When many online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) professionals hear the phrase “search behaviors,” one of the immediate assumptions is the association with a text box and a button labeled “search” or “find.” In fact, usability guru Jakob Nielsen determined that this perception of web searching is so common that it is now a firm mental model.

In my opinion, too many search professionals associate search behavior with querying behavior only. In reality, web searching is more complex than simply typing keywords into a text-entry field. Website owners and search professionals alike often overlook finding behaviors after a searcher clicks on a link to a website from a search engine results page (SERP). One of those finding behaviors is called orientation or orienting.

Orientation, SERPs and landing pages

What exactly is orientation? On a website, orientation is a behavior whereby users determine their position in a website with reference to another point—establishing a sense of place.

Many times, the reference point is a home page or a website’s domain name. However, when people click a link from an organic search listing or a search engine ad, they don’t always go to a site’s home page. They most likely land on a page in the middle of the website, or a landing page created specifically as a destination from someone clicking on a search engine ad.

For web searchers to feel confident that a page or a site offers the product, service or information they desire, web pages should present clear “you are here” cues. Web searchers use a wide variety of “you are here” cues to determine a sense of place on a website—both textual and graphical cues. As a search usability professional, I want to understand which textual and graphical cues are important to my target audience. Where should these cues be placed on a web page? If it is a textual cue, how should it be formatted (color, font/typeface, white space)? If it is a graphical or multimedia cue, how large or small (in dimension) should it be? Where should these cues be placed on a category page or an article page?

Here are some questions we commonly ask web searchers during usability testing to determine their mental models before they click on a link on a SERP:

• Whose website are you about to view? How did you determine this?
• Which section of the website, if any, are you about to view? How did you determine this?
• What content do you believe you will see after clicking on this link?
• Do you believe that the information you desire will be available after you click on this link? Why or why not?

For example, if web searchers use a URL or domain name as an information scent, which is extremely common for navigational searches, they often look at the logo, which is a graphical “you are here” cue to establish ownership of the site. A tagline or a slogan can also be a “you are here” that establishes and reinforces site ownership. Web searchers can also quickly scan the URL, which is a textual cue. This orienting process occurs very quickly (often in less than 1 second) and is a normal process when people navigate from web page to web page.

The benefits of accommodating orienting behavior

Why should website owners accommodate orienting behavior? One reason is user confidence. Providing consistent “you are here” cues throughout a website communicates trust, reliability, and dependability because searcher mental models are being reinforced and validated on every page.

Additionally, consistent placement, usage and formatting of “you are here” cues are important because they decrease demands on users’ attention, allowing them to accomplish their desired goals more efficiently and with fewer errors. In other words, if searchers spend too much time trying to establish a “sense of place” on landing pages they are spending less time and effort trying to accomplish their desired goals—goals that are important to business owners as well as they lead directly to conversions (add to cart, subscribe, enroll, etc).

Finally, recognition, recall and memorability tends to increase when you have provided consistent “you are here” cues on a site. In the event that searchers wish to re-find content on sites via the commercial web search engines, retrieving that content is easier. With minimal effort, searchers encode these “you are here” cues within their memory along with the information they learn on a web page, making content easier to retrieve at a later time.

Therefore, website owners, interaction designers and search engine advertisers need to spend more time making the orienting process as quick and easy as possible. Orientation is a search behavior that no SEO professional, search engine advertiser or website owner should dismiss. Quick-and-easy orientation contributes to a positive brand experience, increases conversions and sales and makes content easier to find.

Heatmapping tool Feng-GUI helps graphic design and conversion optimization professionals gain that much-needed distance from their work. The tool lets you upload an image and the software returns an attention heatmap overlaid on the image—even without any people having seen the image!

This is called predictive heatmapping. So how does it work and what good is it to you? The answers to that plus some real case studies, after the jump.

What is an attention heatmap?

An attention heatmap is a combination of two elements: eye-gazing, and predicted attention.

Eye-gazing simulates the sequence of extremely rapid and involuntary eye movements (”saccades”) that happen as your eye scans a scene. This is overlaid on a heatmap of the attention represented by different colors which predicts where the brain will focus. Hotter areas indicate a more intense focus, while cooler areas show a lower level of awareness and importance.

What factors are considered in generating a predictive heatmap?

As Feng-GUI’s neat “how we do it” page explains, their algorithms are based on recurring themes detected via eye-tracking. These are things like color contrast, orientation of an object, etc.

How can it be used?

The description continues:

“It can be used to refine landing page designs for existing or new pages, and to improve conversion rates. It can identify which page elements are being looked at and which are being ignored. This allows the designer to focus attention on the correct parts of the page and increase the likelihood of conversion. Attention heat maps can be created several times during the design or re-design process to ensure that the refinements are having the intended effect.

“A ‘busy’ eye-gaze path and scattered heatmap with many hotspots is usually an indication that visual priorities of the page are not clear, and will likely result in confusion and a higher bounce rate for your landing page. Relatively simple eye gaze paths and a small number of clear hot spots (centered on the desired conversion-related areas) are a good indication that the page will be more effective.”

Another way these can be used is in improving the effectiveness of print ads. My friends in the Community Law club at McGill Law are putting on an event dealing with depression in law students. Here’s their ad:

And here’s the heatmap:

Notice how little attention goes to the upper right call to action? When I first saw this posted on a bulletin board, I didn’t notice it at all. I thought it was strange someone would just post a random fact, so I looked around and only then did I notice the call to action.

A better ad would have probably made the call to action larger and placed it somewhere below the main copy.

Indeed, this bottom-left to forward-right layout, which I’ll call the forward slash layout ( / ), is very confusing to Western readers, because we’re accustomed to reading from left to right and top to bottom. As my fellow fans of Gord Hotchkiss and Enquiro B2b SEM and usability know, study after study has confirmed this pattern.

Now let’s see these heatmaps in practical web action. Let’s see what we can use them for!

Some sample heatmaps

Suppose you’re SpyFu. And you’re curious to find out your competitors’ conversion rates—for example, AdGooroo. Here’s AdGooroo’s landing page.

What jumps out at you? Personally, the toolbox in the middle grabbed and held my attention, which is bad news for the copy. Feng-GUI seems to agree:

So if you’re SpyFu, you might think that you’re laughing all the way to the bank. The problem is SpyFu’s landing page…

… isn’t so hot either.

The main call to action above the fold looks like some support link because of its placement near the login link, and the areas of the page that are emphasized are secondary (Live Help) and a fake button (Top Secret) that isn’t actually clickable!

For people considering media buys, and what creative to use, I have the [untested] belief that Feng-GUI can predict the best creative. How?

