Or 11? Or 17? To the best of my knowledge, there’s no difference between them except the date they were published. So I may as well click on any of those links! Or none, because they don’t look especially compelling…

For similar reasons, such mystery meat navigation is bad for SEO. Rather than linking internally using valuable anchor text that will help other pages rank higher, you use some useless anchor text that won’t get you a single extra visitor.

Similarly, it’s also bad usability if you have archive navigation organized by month.

We’ve all seen that kind of navigation:

There’s hardly any reason for anyone to navigate an archive by month, unless they’re doing historical research. For example, if you wanted to find out when Yahoo announced the end of paid inclusion, and you had a hunch it was in July 09, you might visit a search blog and go to their July archives.

That’s not how most people browse content though. Most users are interested in a topic, like link building, or link buying from news sites in particular.

That’s why my own archive navigation in the sidebar is organized by topic, and not by month.

Now, there is an exception to this: if you write about ‘royds. Not hemorrhoids, you creeps . The Refuge of Delayed Souls, at http://roydss.blogspot.com

That site makes unique use of the blog format of reverse-chronological posting to tell a story. Each new post furthers the story.

Obviously, not everyone has been with it from day 1.

So the author [her name isn't on the site] has organized her archive navigation so that people can start at Part 1 (eg the first chapter). And they can stop at, say, Part 5 and return the next day and go from there. Kind of like placing a bookmark to keep your place in a book.

So if you’re writing a story or some other content that follows a logical chronological order, time and date based navigation make sense for usability.

They’re still not all you should have, however.

Consider someone who loved a particular romantic scene. Do they have to memorize what Part of the story it was in? Wouldn’t it make more sense to offer some thematic navigation too, based on your story arcs?

It’s no secret I’m a fan of Least I Could Do, a popular webcomic. And they get this storyline navigation just right:

If you liked this post on usability, add my rss feed to your reader to get more quality posts like this regularly. If you’re looking for usability consulting, then email me.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

If I Could Go Back In Time, I’d Kill Date Based Navigation

A Usability Reference For Internet Marketing Master’s Students

Gabriel Goldenberg — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:34:17 +0000

First, the information that’s valuable to all my readers: Check out my most recent usability guest column for Search Engine Land, How Much Detail Do Product Detail Pages Need?

Second, in response to my 4Q visitor surveys, Tara Cervantes wrote me the following in response to the question, “What do you value most about the [company] website?”

“[I]nsight, shared knowledge, great food for thought. I’m an Internet Marketing Master’s student who just can’t get enough (now I’m thinking of old Depeche Mode)…Anyway, great site, I signed up for the blog. Your site made it as a reference for my usability class. The specific assignment was about Personas, just so you know, since the post we read talked about how you read user comments. taracervantes@(sitename removed to prevent spam)”

How can you not feel good when you see feedback like that ? I’d noticed Full Sail-referred-traffic in my server logs (the information your server records about each visitor), but to get a verbal explanation for it (since the page is restricted to Full Sail Internet Marketing Master’s students) is even better.

If this site is good enough for Full Sail’s Master’s students, perhaps you’d like to add my rss feed to your reader?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

A Usability Reference For Internet Marketing Master’s Students

Card Sorting For SEO

Gabriel Goldenberg — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 05:11:55 +0000

Card sorting is a technique from usability, whereby usability pros ask others to arrange a set of cards in the most coherent groups possible. Usability experts use card sorting to organize the information architecture of a website, but it’s also valuable for SEO.

Today I had two consultations over the phone that dealt with the navigation of a website, so I thought I’d touch on how you can use card sorting for SEO. I’m currently writing what I hope will be a small book on advanced SEO, and one of my themes is that SEO and usability fit closely together – improving one often improves the other. This is one of those cases.

“Information architecture” is geek slang for organizing a website’s topics and subtopics together. Let me illustrate why it’s relevant with a couple of examples.

Ex. 1: Have a mishmash of overlapping and/or underused tags and categories in your blog sidebar? Should PPC posts go under your advertising category, SEM category (for those people who still think SEM is only paid search), or be in their own PPC category? If this is you, you know that this is a big concern.

