Archive for the 'Usability and Human Interface' Category
Subscribe to This Category

I have six professional heroes presently - and I don’t mind sharing. In random order, they are:

• Seth Godin - For telling me to quit dead ends and focus on being the best.
• Edward Tufte - Guided me into information design, recognizing and avoiding chartjunk, and telling stories visually.
• Jakob Nielson - For telling it like it is even when it’s totally unpopular.
• Richard Florida - For drawing attention to what drives creative people.
• Steve Wozniak - For his approachable demeanor as well as the desire to spread knowledge.
• Steve Jobs - For his relentless passion to innovate.

I’ve met Florida, Tufte, Jobs and Wozniak. If only for a moment (they wouldn’t remember me.) I had no trouble making the list above. It came to me in 3 minutes. Each have contributed through a career of hard work with a real passion to improve things.

Have any heroes emerged in the SEO world? Should we expect it? As I sat in a meeting recently all eyes were on me to save the business. My answers about content creation, social media, and slow, steady growth were not superhero answers. Some are looking for the cape crusader to save old-school companies with new marketing feats of awe. People start looking for a mild-mannered SEO to burst from the phone booth and fix the problem. I don’t know why.

(more…)

A quick search of Google News shows dozens of cases where homeowners, business owners, and community code enforcement officials are embroiled in battles over improper building permits. In many cases, the builder is forced to tear down the structure - at great expense. Communities put permitting procedures in place so that an even-handed process is applied and ensure safety, prevent shoddy workmanship, and preserve home values. You must stand in line, fill out forms, and pay fees when your project is already complex enough, they reason. So lots of people try to get around it, and some succeed. Houses crack. Fires start. Communities get uglier.

In the website construction industry, we can draw a parallel between SEO advice and building permitting. Pressures placed on any web development project can cause marketing goals to be ignored or at least diluted. The builder doesn’t have to “live” with the results. They get paid and can easily vanish independent of the commercial success of the venture. The SEO gets called to come fix the mess. But the mess is already sealed in the walls. The cracking foundation has already been built upon.

Many companies invest heavily in their web design and construction, and then call on SEO experts to come in after the fact to make suggestions to help traffic flow. Unfortunately this often results in bad news. The website was not designed with search in mind, and you have to re-build it if you want organic traffic to flow. This is the equivalent to being forced to tear down that addition to your home, or that big warehouse building you just put together. You’re stuck. The expense to rebuild it is too high. The expense not to build it is too high (paid search.) I’d like to make the plea to the business community to consider thinking about SEO earlier.

I propose that people involved in web development look to the construction industry for guidance. Involving an SEO/SEM consultant before, during, and after your web development plans are in place can be a money-making proposition. I think that in some ways this is like permitting your building project. In my opinion, SEO/SEM experts should be project managers for any web development project where marketing the site is a core business directive. Decisions will be made with the social, search, and traffic goals take center stage, not the aesthetic “high” of the site being finished and wowing a committee. (more…)

Former Technorati CEO David Sifry has launched Web Hot or Not?, a Hot or Not site for websites.

It’s fun-cool, and has been done before, but it spooks me out in the world of multivariate testing and conversions optimization.

What’s hot:

Studies have shown that sites get only 50 milliseconds to give an impression to users. This site may help us learn what sites are attractive and appealing in a new way. The trouble is our assessment of any site is based on the context of that site, and how it was found. Personalized search results further refine these buckets of intent so the site is more likely to be found by certain people.

What’s not:

Anyone involved in web marketing knows that only through testing can we achieve the beauty of conversions and success for the site owner. To skim over websites and vote entirely on how they appear free from any other information (e.g. the search, PPC or organic, inbound link, intended audience, etc.) is to miss the point. It’s true, often “ugly” landing pages outconvert snazzy flash-based slot machines 3:1. Why encourage sites that look pretty but may not perform or worse, distract business owners from testable designs? I hate to see ego-designers who spend entire web budgets on snazz before knowing if the approach is right.