Have the graphic artists mock up a screenshot with your various banners in place. Then put each screenshot through Feng-GUI to see what draws the most eyes, and you might have found the ad that will draw the greatest CTR for you.

As an aside, I’d like to point out that the faces in the heatmap aren’t highlighted, yet eye-tracking reveals that faces tend to draw our eyes. Feng-GUI has an option to let it know there are faces in the image, and it does slightly better with this feature enabled. But nonetheless, the resulting heatmap isn’t great. So be aware that the tool isn’t 100% accurate; Feng-GUI itself only claims to accurately assess 75% of what actual eye-tracking would capture.

Ironically, Feng-GUI doesn’t seem to have used its predictive mapping on its own site. When I first tried buying credits for Feng-GUI, I went crazy trying to find the “buy now” button. Beside the fact that “buy now” is not in the main navigation, it’s not obvious on the products page either. Looks like I’m not alone in my frustration—I used the tool on the page and ended up with this result:

The order button is one of those small, unimposing white jumplinks at the top of the page. Exactly in that negligible row of links above the active window that gets no attention. And because Feng-GUI couldn’t be bothered to add a simple buy now button with Paypal, you need to email them to request to buy. Only then will they send you a Paypal money request.

By the way, there is a competing predictive heatmapping tool, Attention Wizard, currently in beta. I’m not spending time reviewing their tool because it currently only allows you to generate one heatmap a day.

In this column, I’ll follow up on my conversation with Dr. Jim Jansen from Penn State and his recent investigation into behavior patterns that lie within a large data set of visitor and search advertising campaign data from a high traffic ecommerce site. In part one, Jim and I explored whether a search funnel actually exists. Surprisingly, Jim found that more generic queries, considered by marketers to be “top of funnel” queries, may be the only search activity required. He found these terms tended to generate equivalent or higher ROI than longer, more transactional queries.

Today, I’d like to cover a couple of additional topics that came up in our conversation: personalization in terms of the “maleness” or “femaleness” of the query used, and how personalization may play out on both the desktop and on mobile devices.

Let’s start with the “sex” of queries. Jansen did an interesting segmentation of the queries in the dataset, using Microsoft’s demographic tool:

Jansen: We took queries from this particular search engine marketing campaign and classified them based on gender probability using Microsoft’s demographic tool, which will classify a query by it’s probability of being male or female. We looked at it this way: not whether the searcher was male or female but did the particular query fit a gender stereotype—did it have a kind of a male, for example, feel to it or stereotype implications?

Having done previous work with personalization, and gender specificity does fall into a broad category of personalization, Jansen had his own hunches about what he found. As it turned out, his hunches were wrong:

Jansen: The results to me were counterintuitive from what I expected. Usually, the idea of personalization is that the more personalized you get, the higher the payoff, the efficiency and effectiveness is. [But when we looked at the data] in terms of sales, far and away the most profitable were the set of queries that were totally gender-neutral. We took the queries and divided them into seven categories: “very strongly male,” “generally male,” “slightly male,” “gender neutral,” “slightly female,” “strongly female,” “very female.” By two orders of magnitude, the most profitable were the ones that were totally gender-neutral.

Jansen offered examples of “gender neutral” terms:

Jansen: We defined gender-neutral to be were queries that the Microsoft tool classified up to like 59% either side. So we had a fairly big spread here. Here are some examples of queries based off the Microsoft tool: “electronic chess.” The Microsoft tool classified that 100% male. For a gender-neutral query—“atomic desk clock” and “water purifier.”

At this point, the mystery of why “gender neutral” performed at at a significantly higher level remains to be solved, but Jansen has some thoughts:

Jansen: One thing that is coming out in the personalization research is that at a certain level, we have totally unique differences. You can personalize to a general category and to a certain level, but beyond that, it’s either not doing much good or may actually get in the way. And that may be something that is happening here—that these particular, very targeted gender keyword phrases are just not attracting the audience that the more gender-neutral queries and keywords are.

Again, it’s a “why” thing. We spend a lot of time in web search trying to personalize to the individual level and really haven’t got very far. But now people are trying to do things like personalize to the task rather than the individual person, and there’s some interesting things happening there. Spell checks and query reformulations and things like that are very task-oriented rather than individual searcher oriented.

Dr. Jansen’s point about how personalization might be better aimed at the tasks we’re engaged in rather than the people we are led to further speculation about where personalization might take us in the future.

Jansen: [Personalization] is just so hard to do. You know, Gord is different than Jim, and Gord today is different than Gord was five years ago. Personalizing at the individual level is just very difficult and may not even be a fruitful area to pursue.

We’re nonlinear creatures, we’re changing all the time. I can’t even keep up with all my changes and I can’t imagine some technology trying to do it. It just seems an unbelievably challenging, hard task to do.

I brought up the point that even we don’t know why we do the things we do, because so much of our decision making is driven by unconscious factors. It’s a thought that’s crossed Jansen’s mind as well:

Jansen: I’ve commented on that before in terms of recommending a movie or book to me. I don’t even know what books and movies I like until I see them. Sometimes I pick up a book and say, “Oh, I’m going to really love this,” only to get a chapter into it and realize “Okay, this is horrible.” And I think you see that in the NetFlix challenge— So many organizations have labored for a decade now, and finally it looks like perhaps this year someone may win by combing 30 different approaches simultaneously to the very simple problem of “Recommend a movie. It’s just amazing the computational variations that are going on.

From personalization, our conversation then veered to mobile (not such a long detour, really). To me, the intersection of search and functionality has the most potential on our mobile devices. But the need to “get it right” is substantially higher, given the inherent challenges of handheld devices: limited screen real estate and input challenges.

Jansen: Everybody is saying (again), “This is the year mobile searching’s going take off.” It’s been going on for four or five years now, and really, at least here in the US, it hasn’t really happened yet. But what I think is going to make it hit the mainstream is this combination of localized search. When you have a mobile device, the technology has so much more information about you: it’s got your location to within a couple feet, the context that you’re in can really start entering the picture and information gets pushed to you—I’m thinking tagged buildings and restaurants and cultural events and on and on. And so with my mobile device, where I can talk into it, I don’t even have to type anything. I want “what’s going on in the area?” and it automatically knows my location and the time and perhaps something about me and the things that I’ve searched on before. “Oh, you like coffee shops where there’s some music playing. Guess what? Boom. There’s five right near, in your area that have live entertainment right then.” So I think in that respect it’ll be a little more narrowed search, but the technology will have so much more information about us that in a way it makes the job easier. The problem’s going to be the interface and the presentation of the results.