Heck, I just had to create a Usability category (after much foolish resistance) for this post.

Ex. 2: Borrowing an idea from the Eisenbergs or maybe Tim Ash, imagine a supermarket organized by product colours. Vegetables, St-Patrick’s day cards, and Ms. Vickie’s jalapeno chips would all go in the green aisle. Sure it’s organized, but it’s pretty silly, because no one makes a supermarket buying list by colour!

Well, card-sorting helps you avoid such zaniness, and let your shoppers browse your store for fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy products etc.

Here’s how card sorting works. You put your main topics and subtopics on the cards, and maybe even have some articles on the cards, too. Then, leave it up to some members of your target audience to sort through the cards and tell you what should go where. Write things down, and repeat with the next person. A pattern should emerge, and you can use that to create your information architecture.

What’s nice about the pattern is that all the pieces of information (articles, sales pages, categories, subcats etc) in one group are all relevant to one another, by user’s standards. While no search engineer has ever told me so explicitly, it only follows that if relevant external links are good, so are relevant internal links.

What about just organizing according to keyword research data – short tail keywords in the global navigation and longtail stuff in the local navigation?

That’s a great technique too, which I love to use myself. The catch is that this is limited to SEO, and it doesn’t help much for the things you aren’t trying to rank for. Should “Press mentions” go under your About section or Investor Relations? Should Contact Us have its own place in the sitewide navigation or fit better under About Us.

If you’re doing card sorting anyways, you may as well get some SEO value out of it too .

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Card Sorting For SEO

Usability Problems Affecting Sites For Groomsmen

Gabriel Goldenberg — Mon, 11 May 2009 12:41:02 +0000

This is a guest post from Ian Lurie, who runs a Seattle SEO shop, on behalf of Groomstand Groomsmen Gifts. They have such items as personalized pub signs and engraved cufflinks.

A number of problems set back the usability of various sites in the wedding vertical, and particularly those catering to Groomsmen. Here are some case studies on things to avoid, so that your site’s checkout isn’t avoided like a sweaty marathon runner…

The basic paradigm we need to assume is that laid out in Steve Krug’s excellent “Don’t Make Me Think.” People browsing the web:

Are impatient, meaning that they scan and don’t read. This also means they tend to ignore main navigation.
Satisfice themselves – they make any choice likely to satisfy their needs, rather than spend time to figure out the best choice
Have a finite reservoir of patience. You can only use so much before they leave. And it’s probably already low due to other sites’ negative user experience.

From Cuffwear.com:

A page with no title means you’re not drawing attention back when someone minimized the window or is tabbing around:

Similarly, the copy is really small, and isn’t bulleted. Additionally, the add to cart button is on the small-ish, subtle side.

The end result is that some visitors may have no clue that they offer free shipping in Canada, and are less likely to add a product to cart anyways.

And for those who are comparison shopping and tabbing between windows, it’s less likely that they’ll return to Cuff Wear “http://www…&prod=217″…

From Green Shag:

The title doesn’t match the headlines on the page, which is a big no-no. People click through expecting one thing and are shown another. When this happens, the percentage of visitors who immediately click ‘back’ (aka the bounce rate) goes way up.

The title reads: Custom Dress Shirts and Design Cufflinks. None of the headlines use the word custom, nor dress shirts. And the only headline about cufflinks relates them to Hockey Night in Canada, which says “lockerroom kitsch” more than “Savile Row flair.”

Even if we forgive that because of the burgundy text subhead, there are still a number of ways the page is lacking.

First, what does “shag cheat sheets” mean? To me, it sounds like what Austin Powers used to pass high school math.

This page uses internal company jargon and expects people to be patient enough to read their copy to figure out what they mean. You should never speak in “marketese” – it turns people away.

On a related note, if you’re going to call them “custom” designs in your title, why use the word “bespoke” on the site itself?

Are they selling to Brits or North Americans? North Americans mostly won’t know what “bespoke” means, since we don’t use that word.

