“… A good way to solve problems is to start with the big picture… [because if you don’t understand the big picture] you may solve the wrong problem, or might not explore other—possibly better—answers.”

I thought that idea neatly summarized the perceived battle between “new” SEO and “old” SEO. Search optimization professionals should know and understand the big picture before they define and tout the “new” SEO.

Instead of focusing on flavor-of-the-month/day/year optimization tactics, what are the big-picture items SEO professionals should always keep in mind? Does each flavor-of-the-month tactic support the big picture… or is it merely a flavor-of-the-month tactic that can largely be ignored or discounted?

Here is my take on the perceived smackdown.

Keywords have always been an important part of an SEO strategy because labels and descriptions of Web documents often contain keywords that communicate both aboutness and information scent.

Keywords, Aboutness And Labeling

Keywords, keywords, keywords — I swear it’s a search optimizer’s mantra. I’ve heard myself chant this mantra many times over the years. I’m equally guilty of this chanting.

Honestly, though, what are we optimizers really chanting about? Keywords? Maybe not.

Maybe the bigger picture we’re not seeing is that we are chanting about different types of labels, including but not limited to:

• Content labels
• Navigation labels
• Document labels

Of course, when I just re-read what I wrote in the previous paragraph, one word jumped out: about.

Maybe the true big picture is aboutness. Keywords are important for communicating aboutness for both human and non-human users.

So maybe the “old” picture is keywords. The “big” picture (which has always been present) is aboutness.

Site Architecture & Design

Site architecture, page layout, and design are still important for communicating:

• Sense of place
• Information scent
• Accessibility (to content)
• Visual hierarchy

Remember, site architecture includes both information architecture (IA) and technical architecture. A website’s infrastructure should get stronger over time and allow for the natural evolution of content.

So, I ask: how are any of these concepts “new” SEO? SEO pioneers, such as Eric Ward and I, have  known these big-picture items for many years. And, we’ve refined our methodology to accommodate technology evolution.

And, that brings me to another hotly debated topic…

Link Development + Social Media = Validation

I remember reading this from Selena Narayanasamy’s article, Lessons From The Auto Industry: Leveraging Social For Organic Traction:

“Links are not often thought of as a by-product of a great social campaign. Often the goals of those working on social profiles for a brand revolve around a simple goal: Getting more followers and building an audience… There’s more to social than simply having a sounding board. If you leverage your fans and followers correctly, they’ll be your key to naturally generating links and mentions around your brand.”

I loved reading that observation because I tend to share the latter perspective. I have always viewed social media as forms of validation and credibility.

Here’s my point: Eric Ward has been a link-building practitioner since 1994 (and he has a library/information sciences background like me). SEO companies in the 1990s specialized in link development (such as John Audette’s Multimedia Marketing group) years before Google became known and popular.

Social media has existed for a long time. Instead of newsgroups and forums, we now have Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others. Who knows whether or not these social media icons will stand the test of time?

I know that validity and credibility will stand the test of time because they are a critical part of the searcher experience.

Credibility is a key facet in a positive searcher experience.Reprinted with permission from Peter Morville.

(To download the full image and explanation of Morville’s “User Experience Honeycomb: Searcher’s Edition,” please go to Flickr.)

Web Searcher Behaviors

Searching/finding behaviors are still important, with informational goals coming more and more to the forefront due to the knowledge graph and ever-evolving semantic search.

In spite of the one-size-fits-all mantra of responsive design supporters, they still do not realize that people locate and discover desired content differently on mobile devices than they do on devices with larger screens.

For example, currently, quick-fact searches (an informational type of search) are more common on mobile devices than on devices with larger screens.

Navigational and transactional queries are still important, as they are with desktop/notebook computers. But user experience professionals need to look at the big picture as well — findability is a critical part of the searcher experience.

Look at the User Experience Honeycomb above. See “Findability” in there? Yup, it’s there. As information architecture guru Peter Morville said in his book “Ambient Findability,” “You can’t use what you can’t find.”

So, is “new” SEO that different from “old” SEO? Maybe the details… but not the big picture. Search Engine Land readers, I think that first quote is critical for truly understanding SEO. You have to understand the big picture or else you will probably solve the wrong problem.

Selecting a user-friendly (and searcher-friendly) color scheme usually falls into the hands of technical and/or artistic staff who might not understand the usability and SEO impact of color selection.

As I mentioned in SEO Smackdown: Information Architecture vs. Technical Architecture, whenever I hear certain geek-speak, I am reasonably sure that I am not talking to a person who truly understands the SEO big picture.

Honestly, how many Web designers commonly use the SEO jargon of crawlability and indexation?

Website design and development are two unique skill sets that often overlap. Some artists and graphic designers have incredible technical skills and vice-versa. Color selection often falls into the hands of both technical and artistic staff.

To both designers and developers: do you understand that your color selection affects how your website content might be interpreted and displayed by a commercial Web search engine?

Do you understand how Web searchers might interpret your color selections? Do you understand that your color selection can negatively affect conversions… even with a #1 search engine ranking?

Usability Impact Of Color Selection

As I mentioned in a previous article, Clickability and Search-Engine Friendly Web Design, clickability is a critical part of the user/searcher experience.

To reiterate important points:

• All clickable items on a webpage should look clickable
• All unclickable items on a webpage should not look clickable
• All clickable-looking items on a webpage should be clickable and provide feedback
• Don’t put a link on a page that you do not intend for searchers/users to click

I am certainly not saying that every text link needs to be formatted as blue and underlined. Not at all. I am saying that clickable and unclickable text should not be formatted the same way. To a search engine, it might appear as if you are trying to hide links from users but not search engines.

“But Shari!” I hear many Web developers and designers alike exclaim with the requisite eye roll. “That design principle is Sooooo outdated. People will figure out what to click on after they put their cursor/mouse/finger on the text.”