Imagine being able to walk through a town… I live in Charlottesville, Virginia. Tons of history here from 400 years ago when Europeans first settled here, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, etc., etc. Being able just to walk down Main Street and have tagged buildings interface with my mobile device… I’m a big history buff and so getting that particular information, one, pushed to me or at least available to push when I ask for it is a wonderful, wonderful area of personalization. This idea of localized search and mobile devices and mobile search may be the thing that brings it all together and makes mobile search happen.

Given the direction of conversation I had to ask Jim about the privacy implications of all this functionality. Let’s assume that Google is the likely candidate that assemble this search “utopia.” What price might we have to pay to enable Google’s effectiveness as our own personal digital concierge, or, more sinisterly, our “Big Brother?”

Jansen: You know, the “Big Brother” idea label has certain negative connotations, so I don’t want to say that Google is Big Brother-ish in that regard. But certainly I think with their movement into free voice and free directory assistance, they will soon have a voice data archive that will allow them to do some amazing things with voice search, which would be an awesome feature for mobile devices. Being able to talk into a mobile device, have it recognize you nearly 100% of the time and execute the search.

My final question for Jim was how much of a priority should Google make innovation in the mobile search space:

Jansen: Google of course is the one that knows what they’re doing, but certainly I think it would be naive not to be exploring that particular area. And I think the contrast from what you said about Microsoft and the desktop, the desktop is just so busy. You’re getting so many different signals in terms of business, personal things, my kids use my computer sometimes. And so the context is so large on the desktop, but the mobile device, it’s narrower. You know, you have some telephone calls, you can do some GPS things, so the context is narrower but very, very rich in that very narrow domain. I think it’s a really hot area of search.

The entire interview transcript has been posted to my blog. As always, a conversation with Jim Jansen never fails to be interesting.

I had a search engine optimization (SEO) epiphany recently that involved site architecture and the mental models of web searchers.

Website information architects try to determine how users categorize, organize and label information on a site. Information architects use a number of methods to determine the best site architecture, including but not limited to:

• Field interviews
• Direct, one-on-one observation of users/searchers performing their normal, daily tasks
• Usability testing
• Data from web analytics software, site search engines, and so forth

On a website, an information architect’s goal is to determine a formal site navigation and other forms of page interlinking, ones that best correspond to the mental models of the site’s users. An effective site architecture should enable users/searchers to accomplish their goals more easily and efficiently. With every click, a user’s information scent should be reinforced and validated without distracting, confusing or annoying the user. Additionally, a site’s information architecture should communicate the “aboutness” of page content to both search engines and site visitors.

After three iterations of usability testing on one particular business-to-business healthcare website, I noticed something interesting: pages that the in-house SEO professional created did not match the mental models of the primary and secondary target audience. Words such as “fluff,” “propaganda,” and my personal favorite, “what the [expletive],” were used to verbally describe these pages. Furthermore, these same words appeared in test participant comments and category/section labels.

Digging a little deeper, I also noticed that all of their competitors created web pages that did not match user/searcher mental models. Yet these pages were ranking well. So even this company’s competitors were not creating sites to accommodate user/searcher mental models.

Why would any website owner create an information architecture where a considerable number of SEOed pages belong in the category labeled, “What the [expletive]?” Why do SEO professionals continually build pages, and entire websites, that do not match searcher mental models?

What is a mental model?

A mental model, also known as a conceptual model, is an explanation of a person’s thought process about how something works in the real world, faithfully representing root motivations and matching behaviors. Everyone has a mental model about how a website or a search engine works, and no one person has the same mental model as another person. Nevertheless, some portions of mental models are consistent from person to person.

As an example, let’s use an elevator. Most of us have the same expectations and experiences with riding in an elevator. If we press the button labeled “2” inside the elevator, we expect the elevator to take us to the second floor. If we press the button labeled “5,” we expect the elevator to take us to the fifth floor.

How do we know we are moving toward the fifth floor? On most elevators we usually see a number that lights up when we arrive at or pass a floor. What happens when we arrive at our destination, the fifth floor?

• The number “5” is illuminated on the elevator panel
• The elevator stops
• We often hear a “ding” to indicate that the elevator doors are about to open
• The elevator doors open
• Usually, when we exit the elevator, we can immediately see some sort of visual cue that we have arrived on the fifth floor, such as a sign showing room numbers 501-540, and/or the number “5” somewhere within our immediate visual range.

The textual and visual cues on an elevator are similar to the textual and visual cues on a website. When searchers click on a link on a search engine results page, they expect to be delivered to a page that contains their targeted keywords. But keywords are not the only item on a web page that searchers expect to see.

Searchers have mental models of websites and web pages. They expect to know which elements on a web page are clickable and those that aren’t. On ecommerce websites, searchers expect to see product photos. Headings, categorization and navigation labels on a healthcare site that targets physicians and other healthcare professionals will be quite different from headings, categorization and navigation labels on a healthcare site that targets consumers.

Mental models of SEO professionals

How do many SEO professionals address searcher mental models and site architecture? Here is a partial list:

• PageRank (PR) sculpting (via nofollow tags and other methods)
• Siloing
• Using targeted microsites
• Link farms and other forms of search engine spam

Unfortunately, many SEO professionals are not validating searcher mental models, though they honestly and sincerely believe they are. If a page ranks and a web searcher clicks on a search listing, then the assumption is that the web page matches the searcher’s mental model. Other pages ranking well? Then the SEO assumes searcher goals are obviously being met. More clicks? Even more evidence. Low bounce rate? Web searchers must love the site, even though more clicks on a website can indicate confusion, not user satisfaction.

Never mind that information architects and usability professionals continually see “what the [expletive]” as a site architecture label.

It seems as if SEO professionals and website owners are building websites and pages based on their personal mental models, not the mental models of the target audience. No professional, qualified information architect would recommend a site architecture based on data purely from keyword research tools.

Would I hire an SEO professional to architect a website? Not unless that person or company has a strong education, training and experience in library/information sciences. Many professional information architects have advanced degrees in this field. However, I would hire an SEO professional to contribute to the site architecture discussion. Querying is a search behavior that no website owner should ignore.

Can an ecommerce store’s product detail pages bog a visitor down in too much detail? Can you provide the wrong information and leave people with unanswered questions?

My friend and occasional client Michael runs Greek For Me, an apparel store for Greek fraternities and sororities. He recently asked me for usability consulting to help him increase his conversion rate. I thought I’d share this mini-usability review to help Mike and other store owners who may be struggling with these issues.

Let’s check out Greek For Me’s Alpha Xi Delta Hoody detail page.

(Click to enlarge)

The page gets the general info down fine. It obviously matches the keywords likely to deliver visitors, and like the rest of the site, there’s shopping cart info in the top right and breadcrumb navigation to orient visitors.

Where this product detail page drops the ball is with the drop-down menus used to select size and colors. These overwhelm visitors and make them anxious.