Additionally, the copy consists of big blocks of text, which turn eyes away rather than draw in clicks. This would be better as a few bullet points.

Another issue is that the homepage hero shot isn’t clickable, while some percentage of folks may expect that to be possible.

This is a convention of ecommerce sites – clicking images takes you to a product detail page.

Finally, the links in the HNIC area are barely any different than plain text. This makes it hard to tell they’re links unless you look closely. The result is that fewer people will click.

…

From Black & Lee comes an all-flash site. Their message to visitors is:

- “We don’t care if you want to bookmark a particular item in our catalog or send the link to a friend. They’ll just have to go to the homepage and click around a lot until they find it (assuming your instructions were clear…)”

- “Don’t link to anything besides the homepage. We don’t want to rank anything besides our homepage.”

- “We don’t want search engines to be able to read our text content.”

Ironically, if you turned this into an html site, you could get most of the same experience (except for the neat page-turnings in the catalog) and be as effective at generating inquiries, which is what this site is mostly about. I say that because the phone number and email addresses are fairly prominent, as are offline retail addresses.

…

At Tux & Tails we have a mixed bag.

For starters, they avoid the mistakes of Black & Lee and do a fairly good job of providing search engine friendly navigation throughout the site.

Where things get a little difficult is with the navigation and orientation markers.

In an offline store, there are a number of signs and people to help you navigate stuff. Online, you need to use page headings and breadcrumb navigation, as a general rule.

Neither of those are present on Tux & Tails, so that when someone clicks through from the homepage, they’re less likely to know where they got to.

The titles feature brand names, but don’t indicate much beyond that, when one browses the various lines of vests.

As to the category pages, they also break design conventions by not making images and descriptions clickable to go to a detail page. Additionally, the brief descriptions are in tiny, illegible text.

Lastly, there’s no clear call to action on any of the pages, besides ‘Download our measurement sheet.” Sure there’s the contact page, but that’s a last resort.

Finally, we have Tuxedos.com, whose site is actually usable!

This site does virtually everything right.

You know where you are on the site because of their main horizontal navigation inverting colors depending on which section you’re browsing. They also have breadcrumb navigation to help you further.

The title tag on the homepage starts with Welcome to Tuxedos.com. The Tuxedos.com logo is prominent, so that works well.

However, the title also mentions prom, black tie and wedding affairs, without having any obvious links specific to any of those categories. It’s excusable though, because of the identity bit.

The Browse Tuxedos page splits traffic according to the occasion or brand you’re interested in.

This effectively caters to visitors’ mental organization of things, rather than their own marketing divisions. Other places might force you to browse by geographic location etc.

Images and links on category pages take you further into the site.

On detail pages, they use a call to action to find the product, which takes you to a store-locator lead gen tool. I might call it something slightly different to be clearer, but it’s still pretty effective.

My only other beef is that their detail page SEO isn’t great.

Plus the detail pages also only show one product view. And that’s usually not much bigger than the thumbnail. This is a very sensory, visual product, and so skimping on photography is a DUMB idea. Tuxedos.com are hardly alone in this respect though …

Thanks a bunch for the great post Ian! You guys can find more of his material at the Conversation Marketing blog!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Usability Problems Affecting Sites For Groomsmen

The 4.5 Personas Of My SEO Site

Gabriel Goldenberg — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:46:14 +0000

By observing patterns in visitor intent and demographics, conversion optimization and redesigns can be planned more intelligently. The patterns you identify can be used to create personas. Through my use of 4Q visitor surveys, I’ve learned the top reasons people visit SEO ROI Services and developed corresponding personas.

What’s a persona?

A persona is an imaginary user who is representative of a user group. The main thrust of their representativeness is in terms of their objective in visiting the site and/or using any given page, as well as their demographics and tech savviness.

Creating personas will help me to:

plan my site’s redesign with users in mind,
scope it better and avoid scope creep,
create a better information architecture,
tweak small things in the interim, until the big redesign.
And when I do user-testing, I can aim to get more accurately representative testers.

