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Doctor, Heal Thyself – StepForth Site Redesign
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
February 8 2006
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For almost a full year we have been preaching a brand of search engine
optimization that quotes heavily from the gospel of Usability. Under
our marketing philosophy, sites should be designed and optimized in order
to make transit from any given entry point (not necessarily the index
page) to the desired goals and expectations of both visitors and site
owners, as simple and intuitive as possible.
Sadly, this user-focused facet of our overall website marketing philosophy
was not reflected in the five-year old face of our former
website. Late
last week, we uploaded a new version of the StepForth
website, one we have
been working on for nearly four months.
Call it a case of the “cobbler’s shoes complex” or an
old-school fear a site redesign would cause an immediate loss of our own
Top10 search
engine placements, we had put off a redesign longer than we
should have. Now that it is completed and posted, we can start to publicly
explore how a commitment to Usability is common sense SEO, without feeling
like we should smile while we say such things. The experience has also given
us a greater appreciation of the challenges faced by other businesses when
contemplating the redesign of a fairly large site.
As we near the end of the process, we have completely updated the main
sections of our website and are performing document-by-document re-optimization
of the entire domain as time allows. We will also be converting our sub-domain
network over to the new site templates in the coming weeks, again as time
allows. Who would have thought our site would balloon to contain over 1200
documents in just a few short years?
Case Study – StepForth
We knew we had a problem when we examined stats from WebTrends, Alexa
and Google Analytics. Our website receives a fairly high number of visitors
through two primary entry points (pages) and a number of secondary ones.
The first primary point of entry is the SEO
Blog we have maintained for
eighteen months or so. The second is our INDEX
page, which ranks in the
Top10 on all major search engines and is also page linked from articles
reprinted by other online publications. Our stats tell us we have a very
high bleed rate. Most visitors view one document before leaving and that
is obviously problematic. We know we are very good at getting them there,
it’s the keeping them around part we appear to have had problems with.
Visitors to the blog tend to read one or two articles and split, likely
off to find other search marketing news or information in other places.
That is understandable and to a large degree expected. Blog visitors are
more likely looking for information or opinion than they are for our firm’s
services. We do know that a few blog visitors moved to our site-review or
services pages and can assume that some of these visits have led to successful
conversions (based on our average contact / conversion rate). We believe
the number of blog visitors who choose to move further into our website
should be higher.
While we expect to slightly increase traffic and conversions from our blog,
our self-analysis showed we desperately needed a new front face. Our second
primary point of entry is our Index page. WebTrends revealed a startling
situation. Over 94% of all visitors to our index page choose not to travel
further into the site. That means only 6% of our site-visitors were immediately
interested in reading about our services! To make matters worse, the vast
majority of visitors to the Index page only visited once. Our old design
was text-heavy, built and optimized for search spiders that ranked sites
based largely on keyword content. While the site has sat squarely in the
Top10 for most of its existence, that Top10 placement was not enough to
convince more than 6% of visitors to consider doing business with us.
The 19th century retail advertising pioneer John
Wanamaker once said, "I
know half of my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half!" While
we would love to enjoy the 50% retention rate Wanamaker based his dilemma
on, at least we knew exactly where to look for an answer to our problems.
Our Index page was our problem.
Gord Hotchkiss wrote a piece, The
50 Millisecond Judgment, which was published
in Search Engine Guide last week. In it, he outlines the findings of researchers
from Ottawa’s Carlton University suggesting website visitors can, “…accurately
judge visual appeal in just 50 milliseconds, or one twentieth of a second”.
Visitors were leaving our site because they simply couldn’t find their
way around it quickly or easily.
Here are some of the steps we have taken to improve our overall site, starting
with the Index page.
We spend a lot of time looking at other sites from the search marketing
field. Our colleagues are often our best teachers and keeping up with their
sites is an important part of staying on top of the immense professional
learning curve in SEO. We choose our overall layout based on a number of
elements we saw in other websites, tending towards a design that we think
reflects the conventional wisdoms of the crowd we work around.
One thing we noticed about sites run by SEO firms we consider important
competitors. They all have eye catching looks, a focal point that captures
the viewer’s eyeball longer than 1/20th of a second. The challenge
and the task fell to our in-house designer Mark Johnstone who created the
new look.
The use of eye-catching graphics is good to engage the interest of the
observer however, a web document is really only as good as its content.
In website marketing, all content should be viewed as a call to action.
The goal of commercial websites is to convert visitors into participants
of one form or another. A converted visitor is moved to choose to remain
inside the domain. Ultimately, commercial websites exist to push product.
Our firm has two products, information and technical skill. We tend to
give information away for free, and that information is often mass-propagated
across other search marketing related sites so that goal is easily met.
Mass publication of our free-product does not necessarily provide a clear
trail to the revenue generating product our company offers, our technical
skill in search engine optimization. That job is supposed to be accomplished
by the Index page.
We sell our skills to make a living. While our own rankings and those of
our clients have proved our technical acumen time and time again, that reputation
does not necessarily precede us when visitors come to the Index page. Like
any other business, we need to constantly convert new visitors to new clients,
a job made much more difficult as time passes in the increasingly competitive
search marketing sector.
In order to convince more visitors to stick around, we have made a number
of drastic changes in the look of the site though we were able to retain
the overall site structure. Above the fold (before scrolling down), we:
- Have increased the spacing between lines in order to make the text
easier to read
- Are trying to make effective use of columns, headlines
and color so visitors can more easily scan for information
- Are using an easier to read
drop-down menus
- Have placed right-side “call to action” boxes for website
reviews and newsletter subscriptions, along with a clearer right-side
navigation menu
- Created body text with clear information about the company, our senior
staff and our ethics
- Clear division of visitor interests expressed above
body text:
- business owners
- resellers and webmasters
- news and information
We placed our text outlining our service information and links to internal
service pages below the fold believing that visitors who see the top will
either
scroll down or use the drop-down menu or right-side navigation options
if interested.
Retaining visitors is key to success in the new search algorithms, especially
in relation to Google. Figuring out what motivates visitors to our site
is important to us. We believe we have created a smarter, more intuitive
site that mixes the pillar of Usability in with the other pillars (wise
use of SEO technique, adoption of useful Web2.0 technologies and clarity
in the tone of messaging) of our overall website marketing philosophy.
The site looks much fresher and is much easier to use, especially for visitors
unfamiliar with search engine marketing. We look forward to hearing from
our site visitors both directly at info@stepforth.com, and indirectly through
continued analysis of our site stats.
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