Suppose you’re curious to see the sweatshirt in other colors than gray. If you pick any color, the product picture doesn’t update to reflect your choice. And you can’t click some secondary pictures of the item for different views, because there’s only the one picture.

The same problem repeats with the dropdown boxes for the foreground color and border color. You can’t tell what they will look like on the sweatshirt, much less what they will look like in combination with each other.

And this is compounded by using jargon color names, like vegas gold, old gold and light gold. What if I just want gold? Besides, who goes shopping, thinking “I want a sweatshirt with vegas gold lettering!”

Similarly, if you pick a size, you might have a general idea what that entails, but it’s by no means certain. For example, SEOmoz gave me a tshirt last year that was a size medium. I thought it would fit as I’m about a medium build, but it turned out that I needed a large, so I reluctantly gave the shirt to the girl I was dating at the time. Which might explain why we broke up and I still don’t have a girlfriend. But I digress…

To reiterate, product detail page dropdown menus make visitors anxious. They create a fear of getting the wrong size product with the wrong colors. We as humans fear loss more than we seek gains. So these fears of wasting money on the wrong product reduce purchase momentum (kudos to the Bryan Eisenberg for the momentum metaphor.)

Possible solutions to test:

• By far the easiest solution is to offer no alternative colors. By making the color question a simple yes-or-no decision, momentum is a lot easier to maintain.
• A better solution is to offer a very limited range of popular colors. You could probably copy The Gap and go with blue, pink, gray, red and black. This avoids leaving money on the table in the case of people thinking, “No, I don’t like the default color.”
• Use only one foreground-border pairing for each background color. If you get the blue background sweatshirt, your lettering is white-and-gray, period.
• Add pictures of the product in the alternative available colors.
• Have some sorority girls model the product, and explain what size they’re wearing. Tests typically show that actual-use pictures convert better.
• Create a customization tool that dynamically alters the product image as people select different options. This is probably the most expensive solution, and would likely need to have its own section on the site.

In fairness to Mike, I should point out that he has a clickable link to see the colors involved, but these just show a chart with various swatches of color. And while that might be enough for some people, I only barely noticed it after already writing most of this article.

So it’s skimpy information, presented in a muted part of the page.

Shipping questions for detail pages

Two common questions visitors have are:

• When will the product arrive? (Sometimes phrased as, “When will it ship”)
• What will the price of shipping be.

The product arrival date info is automatically estimated, which is a great piece of functionality. Unfortunately, this too is hidden in the discreet “Additional Information” box below the product image.

As to the price of shipping, this is nowhere to be found on this detail page or any others.

The site tries to solve the problem with a shipping price calculator that appears on the next page, below the cart information, when you click add to cart.

(Click to enlarge.)

The catch is that the visual design of the page emphasizes the checkout buttons. They strongly contrast with the rest of the page by their shape and color (see more on buttons and layout in my friend Sandra Niehaus’ great article on button balance and contrast).

Normally this emphasis on the checkout is good, but in this case it will create a lot of scenarios like this:

• Add to cart
• Check cart info
• Continue to checkout
• [Miss the shipping calculator.]

Then when people move on to the billing page, the ‘Standard’ and ‘Rush’ shipping options don’t provide any more info on price.

So what?

So the net effect of this lack of information on shipping times and rates creates anxiety. Again, this slows momentum towards conversion.

Possible solutions

• Embed a simpler calculator in a reasonably prominent part of the product detail page. For example, some of the whitespace on the right hand side could be used without affecting how clean the page looks. Of course, that’s just a hunch – you’d have to test that to know for sure.
• Since most products have a standard weight and size, Mike could use USPS’ “If it fits, it ships” product and just automatically list shipping rates on his product detail page according to product type.

The fundamental role of a product detail page is to decrease anxiety by spelling out clearly what the product offer is. It should offer enough information to answer visitors’ questions, without overwhelming them and making them bounce.

I’ve been in web development since 1995. For me, and many of you, it’s easy to forget that people don’t have the computer equipment to use the web sites and Internet applications we build. I’ve always found it interesting that TV show web sites are Flash based and loaded with images and video. It’s as if they are built for an elite group of TV watchers and everyone else doesn’t matter.

At a large family gathering, where family and friends of the family came to eat and relax at the shore, someone asked what I do for a living. When it was discovered that I help companies make better websites, I was bombarded with feedback about their experiences. The most outspoken people were over 50 years old. They were smart, not afraid of computers and had up to date computers and Internet connections. They were more likely to have time to browse. Most of them belonged to online communities.

What bothered them were poor user interface issues. They couldn’t find what they wanted without a lot of hassle. Pages were too busy, too long or too boring. Navigation was the area they all agreed on as being the worst. Drop down navigation menus? Hate them. Shopping cart checkout navigation frustrated them. They weren’t so concerned with privacy as much as they just wanted to get in, accomplish their task and get out without resistance.

Experience the user experience

This summer my husband and I packed our 3 kids and 2 dogs into our motor home for a trip to Florida. As Chief Navigator, I relied on my cell phone for directions. When the GPS chose to work, and after figuring out how to use Google maps on my phone, we were able to follow the tiny blue dot and know what direction we going. When I needed to call ahead to one of the campgrounds we booked for a night, in every single case their web site was a user nightmare. Something as obvious as a phone number and address on the homepage was missing from all of them. Their navigation was not designed for mobile devices. Every task took a long time and incredible patience.

As the head webmaster for my town’s Little League baseball web site, I learned a lesson a few years back. I used to upload team game dates and scores in the Excel spreadsheet format that each coach emailed to me to post on the site. However, several parents wrote to say they couldn’t access the spreadsheet or it took too long to download for them. So I began to offer two versions. One is the spreadsheet converted into an html page and the other is the actual spreadsheet. I label each link so they know which one to choose.

User interface design is for everybody

I began to wonder at the wide gap between those who have been using the Internet for the past 15 years and those who are new to it. When I ask a site owner for their site requirements, they typically don’t have any or they are limited in scope. Most will say, “We don’t care about dial-up users”, but I know for a fact they still exist. Most will say they that accessibility is not in the plan or might be in the future. That decision has cost them another part of the population, including someone who has a broken hand they would normally use to guide their mouse. Nearly everyone forgets to design a site that can be accessed by mobile devices. They don’t realize that Flash and PDF files require a plug-in to work and most cell phones are not enabled.

There was a time when we used to say, “Build it and they will come,” regarding web site design. But those days are long gone. Today’s environment is competitive. In the case of retail sites, even a search on an SKU number can bring up 30 different sites selling the exact same item. Split tests are done for link labels or different layouts. I tend to flunk them. For some reason, I vote against the majority. I’m that tiny percent who liked it the “old” way. I didn’t need snazzy or big. But, because the test results indicate most users wanted snazzy or big, this is what the design team will make. They’ll do this even if those votes came from people who would not ordinarily use their web site.