Some people talk about having more empathy for visitors by creating personas. Empathy helps you serve users’ needs by tailoring your site to their behaviour. If you can do that well, accurately, thoroughly and on a consistent basis, you’re going to be very successful.

Read on to find out why people visit my seo site, find out about the personas I’ve built around those purposes, and the action items that I’ve derived from creating these personas. I’ll summarize the persona-building and action-item development process at the end of this post, and give links to more reading on the topic.

The 5 big reasons people visit SEO ROI Services are as follows. The links lead to a section on each persona, lower down on this page.

To read my blog. (Thanks guys, I’m flattered !)
To do “research.”
To seek “technical support.”
To “buy.”
To “Other, please specify.” (Personally, I’ve always wanted to “other, please specify”…)

There’s some overlap between categories – e.g. blog readers and researchers – but that’s OK. That doesn’t affect the principles of creating personas, except perhaps to the prominence you accord one of your visitors’ purpose.

Blog Readers

As a traffic source, you guys often type in my domain name or use other “loyalty” navigation (bookmarks, feedreaders). Another primary source is other blogs that link here and some social media traffic, such as Sphinn, Twitter or Facebook.

Amongst those visiting to read my blog, user satisfaction is generally very high. I get comments like

“Genuine, personal SEO advice from Gab, who seems to know his stuff… this has been invaluable to me,” or “A very creative legal approach to an important internet marketing issue.”

From further discussions I’ve had with you, you’re often looking for advanced ideas for both the sake of entertainment and gaining a competitive edge. A number of you like that the content gets you thinking. This is education as intellectual recreation.

Based on the readers I know personally, those of you reading my blog tend to be young, roughly 20 – 45 years old, with perhaps skew towards the early-mid career web professional or independent webmaster.

In plain English, that means lots of SEOs and internet marketers ages 27 – 35. Plus some bloggers, web designers and developers thrown in for good measure.

In that respect, you’re fairly representative of the industry, I’d say. Therefore, I can also make an educated guess that demographically, most of you are guys and not girls.

Additionally, based on age, you’re most likely to be at the stage of your life where you’re looking to get married within the next 3-4 years, or else recently married. If you have kids, they’re probably in the babies – infants range, and thus you likely are overworked, underslept, but very well supplied with affection. Of course, if you’re a search vet, your kids might be a bit older.

As to technographic savvy, you guys are above average. You’re fairly comfortable with your browser, which is probably customized with a few extensions, as well as a blog, social media profiles and involvement, perhaps an RSS reader, almost certainly a cell phone and/or multi-purpose mobile doodad like an iPhone. You’re on broadband internet or faster, shop and buy online, and perhaps have some tech-oriented hobbies like video-gaming or digital photography.

Last minute addition: Per this data from SEOmoz, most people reading SEOmoz’s blog are owners/webmasters for small-midsize sites. Guys like Willy Franzen, who runs a site on entry level jobs. The next most popular answer was seo consultant/agency worker, followed by inhouse SEM. See also SEOmoz’s Industry Survey Results.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming, which doesn’t need to change that much, luckily…

To this point, most of these things have been educated guesses. Let’s see how accurate they’ve been. I’m searching Flickr now, for a creative-commons licensed picture of a “tech geek.”

Meet James Wilcox, whose picture showed up in said search. He’s a male in a relationship, who looks about 30 years old.

by clompers

He has several pictures of his Motorola Razr2 cell phone and video game screenshots in his Flickr profile. Flickr is a social media network whose purpose is to allow people to share their photography…

He has a website under construction, and an interest in Flock, the “social browser” powered by Mozilla.

Pretty accurate first attempt at creating a persona, wouldn’t you say? It’s obvious that searching for “tech geek” helped find someone with the right technographics, but there are still numerous other points I was on the mark with. Also, I repeated the experience with a few more relevant keywords, and came up with similar profiles. I’m pretty proud of what I came up with, anyways. (Interesting note: I was actually going to call the persona Jim, before finding James… scary close!)