What these designers and developers are describing is called minesweeping. According to Usability.gov, minesweeping is:

“An action designed to identify where on a page links are located on a web page. Minesweeping involves the user rapidly moving the cursor or pointer over a web page, watching to see where the cursor or pointer changes to indicate the presence of a link.”

I’ve personally conducted usability tests for over ten years on desktops, mobile phones, and tablets. I’ve observed, first-hand, who minesweeps for links and who doesn’t. Do you know the group who genuinely likes to minesweep? Children.

Now my next question to you is this: does your target audience include children? I didn’t think so.

Furthermore, requiring users/searchers to minesweep slows task completion. And, to be perfectly honest, if an item on your webpage does not look clickable, most users/searchers won’t click on it.

So, if  you are going to use color to indicate clickable and unclickable elements, please use them consistently. Don’t confuse both searchers and search engines.

Color, Legibility & Readability

In my first book, “Search Engine Visibility,” I wrote about the five Rules of Web Design. The first rule is that all websites should be easy to read. Of course, the rule has corollaries, such as:

• Easy to scan (visual hierarchy)
• Legible
• Understandable

Color contrast is extremely important for legibility. The highest color contrast comes from using the two colors black and white. Some Web designers like to use white text against a black background because it seems to be more stylish, but it is actually more difficult to read and can lead to lower conversions. If you make content too difficult to read, it does not lead to the best link development. And, as we all know, link development is still a key component of the SEO process.

And, do you use colors that have low color contrast, such as light gray text on a white background? Or, did your Web designer set your text size too small to read (which I commonly see in mobile designs)? That would be considered a form of search engine spam, even if the text were barely legible.

If I am working on a website that implements responsive design, for example, I make sure the font-size never falls below a certain size. Sacrificing legibility and readability for simpler coding isn’t a very user-centric approach.

Color must also be understandable and easily interpreted. “Color communicates a message by association,” said Flint McGlaughlin from MECLABS in his recent webinar, “How Do Website Colors Impact Conversion?”

The color blue can have many different meanings. Navy blue can communicate professionalism, security, trust, and dignity. Aqua blue has a different message (whimsical, cool, tropical, water). And a soft, light blue can often feel more feminine than masculine.

So, always keep color contrast in mind so that your site is easy to read and easy to interpret by both searchers and search engines. In order for your website’s color scheme to be understandable, you should also understand color associations and culture.

Color Associations & Culture

“Most international marketers know they need to handle the broader cultural issues rather than just language, said Andy Atkins-Krueger, CEO of WebCertain. “But not so many can easily define culture. For me ‘culture’ is our home environment, the one we’re used to and when things look a bit odd – when we’re browsing the Web, for instance, and seeing strange websites – then that’s probably because what we’re looking at has been created by someone with a different home culture.”

Some people might not know this about me: my master’s degree is in Asian Studies (Japanese), and I spent some years teaching Asian religion, literature, and culture.

As a Web designer and SEO, I know that the color red communicates happiness in China; anger and danger in Japan; and life and creativity in India.

When I design websites whose target audience is outside of the US, I rarely use the same template and color scheme.

Here’s a quote from my favorite SEO book of 2012, “Global Search Engine Marketing: Fine-Tuning Your International Search Engine Results”:

“Even Baidu notes ’Chinese culture has some identity-forming meanings that affect user behavior strongly, namely in color, number, symbol, language, and so on.’”

“I have found that the color red is not as negative as in the US. I have found American designs be much based on the color blue while Scandinavians are more open to multi-colors,” said Kristjan Mar Hauksson, Director of Internet Marketing at Nordic eMarketing and co-author of “Global Search Engine Marketing: Fine-Tuning Your International Search Engine Results.“

“You really need a whole list of potential cultural issues – or you could call them trust factors since working with someone within their culture builds trust which means they’re more likely to buy,” said Atkins-Kruger. “The problem is that culture isn’t just one thing. It’s not just the colour selection, the language, the currency symbols, the complexity or simplicity of the page, reading right to left instead of left to right, calendar formats, forms, zip code formats or alternatives, credit card symbols, delivery timescales, image content or any of the other hundreds of small items. It’s all of them. It’s their combined effect. It’s the answer to the question, “are we among friends?”

“So for example, in southern Ireland or Eire, there are no postcodes at all (don’t make them mandatory),” he continues. “In Thailand, purple represents mourning whereas the west associates the colour with Royalty. If you don’t accept Union Pay credit cards in China, you almost certainly won’t do any business. When western companies change their template from left-to-right reading, to right-to-left, they frequently forget to change the calendars.  And dates in the UK are not presented in the same way they are in the US.”

So, Search Engine Land readers, please consider how you implement color on your websites. Color is a very large part of search-engine friendly design. Color affects link development. Color affects conversions. And the improper use of color can be considered search engine spam. Color is extremely important to searchers.

References

• Provide Consistent Clickability Cues. For research and examples about minesweeping.
• Avoid Misleading Cues to Click. For research and articles about clickable links.
• Lighthouse International. Worldwide organization dedicated to overcoming vision impairment through rehabilitation, education, research and advocacy.
• Color: Designing for a Global User Experience. Webinar about color and culture from one of my favorite speakers and authors, Molly Holschlag.
• Kennedy, Anne F.; Hauksson, Kristjan Mar (2012). Global Search Engine Marketing: Fine-Tuning Your International Search Engine Results. (Que Biz-Tech), Pearson Education (US).

Getting shoppers in the door from search engines is the easy part. Getting them to buy from your online store is the difficult part.

Shopping cart dropout rates are a problem many online retailers have to overcome. Every day customers who appear to be ready to make a purchase abandon their carts before completing the online transaction. This happens for a number of reasons. Even the visitor may not be sure why, only that he didn’t want the products after all.

However, while cart abandonment may be par for the course with online shopping, there are things an e-commerce site can do to reduce the root causes of this action.

Make It Easy To View Items In The Cart

Your main navigation should always have a clear and obvious link that allows visitors to view items in their cart. You cannot rely on “view cart” buttons in your product pages alone.