I’ve long felt we’re missing something with the way we go about user testing. There’s a lot of advice to go out and get 5 random people, show them something and get their feedback. Companies pay for random people. I would rather spend time out in the field, with targeted users who have used the site or fall into the targeted group of intended users. I would prefer to watch them in their natural environment. That would mean being in a motor home, with restless dogs and a kid playing the electronic keyboard while another one is yelling that he can’t concentrate to read and watching the mom struggling to find directions somewhere in South Carolina using a cell phone with a screen smaller than a Hershey’s candy bar.

Understanding the true user experience, for me, means actually going out and experiencing what your site users are going through. Since this is not always a practical option, stand back from your project. Visualize how your friends, family, neighbors, customers in certain circumstances or those with limited incomes, Internet access and computer experience might respond to your design. There is so much we have yet to learn about the real day to day Internet user experience.

Jim Jansen is one of the few academics I know that is fascinated with Internet search. He has spent a good part of the last decade looking at patterns in search query and website logs, dissecting them and continually looking for significant trends. Jim and I crossed paths a number of years ago and have kept in touch ever since. When Chris Sherman asked someone to talk to Jim about his latest research, I was quick to volunteer. As I said in my last column, a chat with Jim is always fascinating.

First, a quick word about Jim’s background. Dr. Jansen is an associate professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Pennsylvania State University. He has more than 150 publications to his credit. In fact, in the time I’ve know Jim, he has turned out papers at an amazing rate. He’s also co-author of the book, Web Search: Public Searching of the Web and co-editor of Handbook of Weblog Analysis. Jim moved into his academic career from the military, where he taught at West Point.

Jim’s research project

Jim has spent the last few years working on massive data sets that have been made available by large, high traffic sites. He has taken a statistical approach to dissecting these data trails and gaining insight into behavior through that analysis. You could say that Jansen is investigating what John Battelle has called the database of intentions.

The database of intentions was a concept Battelle introduced in his book The Search, How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. In his words, the database of intentions is:

The aggregate results of every search ever entered, every result list ever tendered, and every path taken as a result. It lives in many places, but three or four places in particular hold a massive amount of this data (ie MSN, Google, and Yahoo). This information represents, in aggregate form, a place holder for the intentions of humankind – a massive database of desires, needs, wants, and likes that can be discovered, subpoenaed, archived, tracked, and exploited to all sorts of ends. Such a beast has never before existed in the history of culture, but is almost guaranteed to grow exponentially from this day forward. This artifact can tell us extraordinary things about who we are and what we want as a culture. And it has the potential to be abused in equally extraordinary fashion.

As Battelle admitted, this was a BIG IDEA. Jansen has taken a methodical approach to slicing and dicing his own subsets of the database of intentions. I’ll be talking to Jim about one of these slices in today’s column, but first, Jim will explain a little more about his current project:

Jansen: I have several research projects going on. One that I really find interesting is analyzing a five calendar year search engine marketing campaign from a major online retailer and brick-and-mortar retailer. It’s about 7 million interactions over that time, multi-million dollar accounts and sale. A fascinating temporal analysis of a search engine marketing effort. I’ve been looking at that at several different levels—the buying funnel being one, aspects of branding being another, and then the aspect of some type of personalization, specifically along gender issues.

The buying funnel and search engine strategies

The slice of Jim’s research I want to focus on in this column is the idea of a search “buying funnel.”

Marketers have long cherished the buying funnel model. The foundations of this model go back to the AIDA model—Attention/Interest/Desire/Action—introduced by Elias St. Elmo Lewis in 1898. The roots of this model run deep. The labels of the stages of the funnel vary somewhat, but generally they align with Need—Awareness—Consideration—Purchase. In my own recent research in the B2B marketplace, I have expressed some doubt about the applicability of the funnel as a workable model. I don’t dispute the stages, but I do question the idea of a linear “funnel,” with prospects moving obediently from one stage to the next. Based on my observations, many purchases are just not that simple.

But if we accept that some sort of buying funnel is in place, and we know (because we do know) that search is used to qualify and research buying decisions, than it makes sense that there should be a corresponding search funnel. Jansen went in with this basic hypothesis:

Jansen: One goal was to verify whether the buying funnel was really a workable model for online e-commerce searching or was it just a paradigm for advertisers to get their handle around this chaos. And the other goal was to discover if it’s an effective model, what can it tell us in terms of how advertisers should respond?

Jansen’s not the first to explore the territory of a search funnel. A comScore study of search behavior in consumer electronics in 2004 questioned the existence of a search funnel:

“The results of the study challenge a widely held belief that most consumers begin the product search process by using a generic search term (e.g. “plasma TV”) and then later refine their search activity to product-specific terms (e.g. “Sony Plasma KE-42M1”). Operating under this assumption, many retailers and manufacturers believed that investing only in product-specific terms allowed them to reach the majority of in-market consumers closer to their purchase decision. In reality, by taking this approach, marketers are missing the vast majority of their addressable market, since most consumers never use these types of terms.”

So, what did Jansen find in his data set?

Jansen: In terms of the first question, we had some mixed results. One, at the individual query level you can classify individual queries into different levels of this buying funnel model. There are unique characteristics that correspond very nicely to each of those levels. So in that respect, I think the model is valid.

Where it may not be valid is specifying this process that online consumers go through. We found that, no, it didn’t happen like that. There was a lot of drop-out and they would do a very broad query and then there may or may not be more specific queries after.

So we looked at the academic literature—what theoretically could deal with that or explain that?—and the idea of sufficing seemed to fit. If it is a low cost, they won’t spend a lot of time searching… they will just purchase it and buy it.

In terms of classifying queries in terms of what advertisers’ payoff is, I think the most interesting finding was that the purchase queries, the last stage of the buying funnel, were the most expensive and had no higher payoff than the awareness or the very broad, relatively cheaper queries. From talking to practitioners, that is a phenomena that they have noted also… which is why a lot of people bid still on very broad terms, to snatch these potential customers at an early stage.

Jansen’s findings seemed to support the earlier comScore findings and showed that search activity, just like consumer activity, doesn’t go in predictable or logical straight lines. I dove deeper on this particular area with Jim:

Hotchkiss: We similarly have found that you can’t assume a search funnel is happening because people use search at different stages and they’ll come in and then they’ll drop out of the process, and they may come in later or they may not, they may pursue other channels. But the other thing we found is sometimes there’s a remarkable consistency in the query used all the way through the process and we that quite often can be a navigational behavior. It can be people who say, “Okay, the last time I did this, I searched on Google for so-and-so and I remember the site I found was the third or fourth listing down,” and they use the same route to navigate the online space over and over again. So if you’re looking at it from a pure query level, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher because you’re saying, “Why did they use the same query over and over?” Again, it’s one of those nuances of online behavior. Did that seem to be one of the possible factors of some of the anomalies in the data?