Action Items for James:

As a savvy user, I can have him do the online version of card sorting by tagging my posts. This will create better content organization – the way users would see it – either in the immediate future or once I redesign. In design-speak, this creates superior information architecture.
Incentivize him to return / leave comments / be a brand evangelist by providing sneak preview access to tools before public release.
Write content oriented towards his worldview. How To Deal With Slacking Teammates. Get The Boss’ Buy-in For Social Media. “Why Great SEO Works Like Marriage {Subhead: The client/husband should always get the last two words: ‘yes dear!’}”
Survey blog readers to find out what topics they find most interesting. (While we’re at it, I’m listening, guys – let me hear it ! )

Researchers

You guys are more likely to be referred by Google. I know that because you

Have said so in 4Q,
Make comments that directly or indirectly indicate you’re new here, like ‘nice website’, or ‘first time visitor’, when I know that the majority of my Google traffic is new here
Make comments reflecting queries I know I rank for.

Also, you tend to be slightly less satisfied than other users. For better or worse, I get a fair amount of traffic on keywords that are either irrelevant to my content or else poorly articulating the user’s needs.

For example, this post on disguising your text link ads as adsense gets a bunch of people looking for things like “disguising links” or variations on that. One person wrote:

“I wanted to know how to disguise my domain with text but just didn’t understand what i was supposed to do It was n’t [sic] made simple enough”

Uh, I don’t know how to disguise your domain either. Do you want to cloak it? Do you want to redirect it? Do you want to hide the destination of your links? Something else?

For those of you running forums, these visitors are your easy wins to convert searchers into members. Hide the answer behind a registration form. Anyways, the result is that this large segment of my visitors more often leaves unsatisfied, relative to my average.

Shouldn’t I create relevant content for those pages, even if it’s not related to my main theme? Maybe – I’ve made changes this weekend to that effect on my top 5 bouncy pages (tip from Maki). And for those where I just can’t create that content for legal reasons, how can I unrank for the keywords whose traffic I’m not interested in?

For now, I’ve edited the titles and meta-descriptions to better qualify the visitors who clickthrough. Some keywords have included ‘advertising presentation’ ‘serps’ (a foreign pension acronym, apparently) and ‘how to disguise links’). I’ll probably add some content where it’s relevant, though I can find better uses of my time for now.

Who are you?

Like the blog readers, I’d say you’re young, generally. Let’s say that you are 18 – 26. Perhaps even younger than the average, as my visitor feedback and search queries indicate a certain number of people who are plausibly looking for information to use in college.

For example, I’ve had the following feedback: “I’m writing a term paper for my statistics class on the role of Facebook as a marketing tool. Was hoping for some charts etc.”

Others are likely entry-level employees preparing presentations for their bosses. “My purpose is still a bit vague but I would like the most up to date information on social media user stats.”

Another item which came up fairly frequently was that you guys are internet marketers with either some knowledge of the blogosphere – as indicated by comments that you’d return later – or of SEO in particular, as seen by a reference to Dan Thies, of SEO Research Labs.

Finally, because “research” is such a vague term, it’s not all that helpful at indicating to me how I could better satisfy you guys. I wish 4Q would let me define specific objectives so I can see what exactly people have in mind when they say that. But your comments are indicative, as quoted above.

Meet Danny Dover and Rebecca Kelley, guys! I’ve actually met and hung out with them both in person, and they’re pretty cool, bright folks. In his mid-20s, Danny’s an SEOmoz employee “currently attending the University of Washington” who says, “I like to spend a lot of my time simply studying the internet.”

Rebecca graduated from the University of Washington in Arts, with a Spanish minor. She writes, “I compete in triathlons and marathons. I like to think of myself as a mediocre yet stubborn athlete.”