Many visitors may be shopping around category pages without any direct links to their shopping cart. Adding a “view cart” link into your main navigation ensures visitors can easily begin the checkout process, regardless of where they are in the site.

Simplify Changing & Updating Cart Items

When a visitor is viewing the items in her cart, there is often a desire to remove products, increase or reduce desired quantity, change color, size or other options. All of these options should be available right there in the cart, rather than forcing the shopper back to the product page.

Keep Advertising & Up-Selling To A Minimum

Your shopping cart is no place for an ad! But it’s not a bad place for small up-sell opportunities. If an item requires additional products to make it functionable, up-sells are important.

If there are just some additional accessories you want to sell, you can do so, provided it doesn’t interfere with the conversion process. Rule of thumb: When checking out, the fewer distractions the better.

Highlight Security Features

Shoppers are very concerned about the security of their personal information. Be sure to implement and highlight security features such as privacy policies, site security, BBB (and similar organization) memberships, as well as return/refund policies. All of these provide signals of trust that visitors calculate into the checkout decision-making process.

Optional Storing Of Personal Information

You should never keep shopper’s personal information (such as credit card numbers, addresses, etc.) unless specifically requested by the shopper or as part of an account he or she chooses to create.

It’s also important not to force shoppers to create an account just to make a purchase. Make this entirely optional and put that option at the end of your checkout process.

Answer Shipping & Other Questions Upfront

If visitors have questions about shipping, returns, warranty, orders or other questions, they’ll want these answers before they complete their purchase. Providing these answers, or at least provide a link to where the answers can be found, will prevent visitors from leaving the cart to search out that information on your site – and perhaps never return to the cart to finish the purchase.

Provide International Shipping Compatibility

If you ship internationally, you must make sure your information forms support international addresses and phone numbers. Many US websites use forms that collection information using the American standards. Unfortunately, this makes it difficult for those with international addresses and numbers. Ensure your form has international compatibility if you want that business.

Provide An Order Progress Update

In some cases, the checkout process requires multiple steps. The fewer steps your checkout form has, the lower your abandonment rates will be. So, one step is always best. However, if you can’t get around it, be sure to include a progress indicator that gives visitors an idea of what step they are on and how many more to go.

Along those lines, it’s a good idea to keep visitors informed of progress of the completed order. Be sure to send out emails that let them know when items are shipping, along with how they can track the package.

No purchase is complete until it’s complete. Shoppers may be ready to buy, but sometimes even the smallest roadblock can derail them from the process. The last thing you want to do is to give them an opportunity to back out because they just don’t “feel right” about the purchase. A well-designed shopping cart page can help ensure these shoppers feel safe and have everything they need to feel good about their decision.

Image credit: elnur / 123RF Stock Photo

Just because your navigation is built into the site doesn’t mean it’s doing the best job of giving your visitors what they want.

Navigation can make or break your website’s overall performance when it comes to retaining visitors, keeping them engaged and driving them through the conversion funnel.

Strong site navigation makes it easy for visitors to quickly find the information that interests them, sans a potentially frustrating “hunt.” It also helps search engines index your important information efficiently and effectively.

Conversely, poor navigation does more harm than good. It confuses visitors and sends them scurrying for the exit. When they can’t find what they’re looking for, you don’t get the conversion you want, either.

How To Improve Your Website Navigation

• Keep it consistent. Consistent navigation – in both how and where it appears on your site – promotes ease of use and increases your visitors’ ability to find relevant information more quickly. If your navigation is constantly changing from page to page (except where absolutely necessary), visitors lose their on-site bearings and must reorient themselves constantly.
• Divide categories clearly. If your navigation contains multiple sections, categories or sub-categories, these categories must be clearly and visually defined. In other words, category headings must be separated visually from the sub-categories, even if the categories are links themselves.
• Make all navigation elements clickable links. When using multiple categorical divisions in your navigation, all heading elements should be clickable links. This is true even with drop-down menus where clicking a sub-category link may be the natural inclination of the visitor.
• Use accurate navigation titles. Visitors should have a general idea of what they should find on a page even before clicking any navigational link. This is true whether it’s a main navigation link or an internal text link. Use accurate text to describe the linked page so visitors know what they’re going to get. Cryptic or misleading navigation text confuses and annoys visitors, possibly to the point of site abandonment. Make sure all link verbiage, whether textual or in an image, accurately portrays the corresponding pages.
• Ensure every clickable image has ALT text. This is true of every image, but even more important for images that link to other pages. Be sure to include the ALT attribute with descriptive text. This ensures that everybody knows what the link is, regardless of how they are viewing your site.
• Ensure your search feature works. When using an in-site search feature, the search results page must always produce relevant results. It must compensate for misspellings, show related items and even produce results for products you don’t have while displaying similar products you offer. Never produce a search result as “no products found.”

It Doesn’t Work Until You Prove It

An easy, effective way to test your site’s navigation is to first browse a competitor’s website. As you do, take notes on what you like and don’t like. Jot down any problems you run across, as well as anything that stands out as being exceptional. Then go back to your own site and perform the same navigation and note-taking process.

Compare notes between the sites and see if there is anything you can do to make your navigation better. I’m sure you’ll find areas where your navigation is better, but most likely you’ll also uncover areas where your navigation is inferior.

Of course, an even better way to test is to use your analytics to see how visitors are navigating through your site. Make changes only as you can test them with A/B or multivariate tests to ensure you can implement changes that help rather than hurt your site’s overall performance. Use whatever tools you have at your disposal. Continue to test and tweak to ensure your visitors get the best experience possible and you’re getting the results you want.

Image credits: maya13 / 123RF Stock Photo, shutterstock.com

That thought reminded me of information architecture guru Peter Morville’s 3 Circles/Pillars of Information Architecture (diagram below):

Used with permission of http://semanticstudios.com

In this diagram, Morville shows how and why we must strike a balance on each web project between “business goals and context, user needs and behavior, and the available mix of content.”

