There have been many instances of pages that appear on the first pages of a search results, but never really convert nor sell any products. These are the result of pages that have very effective search engine optimization, but very low usability. These pages were designed for search engines, not for real people.

It is very easy to fall into this trap, thinking that once your website shows up in the first page of a search engine result, the corresponding increase in traffic will translate to better sales. However, optimizing your site for search engines while disregarding the real purpose behind optimizing it in the first place is a futile exercise. In the end, it is real people that will give you business, not search engines.

Common mistakes in usability

A page which has great SEO but poor usability can often have these mistakes:

- Minimal and incomplete product descriptions. One common search engine optimisation technique is sprinkling keywords throughout the page. Often times, the keyword is the product’s name. In this case, the product’s name may have been repeated quite frequently on the page but important details such as available colours, shipping weights and sizes are omitted. From a search engine perspective the page ranks high in relevance but from a usability perspective the page is useless.

- Poor quality or missing product pictures. It is well known that search engines are unable to process text inside images, but some search engine optimization consultants will go as far as recommending removing images from pages. Pictures are very important from a usability perspective as they guide a visitor’s eye through the important parts of your page and allow them to focus on where you want them to look.

•    Navigation that is inconsistent. Some SEO consultants will recommend putting keywords in navigation links and that is well and good.  However, some consultants take it to the extreme and try to “maximize” keyword breadth by providing different keyword text for navigation links. This may work well in increasing your search engine ranking, but it is very confusing for the visitor. Often, they will get lost and simply run in circles around your site, dissuading them from completing a transaction.

•    Walls of text. You may have supreme content but if you overload your pages with too much content your visitors will be turned off. Walls of text are very daunting and there is no assurance that your visitor will read them all. This is most especially problematic if your wall of text has no subheadings or poorly formatted paragraphs – search engines may consume these without any problems but your visitors will simply give up from trying to understand it.

The department store analogy

Perhaps the situation can be more easily explained by comparing your site to a department store. Say that you own a department store and would like to increase your exposure. You start spending money on advertising – a few flyers here and there, and maybe some billboards and newspaper ads. Over time you notice that your traffic increased when compared to before the time you spent money on advertising.

However, you also notice something else that’s a bit strange: most of the people who go to your department store just walk around quickly and then immediately leave without buying anything. Some people who actually buy something won’t come back again and some people will simply take notes on the prices of your products and then go and purchase the same products from your competitor across the road.

As the department store owner, you realize there is a problem. You turn to your marketing department and they have a suggestion: you need more advertising. They argue that if you have a small percentage buying your products with this amount of traffic then if you increase the traffic you will get more buyers, even if the percentage of buyers vs. traffic remain the same.

You try out this proposal and you see an immediate increase in traffic and correspondingly sales. After all, the decision was logical: increase traffic, increase sales. You have in fact increased your growth linearly by spending on advertising. Similar principles can apply to SEO, but its about marketing smart rather than just marketing.

Fixing the root of the problem

Will spending more on advertising really solve your conversion problems? Upon inspecting your department store, perhaps you’ll find that your products are in disarray. Or maybe price tags are not readily seen or generally unavailable. Or even perhaps your counter personnel are very slow in processing transactions, leading to a long queue.

These problems have their own versions on your website. The products being in disarray may mean that your site is not very aesthetically pleasing or has very poor organization, structure and categorization. Price tags not being readily available may mean that there isn’t a consistent format with which you display and calculate prices (and other charges such as taxes and shipping). Counter personnel being slow may mean that your checkout service is not optimized or that your webhost is being overloaded and consequently having poor performance in serving your pages.

Just like in the hypothetical department store, your website may have fundamental usability problems that cannot be solved by simply spending more on advertising and hoping for a shotgun effect (i.e. fire a shotgun that even though is inaccurate, with the amount of pellets being shot some are bound to hit their targets). It will be a lot more efficient and effective to try and fix the usability problems first, even before trying to increase traffic count. This can be done with web development which keeps SEO firmly in mind – which a good SEO company will be able to offer.

Remember, the ultimate aim of search engine optimization is to give visibility and exposure to your business so that interested people will come. The end result should be people completing a transaction on your site. Search engine optimization is merely a means to an end; if SEO will interfere with the usability of your site, it is suggested that you compromise in favour of usability rather than SEO.

A good search engine optimization consultant understands this and will not recommend that you sacrifice usability over search engine rankings. Although they may not be experts in usability, they should have at least some idea on a few usability points that can help you improve your site’s conversion. Look for an experienced SEO company which can offer you web development help if necessary to make the most of your internet marketing outlay.