Both Rebecca and Danny have got a bit of a fun/playful side to them. Rebecca’s recent post on getting a massage had me laughing out loud, hard. It’s not the first time, either. And Danny writes in the ‘Fun Facts’ part of his bio:

“Every year I try to do one good act of revenge. My favorite ones have been tin foiling all of my friend’s possessions and filling a different friend’s room with packing peanuts. I spent a year secretly collecting packing peanuts before filling the room. My friends don’t play pranks on me anymore. ”
Lisa “I wannabe in the foreground” Barone and Rebecca Kelley by Tamar Weinberg

Action Items for Danny and Rebecca:

Write better titles and descriptions, then refine them periodically, when I notice above-average bounce rates.
Make use of the Table of Contents plugin, as I keep telling myself I’ll do.
Create comprehensive, Wikipedia style posts so that I can not only satisfy loyal readers, but the “vague intent” searchers. This relates to better category SEO.
Feature charts, statistics and broad-appeal images when writing/editing for this group.
Target these visitors to turn them into subscribers, since many are internet marketers.
Try and please this segment with humorous, wise-ass content.

Tech Support Seekers

Similar to researchers, my intuition tells me you guys visit from Google.

However, there’s one big difference with researchers, and that is that you tend to know less than people who are “researching,” based on the depth of feedback I’m getting and some of the behaviour I’m seeing. For example, one person used it as a contact form.

Some other comments have included:

“26.03.2009 too early for any answer”
“22.03.2009 i don’t know, too early to say”

This tells me that the technographics – that’s fancy talk for tech savvy – of this user group is less. Kind of obvious in hindsight, but I initially thought these were my savviest users looking for help on advanced, thorny issues. Those guys probably fall more into the researchers category.

From personal experience with clients, I’d argue that this group is most likely to be composed of the mid-career business owner or marketing expert, who’s now learning about the web. You know a lot about business and are comfortable promoting offline, but you’re not entirely up to speed on social media, web technologies (and buzzwords!) like Ajax, and creating search-friendly websites.

You’re 40 years old with a wife and 3 kids, a dog, a nice house in suburbia that’s mostly paid off and are probably a college graduate. Meet Ewell Smith, Louisiana Seafood Promotion & Marketing Board Executive Director!

by lsgcp

“Smith got involved in marketing and promotions about a year after earning an MBA degree from the University of New Orleans. He also has a psychology degree from Louisiana State University.

He says he came to the realization that marketing was his strength when he worked for New Orleans Publishing Group. He became involved with a company that promoted concerts and special events.

He later signed on as marketing manager for Southern Forest Products Association, the trade organization for southern pine timber. While there, Smith conceptualized the first branding of a wood species, coining the slogan “Southern Pine By Design,” for which he earned national accolades.” (Source: All Business)

Action Items for Ewell Smith and other Tech Support Seekers:

Use plain English, rather than SEO jargon. Review previous posts for jargon and minimize its use (without compromising search traffic from savvier researchers who know the jargon).
Add an SEO jargon glossary and expand the FAQ section, orienting it towards business questions.
Link the jargon to the glossary.
Expand the SEO FAQ.
Tie things back towards their experience
Promote my one-hour consultation service more prominently, while keeping a balance to offer tech support for quickie questions.

Buyers and “Others”

But for buyers, I’ve still sold SEO services to a number of folks, and there tends to be a certain ‘profile’ that emerges when I think about it.

Demographically speaking, buyers tend to be in the marketing director or business owner type of segment described above, under tech support seekers. They also often rely on the advice of [often younger] assistants, which makes catering to the blog reader and researcher segment equally important. I’ve seen that a few times already, in my interactions with clients.

Their household income is low 6 figures, speaking generally, and they’re generally college-educated and have serious business skills from a decade or two or work experience.

These aren’t the guys you can fool with promises of “guaranteed rankings,” but they are a bit anxious about not knowing all the technical side of stuff. (Note: It’s not like I’d recommend making that promise anyways, since it’s a blatant lie … you can’t guarantee that a girl will go out with your friend, so how can you guarantee Google will like any given site?)

I call this persona “Sam,” after the friendly hotel owner in his late 40s or early 50s who was my first ongoing-services client. He relied on his marketing director, Dino Santelli, for help with web design (Dino also handles a movie extras agency of his own) issues and was fairly anxious about getting SEO done right.

My first meeting with them I showed them rankings I’d achieved on my own sites as well as an SEOmoz PageStrength report (as the tool was then known) and after some hesitation, we started working together.