I wondered if there might be an analogous diagram for SEO, and I came up with this:

Contributors to a successful searcher experience: website owners, searchers, and search engines.

In order to achieve a successful searcher experience, all 3 of these elements need to be present and align beautifully. Let’s look at each of these items individually and see how each group is responsible for their part of the searcher experience.

Website Owners & Aboutness

Website owners have a very important contribution to the searcher experience: aboutness. Aboutness needs to be communicated to both searchers and search engines:

• Do content labels (titles, headings, subheadings, annotations/descriptions, etc.) communicate what page content is about?
• Do navigation labels reinforce a sense of place, information scent, and the aboutness of page content?
• Do document labels (file name, URL structure, etc.) communicate aboutness well enough when search engines are not yet able to clearly determine aboutness from actual document content, such as a graphic image (GIF, JPEG, PNG)?

Aboutness is a term that few people know about or comprehend. Because of this “aboutness” ignorance, it is often skipped and/or misinterpreted during the web development, content creation, and search optimization processes.

Regardless of knowledge level, website owners and SEOs alike both contribute heavily to the searcher experience. Our responsibility is to communicate aboutness to both search engines and searchers as succinctly and clearly as we can.

That being said, now let’s look at another circle of the searcher experience….

Web Searchers & Keywords

Web searchers have a responsibility to communicate what they want to find. As a website usability professional, I have the opportunity to observe Web searchers in their natural environments. What I find quite interesting is the “Blame Google” mentality.

I remember a question posed to me during World IA Day this past year. An attendee said that Google constantly gets search results wrong. He used a celebrity’s name as an example.

“I wanted to go to this person’s official website,” he said, “but I never got it in the first page of search results. According to you, it was an informational query. I wanted information about this celebrity.”

I paused. “Well,” I said, “why are you blaming Google when it is clear that you did not communicate what you really wanted?”

“What do you mean?” he said, surprised.

“You just said that you wanted information about this celebrity,” I explained. “You can get that information from a variety of websites. But you also said that you wanted to go to X’s official website. Your intent was clearly navigational. Why didn’t you type in [celebrity name] official website? Then you might have seen your desired website at the top of search results.”

The stunned silence at my response was almost deafening. I broke that silence.

“Don’t blame Google or Yahoo or Bing for your insufficient query formulation,” I said to the audience. “Look in the mirror. Maybe the reason for the poor searcher experience is the person in the mirror…not the search engine.”

People need to learn how to search. Search experts need to teach people how to search. Enough said.

Connecting Searchers & Web Documents

Search engines certainly have a responsibility in the searcher experience. Not only must search engines correctly and accurately interpret searcher intent from often-insufficient keyword combinations, they must also accurately determine the aboutness of millions (or billions) of Web documents. And then rank those documents accordingly.

Search engine software engineers have a very difficult responsibility, as website owners and other Web professionals do not label content and navigation clearly, and searchers honestly do not know how to search effectively. Add to that the many, many unethical SEO practices that are misleading and that miscommunicate aboutness? Well, let’s just say that I have a great deal of empathy for search engine software engineers.

What are your responsibilities and contributions to a successful searcher experience…both as an SEO/SEM professional and as a web searcher? Can you objectively see your “Blame Google” mentality? Can you objectively and consistently communicate aboutness to both humans and machines? Do search engines misinterpret searcher behaviors and aboutness?

Think about it. The answers might not be as simple as we would like them to be.

His beautiful new website wasn’t getting many visitors!

“Why don’t people want to visit our lovely website?” Thomas wailed, genuinely puzzled that the results of his intensive efforts weren’t as rosy as he had expected. As a strategic SEO consultant, the reasons were glaringly obvious to me… but I had to soften the impact, and gently explain what went wrong.

Together, we quickly checked the site’s ranking on Google for his top 50 keywords.  They weren’t anywhere in the top 10 results. Or even 20.

You see, the not-so-apparent reason for the ‘failed’ website was the lack of something essential for both higher search engine rankings, and to enhance the visitor experience which can convert a prospect into a customer.

What’s that, you ask?

Thomas’s new website, though visually appealing and technology-rich, was sorely lacking in a well planned information architecture and website structure.

But what is “information architecture”? And how does “website structure” differ from design?

A formal definition of “information architecture” would likely put you to sleep! So let’s simply call it the art of organizing and labeling website content, and bringing design and architecture principles to bear on it.

To understand this better, we’ll look at the skeleton of a website, shorn of flesh and skin, stripped down to the basic fundamentals of what shapes and strengthens it – from within.

Basic Concepts Of Information Architecture

In medical school, trainees begin by learning about human anatomy. Knowing what makes up the body helps understand (and later treat) diseases that affect it.

At the heart of understanding website structure, and planning your strategy for information architecture, lies a need to know about terms like semantic search, latent semantic indexing, knowledge graph, and SEO automation.

Semantic search is an attempt to improve search accuracy by predicting the intent of a searcher. The shift from blindly matching keywords typed into a search box against a massive database, to a more “intelligent” form of search that attempts to understand what those words actually mean to the user, has serious implications on strategic SEO for many business owners.

Latent Semantic Indexing is an indexing and retrieval method that was designed to identify patterns in the relationship between terms and concepts within any text.

By providing unique context for each search term or phrase, it ensures that a search for ‘Apple’ computers will retrieve pages with iMac or iPad on it, while a search for ‘Apple’ fruit will pull a different set of results on gardening and growing apples.

The “knowledge graph” is made up of collated information that will help search services like Google deliver more than just a list of 10 websites, and provide contextual information that solves users’ problems better (even when those problems are not explicitly voiced by the user)!

The implications are clear. Keywords are open to being manipulated. User intent cannot be gamed so easily.

To survive a search engine war fought on the battlefield of semantic search, your business must deeply understand the psychology of your collective market, and then provide specific and meaningful answers to their problems, doubts and insecurities in the form of optimized Web pages that are simultaneously designed to rank well… and also fit into the bigger context of your overall business goals.