Jansen: Well, that trend or something similar to it has been appearing in a lot of different domains and researchers are kind of attributing it to “When I do a query, I expect a certain result.” So with a query that may be very informational, what we’re finding is that searchers expect a Wikipedia entry… a very navigational intent behind that very informational query. And I think the phenomena you’re describing is very similar. We have a transactional-type query and users are expecting a certain web page, a navigational aspect: “Okay, I have an anchor point here that I’m going to go to.” I just looked at a query log from a major search engine and an unbelievable amount of queries were navigational in nature.

The other area I found fascinating was this concept of “sufficing,” or, as Herbert Simon labelled it, “satisficing.” Jim and I used that as the jumping off point for a rather interesting discussion about satisficing and how it might play out on a search engine. I’ll just let the conversation play out here, as I think it’s self-explanatory.

Hotchkiss: You know, the idea of satisficing, of taking a heuristic shortcut with their level of research, is also interesting. It seems that if the risk is fairly low, the online paths are shorter. Is that what you were finding?

Jansen: Yes… the principle of least effort is how it’s also presented. We see it in web searching itself in how people interact with search engines and how they interact with sites on the web. They may not get an optimal solution, but if it’s something that’s reasonable and it’s good enough, they’ll go for it. And that seems to be occurring in the e-commerce area also. “I want to buy something relatively cheap. Okay, this particular vendor may not have the best price, but guess what? It’s close to what I’m thinking it should be. Just go and get it done, get it over with, buy it.”

Hotchkiss: And I would suspect that that would also be true in product categories where you mentally have a good idea of what an acceptable price range would be, right?

Jansen: Yes.

Hotchkiss: So if it’s a question of making a trade-off for $2 but saving yourself a half hour of time, as long as you’re aware of what those price ranges would be, you’re more apt to take that shortcut, right?

Jansen: Yes. It does assume some knowledge and risk mitigation—if it’s a small purchase. That varies a little bit for each of us, but you’re willing to cut your costs of searching and trying to find the best deal just to get it done.

Hotchkiss: Part of this too would be your level of personal engagement with the product category you’re shopping in. For instance, I’ll spend way too much time researching a purchase of a new gadget or something that I’m interested in just because I have that level of engagement. But if it’s basically a purchase that’s on my to-do list, if it’s just one task I have to get done and then move on to the next thing, I suspect that that’s where that satisficing behavior would be more common.

Jansen: Now you bring up a really good point. If it becomes entertainment— like a gadget that you enjoy researching—it’s no longer work, it’s no longer something you get done. The process of doing it makes it enjoyable so you don’t mind spending a lot of time. In those kind of cases, the goal really is not the purchase, the goal is the looking.

Hotchkiss: And we found that alters the behavior on the search page as well. If it’s a task-type purchase where I just have to go and get there, you see that satisficing play out on the search page too. Typically when we look at engagement with the search page, you see people scan the top four, three or four listings. It’s that satisficing type of intent where you say, “I just want to buy this thing.” What you’ll see is that people scan those first three or four and pick what they feel is, like you say, the path of least effort. They go down and say, “Okay… it’s a book. Amazon’s there. I know Amazon’s price. I’m just going to click through and order this,” but if it’s entertainment, then suddenly they start treating the search page more like a catalog where they’re paying more attention to the brands and they’re just… they’re using that as a navigational hub to branch off to three or four different sites. And again, it can really impact the nature of engagement with the website… or with the search page.

Jansen: Absolutely, and I really like your analogy of a catalog. You know, there are some people that love just looking at a catalog—flipping through it, looking at the dresses and shirts or gadgets or sporting gear or whatever. And that’s a much different engagement than flipping through the classified ads trying to find some practical thing you need. The whole level of engagement is at totally opposite ends of the spectrum, really.

Hotchkiss: As an extreme example of that, we did some eye-tracking with Chinese search engines and what we found was, with Baidu in particular, people using it to look for MP3 files to download. So when we first saw the heat maps—and of course it was all in Chinese, so I couldn’t understand what the content on the page was without having it translated—but I saw these heat maps going way deeper and much longer than we ever saw in typical North American behavior. We saw a level of engagement unlike anything we had ever seen before. And I said, “Well, what’s going on here?” and that was exactly it. It was a free task… they were looking for MP3 files to download and they were treating the search page like a catalog of MP3 files. So they were reading everything on the page and I think that’s just one extreme example of this catalog browsing behavior that we were talking about.

So let’s go to one of the other findings on the buying funnel which was that quite often the more general, broader categories from an ROI perspective can perform just as well as what traditional wisdom tells us is your higher return terms which are closer to the end of the funnel—they’re more specific, they’re longer, they’re more transactionally oriented. What’s behind that?

Jansen: Well, in a lot of these questions there’s no simple answer… there’s plenty exceptions to the rule of what you have just described there. There are some very broad terms that are very cheap, others that are very expensive. On the purchase side, there are some key phrases that are very cheap because they’re so focused and others are expensive. But in this particular analysis—and again, this was 7 million transactions over 33 months, from mid-2005 to mid-2008—the awareness terms were cheaper than the purchase terms and they generated just as much revenue.

I think a lot of it is that perhaps the items this particular retailer were selling fell into that sufficing behavior where they were gifts, fairly low-cost items. There was just no need to progress all the way to that particular purchase phase.

Really… it was very unexpected. I really expected those purchase terms to actually be cheaper because they were more narrowly focused and to generate more revenue, but overall… it didn’t turn out that way.

Hotchkiss: That brings up an interesting point that we’ve seen with client behavior, especially given the current economic condition. What we found is a lot of clients are tending to optimize down the funnel—they are looking at their keyword lists they’re bidding on and move further and further down to more and more specific phrases, because the theory is—and generally they do have analytics to back this up—that there’s greater ROI on that because these are usually people that are searching for a specific model or something which is a pretty good indicator that they’re close to purchase. But I think one of the by-products of that is that as people optimize their campaigns, those long tail phrases are getting more and more expensive because there’s more and more competition around them, and as people move some of their keyword baskets away from those awareness terms, maybe the prices on that, it all being based on an auction model, are starting to drop. Do you think that could be one of the factors happening here?

Jansen: That very well could be. The whole online auction is designed around [the idea that] as competition increases, cost-per-clicks will increase also. It also may be that those particular customers don’t mind clicking on a few links to do some comparison shopping and may end up going somewhere else… they may have a higher intent to purchase, but the competition among where they’re going to buy is more intense.