I wrote the above from personal experience. And as it turns out, this profile was pretty spot on, as per this research on who “internet executives” tend to be.

Action Items for Sam:

Educating these people builds trust, so aim to get in-person meetings by offering to create an on-the-spot a free “5 action item” to-do list they can take away from the meeting. Limit this to eligible people – those that fit this persona.
Come in to said meetings with background research done, and also leave them with bonus material that will both educate them and build trust. See SEOmoz’s Trifecta reports, for example.
Prepare analogies for common SEO questions that can be easily referred to and understood in verbal communication. K.I.S.S.
Aim to meet people in this group when networking at shows like SMX.

Unfortunately, 4Q visitor surveys hasn’t collected much feedback from you. All I know is that you’re visiting. Thus neither that nor my web analytics are especially useful for building personas as with the other groups.

That’s where it ends for you “other purpose” visitors, except for the time I found out you were looking for a contact form and I had none! Fixed !

How To Build Your Own Personas

1. Focus on BIG audience segments! You need to prioritize the biggest groups in your audience first, to make the most effective use of your time.

Sounds obvious, but it’s easy to get bogged down into an eternal sea of insignificant changes because this or that person had a unique view/purpose when visiting.

In 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens, Stephen Covey Jr. gives the analogy of a bucket that you fill with small rocks, then little rocks. The sea of pebbles fill the bucket and block out the few big rocks. But if you put the big rocks in first, the pebbles can fit around the pebbles. That’s true of optimizing your site, too – focusing on individual users won’t get you anywhere fast.

For example, my Toys.com post attracted someone looking for Toys R Us locations and contact info in South Africa! Obviously, I’m not going to bother updating the page for that person (sorry!).

So what size should your user groups be? How many personas should you make? It depends on your resources for acting on the information, firstly, and the diversity of your audience, secondly. The more resources you have available to take action, and the more diverse your audience (esp. as seen by traffic sources), the more personas you can use.

For a relatively small site like mine, a handful of personas is just fine, because I couldn’t handle optimizing for more. On a Fortune 500 ecommerce site, you’re likely to have more diversity in your audience visitors and more resources to deal with different customer types (hence “for him” and “for her” type navigation and ‘women’s clothes’ search queries).

2. Discover visitors’ intent.

(i) Use 4Q Visitor Surveys to have them verbalize to you what their visit’s purpose is. It’s free! If you’re a bigshot company, I’d speak to iPerceptions about getting a custom solution with better reporting and that deals with the problems I’ve identified in my 4Q service review.

(ii) Check your web analytics for your top volume search phrases, since these also indicate intent.

(iii) Finally, look at your bounce rates to get implicit communication of where your website isn’t matching visitors’ intent. I give the hattip to Maki of DoshDosh for tipping me off as to how he finds pages to improve on his site.

He looks at his top entry pages, defined as those pages getting the most traffic from outside his site. Then he selects the 10 with the highest bounce rates amongst those pages and works to improve them.

3. Compare intent with demographics and technographics.

This is personal! Essentially, you want to get an idea who this person is, as that can inform what content you show them, how you phrase the content, and your site’s functionality. This means knowing your site’s demographics and technographics.

Demographics means personal traits, usually the kind you can stereotype someone by. (Not that you should stereotype people, but it’s possible to make some practical assumptions relative to your audience’s traits. For example, a site about getting out of debt can assume that promoting sports cars won’t hit home with its audience.)

Demographic data includes:

Age
Gender (See: What women want in websites, hattip this post at seomoz)
Education
Location
Income
Career-level
Marital status
Interests & Hobbies
Race
Religion
Politics

Obviously, some of these are more relevant than others, depending on what site you run. Race is irrelevant to building my reputation in SEO, as are religion and politics. But if you’re running a political blog, obviously those three matter a lot. Conversely, a politics blog doesn’t have that much use for knowing someone’s income, unless they’re making an advertising rate card.