At first glance, this seems a daunting challenge. But it’s really straightforward if you proceed with a rational plan rooted in strategy, founded on information architecture principles and framed upon a solid website structure.

Before we explore these elements in greater depth, I’d like to make something clear.

This Is Not A Fight Between Designers & SEO Experts!

Traditionally, these two camps have been at loggerheads. Designers feel SEO ruins their carefully planned look and feel. SEO hotshots complain that higher ranking is sacrificed on the altar of a prettier website.

Yes, it is possible for a design-obsessed structure to wreak havoc with a site’s SEO. It’s also possible for a website driven entirely by SEO to destroy a brand or ruin sales potential. With planning and high quality implementation, the strengths of both specialties can be harnessed to offer a business incredible synergy.

Exploring how this happy union can be achieved is the goal of this report.

Today, any successful website needs:

• SEO (to drive relevant, quality traffic that is looking to buy),
• usability (to manage and convert these visitors into paying customers), and
• the ability synergize both to work in concert, building your brand and growing your business.

Without understanding the reasons why people search, SEO professionals will often misinterpret or improperly classify keyword phrases.

• What are people searching for? (keywords/labels, file type)
• Where are people conducting their searches? (location)
• When are people conducting searches? (date, time)
• Who is using the commercial web search engines? (target audience)
• How are people searching? (desktop/tablet/mobile, query/browse/ask)
• Why are people conducting searches? (goals, intention, motivation)

Keyword research tools, web analytics data, advertising data, and other resources provide us with some answers. However, for our conclusions to be accurate, we should also understand the data and resources in context.

For example, keyword research tools can tell us what people are searching for and the order in which searchers type in keywords. But keyword research tools do not provide a lot of context about each keyword phrase. Therefore, savvy search engine optimizers know that they must use other means to understand searcher context.

Common Mistakes In Query Classification

When it comes to keyword classification, I often observe SEO professionals place their mental models onto keywords without (a) understanding searcher context, and (b) understanding query classification.

Here are some examples.

Scenario #1

Web searcher Bob is about to vacation in Hawaii. He wants to check the balance of his frequent flyer miles. Is Bob’s intent navigational, informational, or transactional?

Many people answer this question incorrectly because they believe that the word “check” indicates transactional intent. However, in order for a person to check the amount of his frequent flyer miles online, he must go to a specific website and log in.

Even though the final intent is to do online activities (log in and look up frequent flyer miles), the essential step before these activities is to go to a specific website. Therefore, the query (keyword) classification is navigational.

Scenario #2

Searcher Natalie conducts a Web search for headphones. Does this keyword communicate navigational, informational, or transactional intent? Explain your answer.

All too often, the immediate and natural thought process is like this: “If I typed in the word headphones into Google, what does it mean?”

The problem with this way of thinking is simple. The second you think about what you would do and why you would do it, you are placing your personal mental model onto the searcher. The idea behind query classification is to understand searcher context, not your context.

So how would I answer this question? Here is my analysis:

(1) Ad hoc query

My initial thought when I saw this query? I thought it was an informational query, more specifically an ad hoc query. With an ad hoc search, the searcher’s goal is to find as many relevant documents as possible about available headphones, a “fishing expedition.

Headphones is a single word. Natalie did not mention brand, type, or any other qualifier word. This single-word query also leads me to believe that this is an ad hoc search.

(2) Transactional intent not specified

Natalie might want to purchase headphones eventually, but the single keyword does not specify whether or not she wishes to make the purchase online or in a physical store.

Transactional queries are ones where the searcher wishes to perform some Web-mediated activity. Since Natalie did not specify whether or not she wanted to purchase headphones online, this makes the keyword query seem less transactional.

Even if Natalie eventually planned on purchasing headphones, she might want to find out about the different types of headphones (over-the-ear, wireless, earbuds, etc.) and compare prices.

So before Natalie decides to purchase, she is finding out information about headphones before an actual online or offline transaction.

(3) Plural = possible list

When a searcher types in the plural form of a keyword, it is an indication that he or she wants to see a list of items. When a searcher wants to view a list of items, it shows informational intent.

Headphones is a word that can indicate singular or plural.

Therefore, I concluded that the keyword headphones is an informational query that might lead to an online or offline transaction – keeping in mind that the online or offline transaction might not be an immediate need or desire.

Granted, these are just my interpretations of the keywords. Had I observed Bob or Natalie in their natural search environments, I could determine more easily their searcher goals.

Card Sorting Analogy

As a website usability professional, I am fortunate to observe people in their natural search environments. Furthermore, I get to conduct usability tests with keywords. Many of my SEO insights are a result of ongoing usability testing.

One usability test I use to determine searcher mental models about keywords is a card sort test. (Please see When Good SEO Becomes Bad Information Architecture for info on the different types of card sort tests.)  Card sort tests can also help SEO professionals determine the best labels when optimizing web documents.

I recently attended a webinar presented by information architect and card-sorting guru Donna Spencer entitled Designing Usable Categories with Card Sorting. I discovered that Donna and I have the same experience with keywords and user mental models.

Card sort tests can be conducted online and offline (usually face-to-face). In her webinar, Donna explained some of the differences between a face-to-face card sort test and an online card sort test. Sometimes, Donna conducts face-to-face card sort tests in groups of three. The value of group testing is listening to participants talk through what they think.

She could observe:

• Where test participants really disagreed
• How test participants resolved the labeling dispute (if it were resolved)
• The words that participants did not write on a sticky note or an index card

In other words, she often hears why test participants had an easy or difficult time determining a category label…something she might not experience by conducting the same test online.

When I observe users/searchers in their natural search environments and during usability tests, I often learn information that I do not get from keyword research tools.

For example, recently, I discovered that if I architected a website based on keyword research data, I would have completely missed the users’ mental models.

The keyword research data showed that the vast majority of search queries were by type. But all test participants mentioned their personal status (single or family) during the usability test. Consumers didn’t know the jargon for different types of services.