As always, I found the conversation with Jim enjoyable and enlightening. We continued to talk more about branding and search and the implications of personalizing to gender, both areas that Jim explored in this latest study. I’ll cover that territory in my next Just Behave column.

To truly understand web searcher behavior, search engine optimization (SEO) professionals should know how searchers locate and follow the scent of information. On a web page, the scent of information consists of textual and graphical cues that:

• Facilitate clear navigation (where can I go)
• Allow for quick orientation (where am I) and
• Communicate content value (should I click on this link)

Navigation – where can I go?

On search engine results pages (SERPs), the main textual cue that communicates, “Where can I go?” is a blue, underlined text link.

For example, in natural (algorithmic) search listings, the primary blue, underlined text link contains the (X)HTML title-tag content. In the news search listings, the primary blue, underlined text link is the story headline. Title-tag content and headings serve multiple purposes:

• Relevancy (ranking). All of the major search engines use title-tag and heading content to determine page relevancy.
• Click-through. A hypertext link is the primary call-to-action on SERPs.
• User confidence. If keywords are present in the hypertext link, it increases user confidence. Searchers believe that if they click on a link that contains their keyword phrase, they will go to a page that contains that keyword-related content.

However, search engines display more than text in their SERPs. In the past few years, search engines have been displaying thumbnail photos that lead to web pages containing graphic images and videos. These thumbnails are also part of the scent of information. What do searchers expect to see when they type in the current U.S. president’s name, Barack Obama? Do they expect to see a thumbnail photo with Barack Obama in it? Or do they expect to see a picture of the Queen of England? Or a kitty cat dressed in a cowboy outfit?

Interestingly, many SEO professionals sincerely believe that link development and social media trump all on-the-page factors for optimization. I have never believed this nor do I practice it, because I see how important the scent of information is to users. No link development campaigns will be successful if information scent is not reinforced in SERPs and corresponding landing pages. If the scent of information is strong, people click. If the scent of information weakens or disappears, searchers abandon the website.

Orientation – where am I?

On a website, orientation is a behavior where searchers determine their position with reference to another point, establishing a “sense of place.” In other words, searchers quickly establish whose website they are visiting, and what section of the site (if any) they are viewing. If searchers do not believe they have “landed” in the right place, they will leave the website. Web searchers orient very quickly, sometimes within 1 second after a page loads.

Landing pages should always validate searchers’ scent of information, both textually and graphically. For example, if an online shopper wants to purchase a pink Burberry cashmere scarf, then the product landing page should contain a product photo of a pink Burberry cashmere scarf. The product page’s title-tag content should contain those keywords as well as other on-the-page text.

Value – should I click on this link?

Why should web searchers click on your organic listing and not others? Why should web searchers click on your search engine ad? How have you encouraged them to click on your link? Is your HTML title-tag content compelling as well as your snippet and/or meta-tag description? Does your ad contain desired keyword content? Is the ad legible or difficult to understand due to keyword stuffing to accommodate all sorts of keyword combinations?

Did you make a video that pertains to the keyword phrase that your target audience types as query words? Does your target audience expect to see a video? Does your video contain a bunch of marketing hype just so your site can have search engine visibility on the first page of SERPs?

The scent of information has a lot to do with user expectations. If users want to see a video about a topic, they will probably use the word “video” or “videos” as a keyword, indicating transactional intent. If they do not expect to see a video listing, they might click on the video out of curiosity…or they might not. Usability professionals commonly perform expectancy tests to determine searcher mental models.

To make web content findable, the scent of information should be clearly established and consistently maintained throughout a website. But remember: you should try to understand the scent of information from the users’ perspective. Not the SEO perspective or the marketing department’s perspective. Not the CEO’s or the IT department’s (shudder) perspective. Keyword research tools do not give you a full and accurate picture of searcher mental models.

Talk to your users. Objectively observe their behavior. See how the scent of information exists (or does not exist) on your website. The answers might surprise you.

For those of you who are interested in reading detailed information about the scent of information, please read more about Peter Pirolli and information foraging theory.

For all its faults, Wikipedia has a lot to teach us about usability. Here are three things that Wikipedia does right that I think websites should emulate to better engage users, boost time on site, and hopefully lead to more conversions.

Summary sections

Wikipedia offers summaries at the top of its feature-length articles. While I haven’t got access to Wikipedia’s visitor data, I’d hypothesize that these summaries help reduce the bounce rate (bounce rate is the percentage of people who arrive and “bounce away” within 10 seconds or so). Let’s think about the factors that play in bounce rate to understand how summaries can help.

I just finished reading the book Honest Seduction: Using Post Click Marketing To Turn Landing Pages Into Game Changers, by my friends at Ion Interactive. One key takeaway of their book is that bounce rates are partly a function of visitors’ mental time commitment.

Someone who clicks an organic listing just made a five second commitment to click. If your page displays a mass of text, you are asking for a five minute commitment. Many visitors will bounce due to the disconnect between their initial five second commitment and your subsequent request for five minutes of their time.

By featuring a summary on your page, you invite users to make just an incremental five or 10 second commitment. By bridging the gap in this way, the summary prevents a commitment disconnect.

Table of contents sections

A table of contents section is another valuable item for users that are in a hurry. While I have to admit I haven’t tested it, I’m willing to bet that these tables reduce bounce rates by boosting message match.

Besides Honest Seduction, I’ve also been reading the Bryan and Jeff Eisenberg’s books on search marketing, and I recently also finished Tim Ash’s Landing Page Optimization. One common thread amongst all these conversion rate experts’ advice is that message match is essential.

Message match is the continuity and total coherence between a click source and the page(s) it leads to.

For example, an organic listing titled “Browse Used Toyotas Starting At $5,000″ should lead visitors to a page with that headline and a number of used Toyotas with prices starting at $5,000, not $6,000. If it’s not immediately clear that your page matches the organic listing/banner ad/PPC copy/email message, then people will leave in droves.

The key is to make things obvious

The problem is that with long textual articles you can’t have everything above the fold. So if a visitor came for something that is below the fold, there’s a good chance that they will bounce.

Now, summaries are a helpful way to address the problem, but they’re only a partial solution. Summaries typically follow the flow of an article, so a scanner with a 7 second attention span might miss the second to last line of the summary. So he might not know from the summary that the article contains what he wants.

Enter the table of contents. This hyperlinked group of keywords is an easily scannable information desk, like the ones you find in malls. It enables rushed visitors to get a better idea of what lies below the fold and deep in the heart of any article.

Thus a table of contents is a tool to reinforce message match on long tail keywords and content that lies below the fold.

