So welcome to our talk: How can UX effect your SEO? I'm Nick
Duffield I'm a user experience designer for a company called E-Life Sciences in
Cambridge. My path to UX is a very typical one: I started off as a graphic
designer first of all, made my way into web design
and then transitioned into UX design. Some of the companies I work for: people
like Microsoft Research in Cambridge I developed websites and mobile
applications for that company for their research groups and both in marketing
departments. Right now I work creating tools for scientists to help them
communicate their work. So today's talk we're going to tell you about an SEO
project that both Kamil and I worked on, in particular the types of things
that we learned doing this type of work and the insights that we gained. I think
an interesting thing about the project is that we changed our own ideas about
SEO - we found that our own discipline of UX design played a bigger part
in this stuff than we initially thought. I think a good place
to start is for Kamil to give you his perspective on what UX design is.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is Kamil. I'm an experience designer at
Cambridge English. I work on digital tools for... I help to build digital tools
for learners and teachers and my background same like Nick's - is in graphic
design I've been doing this for over a decade now working on both printed and
digital media and how I transitioned to experience design - or maybe the better
question is why I transitioned to experience design - it's because of
situation I'm about to tell you. So one day up I was given a brief for design a
poster and it was pretty simple. Create an artwork for the event, include
information of what it is, when it is, where it's going to be held, simple job. I quickly
completed the job and hand it over for approval. And three days later eventually
I managed to get some feedback from the stakeholders and first thing they asked
me: to make logo bigger - it's like because the logo cannot be big enough.
And then they say 'Can you move the headline a little bit to the top? And the
support things a little bit to the left?' And I'm thinking to myself 'What
difference is it gonna make? Why are you doing this?' like and it's pretty much
same story throughout my career there's always seem to be a person who
was a specialist and better how to design and they knew how to do it better
than me. And it always made me think 'Why did I do it? How can I prove that my work
and what I do works?' and so I started researching on internet how to prove to
how to communicate my designs better how to how to create designs that work and
more and more often I started coming across user experience design. So I started
learning and reading about it got into it and pretty much that's how I got
my transition to experience design. But what is experience design? So it's a
design process. It's a process where all the decisions are based around user
needs and their behaviors and today we're going to focus on mainly three
elements because there's plenty of stuff that's included in experience design but
today we're going to focus on three elements that I think may have the
biggest impact on your SEO ranking. So it's interaction design - oh I should have
done it earlier - interaction design, information architecture and UI design
commonly known as user interface design. And some of the tools I use on a daily
basis to achieve a greater information architecture or great visual designs:
stuff like user research, user surveys, interviews, card sorting exercises or
competitive analysis. And one great tool - one more tool that I tend to use - there's
more internal stuff if before you go outside is workshop, design workshops.
This is trying to invite people from not only your own department where you work
we're trying to get people from other departments and brainstorm
some ideas. And by having people who who are not familiar with the product that
you are working on you kind of get a different perspective. And you can see
how others understand product you're working on and it's quite helpful. And
how the UX and SEO are connected how the two work together?
I'll let Nick to share his insights and findings. [Nick] So an idea for a project: SEO and UX.
I'd been doing a lot of training and stuff like that and trying to figure out how
to turn research insights gathered through tools like Google Analytics and
feed that into my design process. I mentioned to Kamil that I was interested in this
type of stuff and he suggested that I look at a course called the Digital
Garage by Google. So I don't know whether you're familiar with this course? But it's,
it's very basic and it's aimed at very small businesses to increase their
presence on the Internet. While working through the course a few
things stood out to me: firstly the course recommended creating and crafting
content in a meaningful way for site visitors. UX would call this information
design or information architecture. I think - and I'll just mention something
about that to you - it also recommended speaking to your customers and
understanding how they describe your content and speaking to them so that
when you do write and create this content you do it in a more meaningful
way to them. It's just typical user research there - we do it all of the time
and we use that to inform our design process. On top of that it recommends
optimising your site and that's, what they mean by that, is making it work in
an expected way for users. And you know like it when you make your journey
through a website, clicking links and hitting buttons and all of that stuff
that's just typical interaction design. It's just textbook UX. So when we were
getting started on the project we needed a guinea pig. And what we wanted to do
was speak to a local business and see if they would let us use their site to figure
all of their stuff out and try new skills. My hope was - we were going to
improve their site.
Getting started we had a few questions. We knew the store that we that we were
looking for would have would need to poor indexing. If it did we needed
to know why that would be. If users found these sorts of pages we'd need to know
how they use them. If competitors were doing better with
their indexing than them we need to figure out what that would be. So with
all of these questions we had a basic outline for our project. We went and
proposed this to a friend of mine who had a failing business. He had good footfall
but the actual website that he had wasn't performing very well. To kick the
project off we divided all of this work into interests for both myself and
Kamil. He carried out certain parts of the project.
