Does Your Website Have Good SEO & User Experience?

Does your website have good SEO AND user experience? - that is the first question I like to ask business owners.

You have included your tags, meta tags, keywords and did your link building like every good website owner has done. What next? Will the search engines beat a path to your door and get you enormous amounts of traffic that will crash your server? The answer is no.

The above is just one tiny step towards achieving your business goal. First of all, sit down and write your goals. What is it you are looking for? Is it leads where you just want visitors to leave their names and contact information? Or is it more lofty, like earning some dollars while they are on your site? How do you get them to loosen their purse strings?

As a consultant, I always tell my customers, know your goals. Knowing what you want to get out of your visitors will help you create a targeted ad and a relevant landing page for the customers. If you are a mortgage broker, have a form on your site where interested customers can leave their contact information. In this way, you can make follow up calls and sell your products to them.

If you are a business selling multiple products, it is a good idea to have relevant keywords on the landing pages. In addition to that, you can upsell or give information on related products with a search function located in your site. So when a customer lands on a page selling, say, a softwares, you can have relevant add ons or similar products with the words "if you like this product, you may like these too" or something along those lines. You not only give the customer a good user experience, they may come back later too. And don’t forget to add a "Tell a friend" or "Bookmark this page", so they remember where you are located.

Just as in real life, where you don’t forget the friendly waitress who served you in one of your favourite cafes, and you want to come back for more, a user experience has to be made pleasant. There are no sales people to sell or give your customers information and it has to all be done by a silent website. So being intuitive, knowing your customer, having wish lists which you can refer to, remembering their birthdays, having live support on the site or a good help manual, all these go in creating a good impression and goes to increasing the bottom line.

As important as it is to have good search engine optimisation (SEO) like keywords, relevant landing pages and relevant url's, once the user lands on the page, it is important to make sure all links work, pages load quickly and makes the customer want to come back for more.