Web UsabilityBusinesses spend huge amounts of money every year developing a web presence in order to get their potential customers to visit their web sites. They do this in order to get the chance to convert a visitor to a paying customer. In SEO terms this done through a “call to action.” A call to action might take the form of asking the visitor to supply information, make a purchase, download a file, order a service or even just contribute to the conversation. No matter what the call to action may be its completion should be the measure of a SEO (search engine optimization) campaign’s success.

Seeing SEO services are used to increase your chances of presenting your call to action to potential  customers, it is in your organization’s best interest to remove any friction in completing that action. That is where web usability comes.

What is Web Usability?

Web usability is all about developing efficient websites. Efficiency means that vistors can complete their task quickly whether that is finding information or making a purchase. Web usability focuses on making it as easy as possible for visitors to navigate your sites and to retrieve, input and process information without having to undergo additional training. Your website should look appealing, pages should load quickly and obstructions to completing your call to action should be minimized.

Paying attention web usability can have a large impact on your bottom line. Microsoft  conducted an analysis of their search engine, Bing, to see if there are any correlations between page speed versus other performance metrics such as satisfaction, revenue generated per user, and clicking speed. The report revealed that a less than two second increase in page responsiveness reduced user satisfaction by -3.8%, reduced revenue per user by 4.3% and a lowered clicks by 4.3%, among other findings. For a large company like Microsoft, a 4.3% drop in revenue can equal millions of dollars in lost profit. Bing and Google Agree: Slow Pages Lose Users

Another example comes from design expert Jared Spool, who wrote about a case where replacing a button with a clear error message to avoid user errors in a checkout process increased revenue by $300 million in a single year. The first month saw a 45% growth in sales that was credited to the change in the checkout process. The 300 million button

If implemented properly web usability has two major benefits  One, it allows the user to move through your site easily and complete any transactions. Two, what helps the user also helps the search engines. The search engines crawl your site in the same manner a vistor does, moving from link to link. Ease of navigation means the search engine can index more pages on your website.

Website usability factors.

There are a number of factors that go into usability on the web. At Wi-Phye we look at number of common web usability issues including:

  • Layout and Architecture are the most important factors in web usability. We focus on improving your web design to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to find information or complete your call to action. Any friction in this process might lead to visitors leaving the website. In addition to this users have grown accustomed to particular layout conventions on the Internet. There are numerous examples such as using the term ‘About Us’ for organization information, ‘Contact Us’ for contact information and a company logo on the top left of the page that acts as link back to the homepage. Users expect this behavior and when it doesn’t work as expected it could lead to a frustrating experience.
  • Make Your Content Easily Readable. Internet users don’t really read content online, at least according to a study by Dr. Nielsen on reading behaviors of people on his website. His analysis shows that people only read 28% of the text on a web page and this figure decreases the more text there is on the page. How Little Do Users Read?
  • Controls such as buttons, banners, and emblems should be clear and easy to understand. With the introduction of touch screens on mobile devices it’s also important to make sure the click area of the controls is large enough to support a finger point.
  • Consistent Design. There shouldn’t be a different layout for each page of a website. Users expect that the layout features such as headers, menus, and footers should be the same or simliar across the entre site.
  • Test, test, test and test some more. We are living in a multi-device world. One moment your visitor might be using a desktop or laptop and the next a smart phone. We make sure your site works on all these platforms.
  • Understand your users. No one likes to wait. Studies of web usability have concluded that 8.6 seconds is the maximum time a users will wait for a page to load. We try to improve the performance of a page by optimizing images, reusing graphic elements so they load from cache and if necessary using background loading techniques to present the page a fast as possible.
  • Audio and video. Large multimedia files can increase page load times. Having audio and video start playing automatically can also annoy users.
  • Measure your performance. Analytics that tell us how people are navigating through the site, how long it takes them to perform an action and which pages visitors are entering and exiting on can help us determine the effectiveness a layout. Top landing pages, bounce rates, geographical referrals, referring domains and keyword analysis can also help us identify where improvement should be made.

At Wi-Phye we are experts at developing search engine crawler and human friendly websites. Contact us now to find out how we can make web usability improvements to increase customer satisfaction and boost your conversion rates.

As a Cleveland SEO Company Wi-Phye is uniquelly qualified to help your small business and local customers.