So for this company’s website, the primary way of organizing information was by target audience, not by type. Because of this, I modified the primary navigation and relevant page interlinking on the website.

I did not discount the keyword research data. I just used the keywords in the right context.

Sometimes, the missing SEO ingredient is understanding why people search.

To me, search engine optimization is optimizing a website for people who use search engines. Understanding searchers, their contexts and environments, behaviors, and intentions is just as important as understanding how search engines work.

In my opinion, if SEOs are optimizing websites without considering query classification and searcher personas, then they are optimizing more for search engines than for searchers (technology-centered optimization). Keyword classification is crucial for long-term search engine visibility and conversions.

Is query classification a part of your SEO plan?

Resources:

Broder, A. (2002). A taxonomy of web search. SIGIR Forum, 36(2): 3–10. Retrieved at http://www.sigir.org/forum/F2002/broder.pdf.

Jansen, B.J., Booth, D. & Spink, A. (2008). Determining the informational, navigational and transactional intent of Web queries. Information processing and management 44 (2008), 1251-1266.

Spencer, Donna. (2009.) Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories. Rosenfeld Media: Brooklyn, NY.

Thurow, S. and Musica, N. (2009). When Search Meets Web Usability. New Riders: Berkeley, CA.

Images from Shutterstock, used under license. 

He asked for some books to read, online courses to take, webinars to attend, and so forth. I gave him a partial list as a solid starting point.

When I sent him an upcoming webinar list (with descriptions and agendas) that had me excited, he replied, “I looked at these agendas, and I didn’t see anything related to search engines and SEO.”

My heart sunk. Smart man…very smart man…stuck inside of a SEO bubble.

As SEO professionals, we have conditioned ourselves to believe that if a document (webpage, image, video, webinar, etc.) contains a keyword phrase, then that keyword phrase must somehow describe the document and/or that document’s content.

As SEO professionals, we have conditioned ourselves to believe in, "No keywords? Not related!" Sometimes, there are connections we do not see because we view websites inside of an SEO bubble.

And vice versa—if a document doesn’t contain a keyword phrase, then the keyword phrase must not be applicable to that document.

One usability topic, in particular, might not seem as though it is related to search engine visibility, but it is: emotional design.

Visceral, Behavioral & Reflective Design

One of my favorite usability books is Donald A. Norman’s Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things.[1]  In his book, he discusses 3 different aspects of design:

• Visceral design
• Behavioral design
• Reflective design

According to Norman:

Visceral design concerns itself with appearance. The visceral level is fast: it makes rapid judgments of what is good or bad, safe or dangerous….  (p. 5 and p. 22)

Behavioral design has to do with the pleasure and effectiveness of use. The behavioral level is the site of most human behavior…. [It] is not conscious, which is why you can successfully drive your automobile subconsciously at the behavioral level while consciously thinking of something else at the reflective level. (p. 5 and p. 23)

Reflective design considers the rationalization and intellectualization of a product. The reflective level is the contemplative part of the brain. We can remember previous experiences and tell others about our problems. (p. 5 and pp. 22-23)

Usability professionals are mostly concerned with behavioral design. And Web designers are concerned mostly with visceral design. Interestingly, users/searchers are more tolerant of errors in attractive designs than in ugly ones.

“…although poor design is never excusable, when people are in a relaxed situation, the pleasant, pleasurable aspects of the design will make them more tolerant of difficulties and problems in the interface.” [2]

As a pioneer of search-engine friendly Web design, I have not focused primarily on aesthetic design. I have not focused primarily on accommodating search engines only because optimization involves both searchers and search engines.

Visceral Processing & Google Gullibility

I constantly observe 3 levels of processing all of the time when people interact with search engine results pages (SERPS) and websites.

The visceral level is hard to ignore on a Web SERP because of our instinctive human perceptions. If a site’s listing appears at the top of search results right now, it must be the most relevant, right? And if Google or Bing put that listing there, the link(s) must be safe to click, right?

How many times have we, as searchers, been constantly inundated with inappropriate search listings? Was it the searchers’ fault because we did not formulate an accurate query? Or is it the search engine’s fault, not able to filter out search engine spam? Or both?

Website usability guru Jakob Nielsen stated his article, User Skills Improving, But Only Slightly:

When it comes to search, users face three problems:

• Inability to retarget queries to a different search strategy
• Inability to understand the search results and properly evaluate each destination site’s likely usefulness
• Inability to sort through the SERP’s polluted mass of poor results, whether from blogs or from heavily SEO-optimized sites that are insufficiently specific to really address the user’s problem

Given these difficulties, many users are at the search engine’s mercy and mainly click the top links — a behavior we might call Google Gullibility.

In Emotional Design, Norman said that the visceral and behavioral levels are about the “here and now,” a user’s feelings and experiences when he/she is actually seeing or using a product. In our context, that product is a web search engine. What do searchers see? What do searchers do based on what they see in SERPs?

On the flip side, the reflective level is long term. On the reflective level, users/searchers remember past experiences with SERPs and corresponding websites.

Therefore, to overcome Google gullibility, we have to rely on a different part of our brain: the reflective level.

Reflective Design In Search Listings & Landing Pages

In Emotional Design, Norman said:

Of the three levels, the reflective one is the most vulnerable to variability through culture, experience, education, and individual differences. This level can also override the others. (p. 38)

I observed reflective processing in full force in the last month on an ecommerce website.

The searcher task was to purchase a box of blank-ink markers from a particular brand. Interestingly, one persona in their target audience loved this particular brand of markers so much that they constantly wrapped the markers with colored tape (so no one else in the lab would steal them). And they kept secret stashes in their lab stations.

I understand. I worked in biochemistry labs for about 10 years. These markers are perfect for labeling test tubes, Erlenmeyer flasks, beakers, and the like.

The brand owner of this marker created a separate website for these markers. And guess what searchers clicked on when they viewed the Google SERP? The mini-site’s listing, of course.