During 2007, my firm received hundreds of inquiries for services. The vast majority, perhaps 80% were in the “just make me a website like this one” camp. Many were carrying a previous designers’ handiwork with them in complete wonderment of how such a large investment could fail to produce results. As an design-by-testing developer, this pattern was highly discouraging.

The confusion among businesses about what is required to develop a web business is widespread.

“We just want to find someone to put up a site like our competitors’ ” was a very common request that, to me, is a horrible way to approach the problem. I think it is often a panic reaction to the competitor’s first-mover advantage or to a drop in ones site performance. It is too easy to assume that a snazzy site is also meeting the needs of the customers and reaching full potential. Intuition has its place, but you could be very, very wrong. Even experts get this wrong much of the time. I have evaluated the analytics data from some hot-shot designs and found exit rates over 80% and time-on-site under one minute for most visitors.

Unless you intimately know the market, which most web designers do not, designing “from the hip” is an irresponsible way to spend clients’ money. Every web developer worth their salt should be doing rudimentary testing of a business’ feasibility before heading down a given design path if one could even begin to achieve high conversion rates.

You can, to some extent, predict customers’ movements if you observe through testing and extrapolate the results into the larger design. Observation requires a laboratory, even if it takes the form of analytics on a screen. Lightweight page development with good experimental design can serve that role. While the sample sizes are often too small to achieve “true” statistical validity, even pseudo experiments with repeatable results can help you get into the right quadrant.

Why is it that small to medium businesses have not embraced the value of experimentation in web design and marketing? What has caused companies to embrace the myth of the superstar web designer or the fire and forget web marketing program?

Testing the idea’s potential before spending huge amounts of effort on web development or SEO is critically important, yet rarely done. I received at least 20 requests in 2007 for people wanting to do gift basket websites and at least 20 wanting to sell personalized products (as resellers of the same corporate gifts catalog!) None of these entrepreneurs had even considered the landscape in which they wanted to be painted was full of others doing exactly the same thing and the over-crowded search results pages served as direct evidence.

I am giving much thought to how we might do a better job packaging this story for future clients. I encouarge your ideas in the comments.

Related: conversion rates for some online retailers.

I thought about how ridiculous this product was. It was a good idea to get all the charge-ables together in a single place. It was not a good idea to do it all on paper and never test the feasibility. But it clearly doesn’t work in the real world. The solution? Shall we redesign it so it really works? Nahhhh…Let’s SELL IT ANYWAY!

One of the most difficult challenges is tracking paid search performance via telephone calls for the small business. While a few will spring for a new 800 number or IVR system to get some of that information and train phone staff in its use, many cannot due to the workaday reality. Often the busy office environment means metrics go out the window in favor of just getting the order out, so the company continues to guess.

This is especially true for companies who are struggling to find their sweet spot in the paid search world. During the day-to-day chaos, few are thinking about the cost of each call - they just want to answer it and do their best to change the caller into a customer. If the staff is so busy, do you really think they’ll drill down and get the “how you found us” information accurately recorded. It doesn’t happen. Pay-per-call and click-to-call offer “embedded” tracking, but are plagued with inventory and adoption challenges. My friend Christine (CC: Nice to see you at SMX!) created a great post on Offline Conversion Tracking, which covers some of the same ground, and this issue has often come up in conference sessions.

As Greg Sterling points out, the vast majority of purchases are made offline, yet the tracking solutions are only just maturing, and others have a very healthy skepticism about some of the new solutions.

The real result of this is the “leaking” of marketing budgets that happens with a lack of tracking. The dynamics of the purchase cycle are mysterious, making strategic and tactical solutions little better than guesses.

I see basically four flavors of off-line conversion tracking from pay-per-click ads, and would like to introduce a hybrid.

anecdotal
customer question at point of sale, catalog IDs, coupons, offers
poor man’s IVR (multiple phone numbers)
cookied IVR
…and a hybrid…
cookied part number modification

CLICK MORE to see the rest of this article.

(more…)