Things like analysing Google Analytics I was interested in, in the Google Search
Console to figure out why this guy's site was indexed so badly or their
ranking was poor. And we proposed all this stuff to the guy and then he
was interested. And we said look here's the deal: we're going to learn stuff by
performing all of these things on your site and as a trade what we will do will
write a report up and share this with you and you can do what you want with it.
You can give that to a developer if you want to make those changes that's great
and that's that's pretty much the trade we made. I think it's probably a good
time for Kamil to tell you about the types of work that he was engaged in
while doing that stuff. [Kamil] So we kicked off with looking at - they gave us access to
their analytics dashboard - and we kicked off by just having a general overview of
how their website performs. So we compared the data from 2015 and 2016 and
the things we wanted to search for was potential problems, look at the flows we
wanted to learn how many visits they get, how often the visits happen and the
conversion - the basic conversion rate. And the key findings from just looking at
analytics we learned that the visits to online store and the physical store
were pretty much - there was no surprises there - it pretty much matched so there
was highs in January and December for for the sale period, then slight dip,
slight increase in sales again over the the summer period because this is an extreme
sports shop - so kind of a muchness there was no surprises. We had a look at
demographics and from demographics we learned that most of the visits were
quite local, which again although sad it wasn't anything that would surprise
us because we knew that they ranked quite poorly so we didn't expect the
website to reach distant customers. But the big stat, the big
discovery, it was like a golden nugget - at least for us - they had a 90% dropout rate
at the checkout. That's one out of 10 people completing a purchase. Obviously
it was horrible news for the owner but great news for us. For us it was another
piece of research we could do - prepare some hopefully works, work on some fixes
and improve it. So we got that all this insight,
presented it to Nick's friend, and we told him what work we'd like
to do next. And he agreed for us to carry on with the project. And the first thing
we did - with help of the guys in the store - we organised a day of in-store usability
studies. So we got the script ready, because it's useful to run studies by a
script, we divided our roles. Nick was the interviewer, I was observer and
note-taker. And we set up a goal. And the goal on that day was to learn why people
are dropping at the checkout. And on top of it we thought, by observing, we can
learn how people are using the website in general. We managed to get eight or
nine subjects - I mean subjects - people actually who came to the store and
we asked them to purchase a product using the website. Whether they'd
wanted to use their mobile device - or we had the tablet available and computer - asked
them to search for the product they came to buy and complete the purchase using
the online store. And the insights we got from this: we learned
why there was a dropout rate: because people couldn't - first - they couldn't find
the checkout button. Second thing, once they found it, they couldn't identify the
pay button because it didn't look like a button. Another thing we learned, as an
extra, it took quite a long time and a significant amount of
pages for for people to scroll through to get to the desired item. And there
was a small problem with the oversized cookie message - so it is pretty much
would fill the whole screen on a mobile device. So we knew what's wrong: then we
had to fix it. So we again split the duties. Nick was going to go and create a
set of wireframes to present a new checkout procedure, a new
button how it would look. And what I wanted to do is to work on the
information architecture of the website, that I was hoping, is going to reduce the
search time of the items. And in ideal world, where you have budget, stuff like
that would be probably best to do with a group of 20 people in a room like
this and and do something we call card sorting exercise. But as our project
was more for us to learn, it was pro bono, we didn't have no budget.
Our budget was zero. We had to be quite creative on it. So I thought as the
saying goes: 'Good designers copy, great designers steal' and I'm a great designer
- I'd like to think - so [Nick: One of the best!] yeah! But in a design
world, or in the UX world we don't call it stealing.
We call it 'recycling of well understood patterns' yeah? So the best way
to do it on the cheap, as in for free, I took top ranking for competitive
websites, scan the the website, check how they group the items, how how they
structure their information, mapped it out and look for overlapping patterns. And
based on the findings I designed a brand new architecture for the shop we're
working for. And because, in a situation like that, there's no sense
reinventing the wheel. Those guys ranking on the top, which means: their customers
like it, it works for them, it's gonna work for us. And I'm gonna let Nick now
speak about the whole journey of wireframes and Search Console. [Nick] Okay so for
my part, the Search Console, it threw up a couple of recommendations. Stuff that need
fixing. So that what happened is the staff, when
they create new pages, have been doing a typical 'Save as' type of thing and what
they hadn't been doing was changing the page titles, things like the meta
descriptions and the keywords they were associated with these pages. So 65 pages
had duplicate page titles, 822 - I don't know how they managed to get that number -
had duplicate meta descriptions and there were just like an abundance of
duplicated keywords there. It just it resulted in completely inaccurate page
information for search results. Google called this out, I made a report for these
guys and tried to write content in a structured way so they could use it.
