What is a marketing funnel? Complete beginner’s guide
Learn how to create effective marketing funnels that turn visitors into loyal customers. Start optimizing your sales process today.
Topic: Usability testing
How to improve site performance with user testing
Gather insights from your target audience about their experience, pain points and expectations to inform your SEO and content efforts.
How to write long-form content: 7 smart steps and examples
Writing long-form content that gets results is a skill. Learn how you can leverage it to meet your content marketing goals.
What Do Users Really Think Of The New Google Design?
When Google started testing the new look for its search results pages which ditches the shading behind the ads and replaces it with yellow “ad” icons, contradictory outcries of this sort began popping up, “Ad click-through rates are going to plummet because the ads are too obvious with those bright icons.” “The ads look like […]
AdProof PPC Ad Copy Testing Platform Aims To Speed Up Testing Through Crowdsourcing
Ad copy testing is one of the foundation blocks of PPC campaign optimization. Yet, as any PPC manager knows, it can be laborious, time-intensive, money-consuming, or take eons to get enough data to make a call and move onto the next test. Jonathan Nelson and Yuanyi Zhang developed and recently launched AdProof, a new “user testing” […]
Deep Dive Into Bing Webmaster Tools With Sr. Program Manager Vincent Wehren, Part 2
In the first post of this series, we briefly explored Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT) with Sr. Program Manager Vincent Wehren. In that article, we discovered that BWT is a well-rounded suite of SEO tools that have the added benefit of the massive amount of search engine data provided by Bing. We also learned from Vincent […]
Keyword Classification: Understanding The “Why” Of SEO
Keyword classification is often the missing ingredient in SEO plans. Without understanding the reasons why people search, search engine optimizers will often misinterpret or improperly classify keyword phrases. How do we understand the "why" part of the optimization process?
How To Understand Keywords In Searcher Context
Is it possible for SEO professionals to understand searcher context based purely on keyword research data?
User-Centered Or Usage-Centered Design: Which Is Better For SEO?
When creating a search-engine friendly website, do you follow the principles of user-centered design, usage-centered design, or both?
Eyetracking & SEO: Fad, Fact, Or Fiction?
Do SEO professionals use eyetracking usability studies as a link-juice fad? Can eyetracking tests yield useful information about Web searchers?
How To Use Personas & Scenarios In SEO
Keyword research tools are great, but they do not provide enough context for understanding searcher behaviors. Usability test scenarios can help SEO professionals better understand their target audience.
Web Site Usability For Improving Online Forms
You’ve heard it said a hundred times. Search engine marketing leads to a dead end if the web site isn’t designed to deliver what it promises. Many an anchor text, meta description and advertisement text have sent users into a house of horror because the landing page is a complete disconnect from what was marketed. […]
More SEO Myths About Website Usability
When you optimize your website for search engine visibility, who are you targeting? The statistically average web searcher? Someone who is new to web searching? Or a highly experienced web searcher?
Mobile Searcher Behavior Should Drive Design & SEO
Mobile searchers have different goals, motivations, and limitations than desktop searchers. What are things you should consider before building and optimizing a website for mobile searchers?
Keywords, Aboutness & SEO
Do your web pages, graphic images, and videos effectively communicate aboutness to both web searchers and search engines? How do search engines and searchers determine aboutness?
When Good SEO Becomes Bad Information Architecture
Have you ever heard the phrase search engine optimization (SEO) architecture? At first glance, it might seem like a good idea...but maybe not. Learn about 2 critical usability tests that help SEO professionals not make critical architecture errors.
SearchCap: The Day In Search, April 30, 2010
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Google Tests Phone Numbers In AdWords Ads A reader sent us a screen capture of a phone number being listed in the Google AdWords ad text. The phone number is not […]
Deadly Sins Against SEO: Part 2
More egregious mistakes that website owners, web designers/developers, landing page experts, and others make to prevent qualified search engine traffic and conversions.
A Principal Goal Of SEO Should Be Customer Loyalty
How search engine optimization (SEO) professionals can measure customer loyalty as a part of a successful search experience.
Understanding Orienting Search Behaviors For SEO & Conversions
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 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.
SEO & Searcher Mental Models
Do search engine optimization (SEO) professionals architect websites to match searcher mental models? The answer might surprise you.
Optimizing For Re-finding Search Behavior
Re-finding search behavior is common in web search, image search, and video search. What is it, and how can you make it easy for searchers to re-find your content?
6 Usability Tips to Maximize B2B Website Conversion
B2B marketers invest a substantial amount of time, effort, and money driving visitors to websites. Making sure the site adheres to basic usability principles is critical to maximizing online marketing results and alleviating obstacles that prevent prospects from taking the desired actions. Below are six, easy to implement usability tips to ensure that visitors get […]
Why User Experience Is A Crucial Part Of Good SEO
Have you ever heard a search engine optimization (SEO) professional use the term user experience during a presentation, in an article or as part of a sales pitch? On the web, user experience (commonly abbreviated as UX or UE) is a term used to describe the overall perception, experience, and satisfaction that users have as […]
When Keyword Research and Search Data Deceives
As search engine optimization (SEO) professionals, we obsess with search data from a wide variety of resources. Which one is best for our clients? Which keyword research tool reveals the most accurate search behaviors when rebuilding a site’s information architecture? Does our web analytics data validate our keyword research? And, more importantly, did these tools […]
Understanding Search Usability – Part 2
In part 1 of Understanding Search Usability, I looked at search usability and the wide variety of search behaviors it addresses. SEO professionals tend to focus on query-related behavior, and web site usability professionals tend to focus on browsing behaviors. When both groups open their eyes and realize that all of these search behaviors are […]