In the absence of a table of contents, I’d venture a guess that people may start reading at the introduction (or summary). But if they’re not captivated quickly, they probably won’t dig down in the hopes of something more interesting showing up.

With a table of contents, even if the introduction fails to grab readers, the table of contents may lead them further into the text.

Copious inline navigation

This is another way of lifting time on site and pageviews, as I’ve seen in my own personal experience. In most cases, greater time on site and more pageviews correlate to greater engagement and likelihood to convert. Additionally, this obviously ends up being very valuable for SEO.

Wikipedia is well known for pioneering the linking of keywords throughout its articles to whatever Wikipedia page existed on the topic of that keyword. Its users appear to largely appreciate this navigation, as I learned from my friend Rachel.

While chatting one day at one of my school’s computer labs, Rachel told me that she loved reading Wikipedia, for entertainment. “I could spend hours and hours reading Wikipedia,” she told me.

Obviously, she and other users browse Wikipedia articles and click from one to another. Heck, I’ve done it myself while reading about famous privateers/pirates in colonial times.

While broad general navigation is good, Rachel-style use of Wikipedia is only possible due to the simple system of internal linking that Wikipedia has created. When editing a Wikipedia page, you just need to put double square brackets around a word (i.e. [[word]] ), and it will then automatically link to Wikipedia’s page on the topic.

Nowadays, major newspapers like the New York Times have adopted the practice, and it gains more currency amongst the Wordpress community daily. Wordpress bloggers have downloaded my Internal link building plugin, which automates Wikipedia-style inline navigation, over 7,300 times from my own site since it was released a year ago. And many more downloads have occurred of translated versions hosted by East European SEOs.

So consider using in-line navigation to engage users longer and make more money.

Competitive intelligence doesn’t just come from analyzing competitors’ backlinks. By analyzing some of the web’s most popular sites, it’s possible to discover usability techniques that can be easily copied over to lower bounce rates and lift time on site. The conversions should follow.

If you could have had a crystal ball in 2004, would you have known that the power of online marketing is hiding within conversations? Did you consider that the content you put on your homepage holds little salt with readers unless it can be backed up with outside information? People still want the same thing today as they did five years ago: trusted people-tested results and recommendations.

Were you aware back then that search engine technology has undergone several scientific studies to help determine the effectiveness of search results for Internet users? What helps search engines understand what we want? Conversations. Why do we want anyone talking about our web sites? Conversions.

Who got the better deal?

The other day I was running errands and a woman stopped me to admire my Teva flip flops. She said she had a pair and loved them but hadn’t seen them in the color combination I was wearing. We compared notes about how we learned about this product and who got the better deal.

I learned about my Teva’s from a social networking web site dedicated to women over 40. A small staff tests products marketed to women in that demographic and report their findings on their web site. They also invite member feedback. They promote these discussions and each product they test in Facebook, which is how I learned about the flip flops.

Based on the high praise of testers and member feedback, I followed the affiliate link and bought two pairs, one for myself and one for my daughter. I paid full price and was taken to a web site that offered over 30 choices of the product to select from. The whole process went well. I felt good about the purchase based on the type of customer conversations that followed the site’s review. I was also able to add my own feedback to the discussion when I received my flip flops.

The woman I met described her experience. She was browsing online shopping sites and followed a link that took her to a sale on flip flops. She wasn’t so concerned with the brand name as much as she was with the price. The page she landed on displayed two pairs of flip flops, at a buy two-for-one price that was 60% cheaper than what I had paid for mine. She was happy with her bargain, until she saw mine and realized there were other patterns nicer than what she bought. She asked me to show her the manufacturer tag and this is how she learned it was Teva’s that she had purchased. Her experience satisfied her need for the right price, but she had no recall of the name of the flip flops, couldn’t remember the web site where she purchased them from, and she was never prompted to visit the Teva site to see more choices. She also had no opinions to help inform her purchase. She simply went with the bargain price.

She got the better deal. She paid far less than I did. But I had the better interactive customer experience. I was never a number or a body-less sale. I also not only remembered the name of the site where I made my purchase, but I returned to it again to leave a comment. I’ve also recommended it to people. Most people will never hear about the other woman’s Teva experience, because she wasn’t really sure she had even bought that brand. She was certainly not inspired to share her experience online anywhere. She will not help sell the shoes or refer the web site she ordered hers from.

Conversion optimization

From the perspective of the web site owners whose site I purchased my shoes from, they made out well. They use social networking to get the word out about their web site and each new product they test. They use images to help illustrate experiences with products. When optimized for image searching, these pictures may take searchers directly to their product pages. They create a community with free membership. Feedback is strongly encouraged. And it’s not just words. They figured out the emotional connection that’s also needed for conversions. A product used to remove cellulite showed real members’ before and after photos. Women love to know they’re not alone with some sort of perceived “body imperfection.” The site owners understand how trust increases conversions by using genuine photos and comments instead of marketing hype. How fun it is to respond to a “me too!” moment.

They also earned money for all their focus on conversion optimization, although they most likely don’t come to work everyday calling it that. More likely these site owners ask themselves what would work for them and their community. What would sell to women like them? What have other web sites missed by targeting baby boomers or marketing to women? Or, what doesn’t work? What have women been miffed about for so long? Could it be images of size zero women models? Perhaps altered images or just the fact that we know so many diet and health product marketing relies on fake and touched up photos? The owners of this site set down to optimize for emotion, trust, momentum, credibility and findability.

Most search marketers focus on keyword marketing, keywords in domains and quantities of inbound links. This is important, but search engines are also strongly invested in our web usage behavior. Truly, it is how we search, make choices and interact online that matters most to conversion optimization, and it always has been.

Sure, some of us call this usability, user experience, persuasive architecture and search usability. The unifying thread is the human to human connection or “social conversation.” Perhaps you’ve heard this term too and toss it aside as just another fancy name for social networking. However, consider semantic search. Consider all the ways we define words. Keywords can no longer rule the stage because there are so many definitions for certain words. “Green” is a color, and so much more. “Cougar” is an animal, and so much more. “Cup” is something that holds coffee, and so much more. After years of search results’ leading to re-searches, today’s search engines know that to present us with accurate search results will take a mix of magical mind reading and a more practical study of our brains and human-computer behavior.

We can help by creating conversions that help search technology understand the context in which words are placed. Someday, you will be able to type, “lump found in breast,” and search engines will know we’re not talking about a chicken, perhaps it’s a woman who is conducting the search, and it will bring up medical sites and supportive sites, such as those put up by survivors. Search engines will know what results to give you based on your search history, your location and, remarkably, by whom you converse with and how you network.

Your mission is to optimize to be remembered, design for effortless ease of use and accessibility and to be honest, authentic and well, human.