Because, don't forget, these guys are just regular shop owners. They don't know
anything about design, they don't understand programming or any of that
stuff they don't really know anything about websites. So what they needed was a
structure that they could follow and work with when they were creating their content.
So my proposed fix was this: for each page title, to start that off with the
brand of the item, the name of the item and then separate that with a hyphen and
then describe the item in some way. There could be a detail of some sort, in this
instance that was the color, and then to reference the title at the very end
with the actual store name. So the neat thing is about this it gave them a very,
very simple structure to follow and they could just roll these things out as they
needed to which cut down on all this duplication that they were seeing.
Hopefully that would, they would result in better indexing, better ranking
hopefully and it should fix their problem. And then you know my advice was
to do this for a couple of sections of your website
and see how this goes and if you start to see in an improvement
in your in your indexing and ranking and stuff like that then you know you're
doing something right and you can continue this out through the rest of
the site. Another thing that I had to help with was this checkout
experience issue that these guys had had. So what was going on there is that um
they had key call to actions just buried in side-bar navigation so it was just like
a regular old link but it was the most important thing on a page. What we
found customers were doing is that they knew how to add items to their shopping
cart but they just couldn't get to the checkout because this thing was just a
minor link like in their peripheral vision. And so a fix for that was a set
of wireframes - I mean they don't look like anything special we didn't have
time or budget to do any any huge visual design improvements. I don't think they'd
have accepted that sort of stuff even if we did because they had their way of
thinking about their website - what I suggested was instead of turning this
this little button here, which is just a piece of text, leaving it like that and
then that sort of like highlighting or underlining in a very simple way - make
that a huge great button so when something gets added to a cart this thing then
lights up and we get some sort of ribbon strip that gets tacked to the bottom of
the browser window showing that you've added an item to your cart. There's
a secondary button there so if you miss that one you're going to be able to see
that and through that you'll be able to navigate your way to the checkout and
then pick your gateway of choice and then follow that through to make
your payment. By proposing this fix we saw over the following month like a
twenty percent increase in sales conversions which was a massive win for
those guys. So all of this work we completed there we handed our report to
the shop, we got the developer to do some of this work in our report. What we did
we prioritised the stuff that they needed to do in order as fixes to their
website. We said we know you don't have time and money and
experience and all of this stuff, so do what you can right? Just doing one thing
off this list is going to help you. That was one of those things I think,
currently they're still working on improving their site. Time, money, budget,
people all of that stuff so you know over the next year hopefully though they
will get their site in order. I think a key thing for them is better indexing.
What I did explain to them: the being found is only part of the user's journey.
Once they get to your site they need to be able to know how to use it. The
content needs to make sense and it needs to work in a way that they
expect it to. They can make purchases or do the things that they
want to do, if it's a blog they might want to read content and then find other
bits of content thats of interest to them. So however you piece your site
together it should make sense and the best way to do that sort of thing is to
ask your customers what they want, understand the way that they think about
your site, and then optimise your site accordingly. So I think a good thing to
do now I'll hand you back to Kamil he can give you some wrap-up there so
thanks a lot. [Kamil] So I think all of us it's safe to say that although my job
title is Experience Designer some of you are marketers, SEOs I think it's
safe to save that, deep inside, all of us are user experience designers.
Although our disciplines are slightly different we have the same goal. The goal
is to provide our customers, and people who use our products, with the
best possible experience they we can get - with, we want to leave them with a
smile on their face and we're hoping that they're gonna keep coming back to our -
buy our product for more and more. And all the stuff we describe and the research,
although it sounds like it's time-consuming and an expensive thing to do
it's not really. As I told you like you can do stuff like information
architecture, you can do almost for free. And there's plenty of other resources
available on the web and on the internet that can help you, other tools
that can help you understand your users better. And as long as all
the decisions you guys make are based around user behavior and their needs, you
should have plenty of successes. And all it takes is to start a conversation with
your customers. And from my experience people are normally quite
happy to talk - especially if there's a problem - that they will tell you how to
fix it. You don't even have to think of it because sometimes they've already come up
with the solution. And I said as long as all the decisions are made around their
needs you should be fine. And one thing I think both of us would like you guys to
take away from today's talk: optimise for your audience - not the search engines.
Thank you very much - thank you for listening.
[applause]
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