Searchers thought that going right to the source of their prized markers would save them a lot of time and (hopefully) money instead of browsing through a bunch of online stores.

However, the homepage of this branded marker site was a Flash-based splash page. I will summarize the basic response to the landing page:

“Oh hell no!” (Immediately clicked the back button)

This response clearly shows a reaction to reflective design because the searchers remembered what it was like to experience Flash-based splash pages. They didn’t want to watch a Flash movie in order to buy their prized markers.

Throughout the month, we performed other search tests. Do you know what happened when the searchers saw the mini-site’s listings appear in search results? Again, I will summarize the basic response:

“I’m not clicking on THAT link again!”

Search engine optimization isn’t only about the here and now. SEO is not a quick fix or a flavor-of-the-month set of strategies. SEO is about consistent, long-term findability.

Emotional design is an important part of the searcher experience from the very first to query to subsequent queries months later. Search engines do not have emotions…but searchers do.

References:

1. Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional Design: Why we love (or hate) everyday things. New York: Basic Books.
2. Norman, D. A. (2002). Emotion and design: Attractive things work better. Interactions Magazine, ix (4), 36-42. Retrieved at: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/emotion_design.html.

When it comes to keyword classification and context, it is far too easy to inject our personal opinions onto keyword phrases. It is not a “bad” thing to want to relate to, engage, and connect with your target audience.

As search optimizers, we sincerely hope that searchers’ mental models of desired content matches the content we have on our own and our clients’ websites.

Nevertheless, the ability to be objective about keywords is vital in order to truly understand web searchers. As SEO professionals, we not only need to understand the words and phrases that our target audiences type in to search engine, we also need to understand the context of keyword phrases.

Searcher Mental Models & Search Conditions

What exactly do I mean by context? By context, I am referring to a searcher’s mental model and the conditions under which he or she is searching.

Questions to consider:

• Is the search being conducted at home or at the office? Or both?
• Is the searcher using a desktop computer, tablet, or mobile phone?
• Is there a time constraint on the search query, such as needing to change ones hotel reservation due to a delayed flight?
• Or is the search session one that lasts over a period of 2-3 weeks, such as when a person is researching a product before purchasing?
• If the search session is long, are the keyword phrases repeat queries, possibly re-finding queries?
• Is the searcher a newbie, experienced, or expert Web searcher?

Some context can be gathered via Web analytics data and other types of software. But not 100% of searcher context. All too often, Web searchers do not type in their keyword context in a search box.

Keywords Without Context

Here is an example from some usability tests my firm conducted last year. We presented over 100 participants with a search box with a single keyword. The first word we presented was the word gas.

Here are a number of images that came to their minds (not presented in any particular order):

Images associated with the word gas.

Most participants immediately thought gas meant the gasoline that they put in their cars. We observed facial expressions of amusement when participants were thinking of belching/burping or farting.

Then, we changed the context. We told participants that the context was a medical/heathcare context.

None of them thought of natural gas or car fuel. Some participants thought of oxygen. Some (again) thought belching or flatulence. And a couple of participants thought of Group A Streptococcus (abbreviation is GAS). So even though the context was more specific with the second question, the keyword associations were quite different.

We next used something possibly simpler than a word: the letter K.

Here are a number of images that came to their minds after being shown the letter K in a search box (also not presented in any particular order):

Images associated with the letter K

I can tell you my immediate association with the letter K. It was file size, as in kilobytes. I am a Web designer/developer and an SEO. I optimize PDFs as part of my job. So that is my personal mental model.

Around 10% of participants associated the letter K with Vitamin K, which can be found in some of the foods shown above. Keywords associated with Vitamin K include vitamin(s), diet, supplement, vegetables, food, and so forth.

If you put a number in front of the letter K, it can completely change the context:

• 401(k)
• 18K or 14K

What are the words associated with 401(k)? They are probably words associated with savings, retirement, financial planning, and money.

What are the words associated with 18K and 14K? Probably jewelry, metals (gold, silver, platinum), gemstones, and so forth.

Notice how something as simple as a single number or a single word affects context. Notice how users/searchers expect to see different words on webpages based on their search conditions and mental models.

And, as I mentioned previously, searchers do not often type in their context into search queries.

The Untyped Context

Labeling is an area where the areas of information architecture and search engine optimization overlap. Part of my job, as an information architect and an SEO professional, is to understand how a client’s target audience organizes and labels content on a website.

One of my most eye-opening and humbling experiences as an information architect was to recognize that Web searchers do not organize content based on keyword research data. With every card sorting and other usability tests, I heard (and recorded) comments that were contrary to keyword research data.

People do not categorize insurance, travel, real estate, healthcare, food and recipes, etc. by topic but via other means. They might first categorize themselves as a part of a group and then search by topic.

They don’t type in their personal information (What group am I in?) in the search box. But they expect to see their context in search results and corresponding landing pages 100% of the time. They expect to see text, images, and even color associated with their context.

I constantly observe SEO professionals and website owners use volume of queries to architect a site when users/searchers organize content by less common keyword combinations.

In the examples above, look how a single word or a single letter changed the searcher context…and you might not see these words in analytics data or in the right volume.

I am not saying to discount keyword research tools. I have used them since 1995. They provide useful data, particularly for labeling. But I urge SEO professionals to consider alternative means of understanding searcher context.

• Field studies
• User interviews
• Usability testing
• Observing users/searchers in their “natural” search environment
• Diary studies

As information architect Peter Morville stated in his User Experience Design article years ago,”…we must strike a unique balance on each project between business goals and context, user needs and behavior, and the available mix of content.”

Adapted from information architecture guru Peter Morville’s 3 Pillars of Information Architecture. Image used with permission.

And from noted search expert Richard Zwicky in his Context Within Search and Optimization article, “This process of helping guide the search engine to better understand the context of a document, so that the engine can properly direct searchers to the right document, and thus ensure relevant results, is a the core of what any good search engine optimization firm must do. It should be at the core of every search engine algorithm, but obviously context is not yet there.”