To figure out demographics, I encourage you to use Quantcast demographics on a site you’re curious about, or another site with similar content but more traffic. You can correlate it to Microsoft’s demographics tool. Very handy sites, both of them! See these social media demographics, for instance.

Technographics means tech savviness. How knowledgeable is your target audience relative to computers? How experienced are they? Steve Krug’s famous usability book, Don’t Make Me Think, will have different applications depending on your audience. Sites oriented to graphic designers or women can afford to be more subtle with their calls-to-action. FOR MEN, MAKE THAT CALL TO ACTION OBVIOUS. “CLICK HERE FOR OUR PENIS ENHANCER PILL.”

(Fun aside: Referral data tells me that people from the competitive [read: spammy (porn, pills, poker)] parts of the web use and recommend my internal link building plugin. If the spammers use it for SEO, I think that’s a pretty strong testimonial that it works. Not to mention it’s patterned off Wikipedia…)

4. Name the personas, and refer to them as you create your site! Steve Krug suggests that this helps you empathize better, as do Tim Ash and the Eisenbergs, all of which names are tops in the conversion optimization industry.

—

What are your site’s personas? Can I add other action items to the personas I’ve created for my site above? Do you have any other comments, questions or constructive criticism? I’d love to hear anything you can share, and will add dofollow links here for quality comments – you can choose the anchor text .

For more on personas, try the following:

http://www.uie.com/articles/mulder_interview/
http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/adhoc_personas_em.html – “Thus, a major virtue of Personas is the establishment of empathy and understanding of the individuals who use the product. It is important that each Persona seems real, allowing the designer to ask, “how would Mary respond to this?” or Peter, or Bashinka? “
http://deyalexander.com/resources/uxd/personas.html
http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_personas

If you liked this post featuring my ideas on personas, you’ll want to come back in the future for more of the same. To save yourself browsing time later, why not add my rss feed to your reader now?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

The 4.5 Personas Of My SEO Site

SEO ROI » Usability

13 Resources For Mobile Landing Pages And Website Design

Easy Usability Tip For Registration Page Conversion Lifts

The Sadly Short Story Of The Isolated Product Developer

Moral of the story: Ask what people want. Then develop. It’s funny how this is true in both SEO (keyword research first… building links backwards), product development, and the ways markets develop in general.

If you liked this post on marketing and creativity, you might want to download a chapter from my upcoming book on advanced SEO.

Ecommerce Shopping Carts and Shipping Rates: Don’t Wait Til Checkout!

Takeaway tips on ecommerce shopping carts and shipping rate information:

If you liked this post on ecommerce usability and conversion optimization, add my rss feed to your reader!

30 Second Tip For Phone Number Integrity In Local SEO Listings

Reading the curiosity-arousing article on SEL, “The Phone, Calling,” I noticed that the use and presence of call tracking numbers, toll-free numbers and other non-main-line phone numbers could cause trouble for search engines.

If you’re really paranoid about search engines using fancy optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract the phone number from the image, you can go further.

Usabilla Review at SEL

P* Comment Spam?

Saving Space Above The Fold In Web Page Headers

Did You Make This Beginner Web Design Mistake Too?

As my high school science teacher, Mrs. Sadaka, taught us: “Form is related to function!” What she meant is true in just about every walk of life – function must define form or else you’ll get nowhere.

Usability Testing Tool Review: UserTesting.com

Google Does Something Right (OMG! Stop The Presses ;) )

3 Guest Posts Of Mine

If I Could Go Back In Time, I’d Kill Date Based Navigation

A Usability Reference For Internet Marketing Master’s Students

Card Sorting For SEO

“Information architecture” is geek slang for organizing a website’s topics and subtopics together. Let me illustrate why it’s relevant with a couple of examples.

Card sorting makes your internal navigation within any particular theme (or silo, to cite Bruce Clay’s language) more relevant.

Usability Problems Affecting Sites For Groomsmen

The 4.5 Personas Of My SEO Site

How To Build Your Own Personas

If you liked this post featuring my ideas on personas, you’ll want to come back in the future for more of the same. To save yourself browsing time later, why not add my rss feed to your reader now?