Help search engines understand context. Open your eyes to other research methodologies. You won’t regret it.

How is it possible, you may wonder, that a website representing a popular brand could experience a day of lost sales during the busiest shopping time of the year? What did they lose, in addition to customer trust and revenue loss? Consider what they did to become that famous brand.

Most likely, they have a marketing company that handles everything from print advertising, PPC, sponsorships, social media marketing and organic on-page search engine optimization. They’re also more than likely to have user interface engineers hired to design attractive websites and programmers assigned to scripting and coding interactive forms, applications and pages.

Were the individuals in each of these areas testing together? Do they communicate any strategy that may interfere with something another department is working on? Unfortunately, the answer is often no.

In cases of large corporate website development, entire departments are working on the exact same project and each feels they have the most stake, power and investment. You can bet that when changes are made to the design and performance of an order process, starting from a product page, that along the way to final production, something wasn’t tested for both search engine and user reactions.

Objective Approach To Testing

If you’re reading this article, chances are you’re already on board with the idea that Usability and SEO procedures do, in fact, blend together well. It wasn’t always accepted and there are some people who still insist the two practices can’t live together.

Frankly, unless you’ve mastered one, you can’t succeed at mixing the other into your personal practice unless you’ve spent time in the other camp. Nothing bangs you over the head with an “Ah Ha!” moment better than when you realize that to truly make your client or employer’s Web based project successful, you must understand how search engines index and rank, and how people search and make choices from search engines and webpages.

As simple as this might sound, finding people with both usability and search engine strategy and testing skills is quite difficult. In addition, there is an understandable lack of understanding what usability and search marketers do because there are related, and just as important, skills, tactics, practices and procedures each profession can do to enhance value.

For example, despite complaints that information architecture is dying and SEO is already dead, the truth is that long-term success online (and now, with mobile devices), information architecture is critically vital and, in my humble opinion, the ancient methods of organic SEO is as necessary as eating vegetables for good health.

Why wouldn’t giant company departments with managers and staffs with trained people consider some sort of unified testing approach during the development phase? One answer is time. Those of you who work in intense development environments understand managers that are breathing down your neck and superiors forcing impossible deadlines.

It’s easy for mistakes to be made in these situations, and this was the case of the big brand that lost a day’s worth of sales. They didn’t factor in time to test the results of changes and when several departments are rolling out their own set of updates at the same time, something is bound to conflict.

If large companies with multiple websites face severe situations like this, what does it mean for the rest of us? The solution is the same for everyone.

Hire an outside, objective company to handle all testing or create an in-house QA testing department ready to handle all aspects of front and back-end design testing.

This includes search engine marketing, which brings in areas such as site architecture, domain structure, content implementation and works with the usability person on persuasive navigation, target market analysis, mental models and much more.

Tools &  DIY Testing

Many website owners and companies with an online presence lack enough objective information to decide what type of testing their site needs. Many of you are aware of methods you can do on your own or by reading a how-to article, such as split testing, click tracking and making sense of Google Analytics and your server logs.

There are heat maps, gaze maps, feedback forms, surveys, user generated product feedback and color contrast software. Add to this all the free SEO tools and free or low cost mobile device emulators, and you can spend hours gathering information on your website’s performance.

But will you understand what all that data is showing you? Do you have access to case studies that explain why certain types of people make the choices they do?

Eye tracking software is cool but unless you can get verbal feedback from the user about why they looked at something somewhere and then looked at that thing over there, you can only guess.

Would the results of eye tracking tasks be different if the test subject started from a search engine result rather than just being shown a page layout? What color choices and navigation styles work best for your target users?

Real website testing via audits and reviews can consist of a mish mash of the above tools, but if you don’t have an interpretation of the findings, what use is this to you? User testing is helpful but unless the test participants represent your target user demographic, the results aren’t solid. They can find broken links, but so can software. They can tell you if they understood the content, but so can software.

The bigger your website, the more you will need to invest in all out testing from every angle. It can mean performance testers who record expected user activity and each time a change is made to any code, the tests have to be run again or changed to adapt.

One of the first lessons a website designer or owner learns is that any change to the design or addition of scripts or content leads to changes in how a search engine may crawl the site or index a page. Something as simple as changing a word in text navigation can affect search results and also confuse regular users.

Search engines expect changes to webpages but people don’t. They simply want “the thing to work” and they want it to work just like it did the last time they were there. Every Twitter or Facebook user will bend your ear on how changes to the user interface upsets their daily, harmonious social activity. Each Beta roll out comes crawling out knowing that testing is being done live and they must face the repercussions if there are any. And, there will be.

What To Test

Despite the long term value of investing in creating an in-house testing environment, which pulls from every contributing profession to website development and brand marketing, most companies won’t consider it.

Even some QA companies themselves don’t include human factors, user experience design, persuasive architecture, information architecture, social media marketing and search engine optimization. They strictly focus on functionality and some basic usability standards. Rarer still would be any QA testing department or usability testing company that includes accessibility standards testing. This may still be a specialization singled out like information architecture and mobile device testing is.

In addition to a fear of investing in hiring website testing and not understanding why tests are needed, many site owners don’t know enough about why they even own a website. Obviously, most site owners want to generate revenue or be a leading source for information, but they don’t have a plan for how to do this online. They may have created a business plan but not a website requirements plan.

This is how you decide whom to hire for website testing, audits, reviews and analyzing marketing data. Whomever you hire should ask for the requirements for your website. Who is it designed for? What do you expect search engines and people to do with it? Who is your competition and why? What makes your company so special?

Website usability, user interface, SEO and search engine strategy testing can present you with reams of data to fill up spreadsheets and make pretty charts, but how helpful is any of it unless you know specifically what to test for?

Photo Credits: “Businessman Pressing Risk Button, stock image from http://www.freedigitalphotos.net, used under license, contributed by user “mack2happy”.