Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category
Posted on April 29, 2013 by Reid Bandremer
A lot of folks come to us asking us to help them restore a decline in website traffic that occurred after a site migration or major update. Typically, most – if not all – of the traffic loss was preventable. There’s a lot of different update and migration scenarios and a lot of different things that can go wrong, but we keep seeing many of the same underlying issues.
For the purposes of this article, we’ll define a migration as anytime a large amount of pages or content move from old URLs to new URLs whether it be migrating an entire site to a new domain, a subdomain to a subdirectory, merging a small site into a bigger one, or what have you.
And I’ll assert that most potential problems with any migration can be prevented by following 7 fundamental pieces of advice so simple that even a CEO should understand.
- Understand the Stakes
- Make Sure No Content is Missing
- (Properly) Redirect Every URL
- You Need a (Cross-Functional) Migration Team
- You Need a Pre-Launch Plan
- You Need a Post-Launch Plan
- Use Tools (more…)
View Comments (5 Responses) | Categories: Paid Search, Search Engine Optimization, Usability
Posted on February 4, 2013 by Sayf Sharif
Recently, over the holidays with family, I participated in a conversation where I mentioned that the data supported my position. I made the mistake of saying “Statistically….” which as you might imagine, in a holiday family setting, is bound to generate at least one comment about how you can prove anything with statistics, and a dismissal of a scientific study, without reading it, because it contains *GASP* data.
“Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’” – Mark Twain
Interestingly, there is no record of Benjamin Disraeli saying that, so the attribution of that quote by Twain to Disraeli itself was a lie. (more…)
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Posted on November 15, 2012 by Travis Loncar
Google’s Panda update is anything but extinct. It frolics in the wild web, chewing on and spitting out the bamboo that is thin, outdated content. It is not particularly forgiving and, thus far, has caused severe search engine visibility problems for web properties of all sizes. Those nomenclature guys at Google – they ruin the cutest creatures, don’t they?
Now, more than ever, it is imperative that, as SEOs, we advise our clients to get copy (indexable text) on their pages. Having 300-400 words on important pages can be an easily attainable competitive advantage. Often, however, the client is concerned with design and usability – a valid concern, no doubt. How do we add 300-400 words in a way that doesn’t detract from the current design and/or usability of our website? My answer: Get creative.
Let’s look at a couple of examples (using various web properties and some Lorem Ipsum text) of how copy might be implemented in a way that provides SEO value but doesn’t detract from design/usability.
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Posted on August 9, 2012 by Travis Loncar
If content is king, presentation is queen. An aesthetic appeal can make good content great link bait. Similarly, poor presentation can detract from a well-written, thought-provoking post. It’s important that the king picks a beautiful queen, regardless of whether or not he’s the cat’s pajamas. In this post, we’ll look at three simple CSS styles that you can implement to make your blog posts shine.
CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is the presentational language of the Web. Typically, styles are housed in external .css stylesheets, and referenced in the head of each HTML document. However, we’ll be concerning ourselves with inline styles, or CSS that’s added directly to the HTML. Let’s take a look at a simple example of inline style.
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Posted on June 25, 2012 by Sayf Sharif
Sometimes interesting modern conversion rate optimization lessons can be learned from old folktales, such as the Story of Wilhelm, Henriette and the Black Fleece.
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Posted on May 24, 2012 by Sayf Sharif
A.B.T. Always be testing. This is the mantra of successful website owners. But what does that mean? Well you should be testing everything, but how can you really know what’s wrong with your website, or why people are having problems, or generate possible fixes? Simple. Regular and repeated cycles of usability testing. Check out our infographic on how to use usability testing to increase your conversions after the jump…
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Posted on April 16, 2012 by Travis Loncar
When I first set out to write this post, I had two things in mind: rich snippets and Britney Spears. I won’t waste your time trying to justify the latter, but let’s just say I thought it would be interesting to mesh the two together. While the original idea didn’t make it far past conception, what I stumbled upon seems to be all the more interesting. Don’t get me wrong: Britney will forever have a place in my adolescent heart, but the scope of this goes beyond just her. It’s time to put those old, tattered posters back under my bed and move onto more pressing issues. Today, we’ll discuss rich snippets for music, or, the current lack thereof.
Rich Snippet Overview
While you’ve undoubtedly seen them when executing searches, if you’re not especially familiar with rich snippets, you might want to take a minute or two to skim over Google’s support page. Google defines them as “the few lines of text that appear under every search result . . . designed to give users a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to their query.” Much like the result description, rich snippets are pulled dynamically from the HTML and are query-based. We see them everywhere. Products. Reviews. People. Events. Ever search for a product that’s available on Amazon? If so, you’ve probably seen a rich snippet. Notice, in the graphic below, that while one query failed to return a ‘snippetized’ result, the second query (where second_query = first_query + ' album';) has a nice, colorful rich snippet.
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Posted on April 5, 2012 by Phil Anderson
This is part five of a multi-part series on The Infinite Conversion Loop. If you have not read the previous articles, you should check out Introducing the Infinite Conversion Loop, 10 Things to Check in Your Google Analytics, Who are these people visiting my website?, and How to Legally Spy on Your Visitors.
Last time we talked about Passive User Testing, that is, examining user behavior without their knowledge or involvement. Passive user testing is great for finding large problems, but it’s hard to get the “why” from this method of testing. For example, you may notice everyone is abandoning at the first step of the shopping cart, but if there is not a JavaScript error or something obvious, it may be hard to fix this problem.
Active User Testing is the best way to get more answers. It’s more expensive then passive user testing, which is why I recommend it only after you’ve fixed the real big problems. You really don’t want to waste money on people telling you the site doesn’t work at all in Internet Explorer (which can easily be identified using automated means). Active user testing involves (usually) paying people to use your website and verbalize what they are doing.
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Posted on February 20, 2012 by Phil Anderson
Welcome back to the Infinite Conversion Loop. Hopefully since the last post, you’ve not only got your Analytics accurate, but also are getting more visibility into who is visiting your website.
Have you ever found yourself staring at your Analytics data, wondering “What the heck is wrong with these people on my website? Why would 10,000 people come to my site, but only 100 of them decide to purchase anything? I mean my site LOOKS awesome, and I’d give me money.” Unfortunately, we can’t actually view what people are doing without resorting to something illegal… or can we?
ClickTale
Enter ClickTale. ClickTale records a sampling of your visitor’s behavior for an entire session using JavaScript to detect mouse movements, clicks, time on page, etc… it’s able to do this in such a way that it really feels like you are watching a video of someone using your website. ClickTale is pretty pricey ($99/month for the lowest level), but I think running it at least for a month or two will give you all sorts of insight you just can’t get looking at the numbers.
For example, one thing I always wanted to understand was the low usage of the advanced search on my site. I saw in analytics that few people were searching with these advanced options, but I didn’t understand why. ClickTale gave me the other piece of the puzzle, people were TRYING to use the advanced search, but getting confused by the options. As I watched them click radio button after radio button, only to click the Back button 90% of the time, the UI problem became clear.
Another benefit to ClickTale is it also sort of does your cross-browser testing for you, quietly in the night. It logs JavaScript errors, and lets you search on them, so you’ll discover the JavaScript error that you didn’t realize was occurring on IE7 or Firefox 4 for OS X.
The only frustrating thing with ClickTale is that you’ll see people who are clearly confused, but you can’t ask them why!! (I’ll cover this in the next post).
Google Analytics
Since we’re big fans of Google Analytics here at LunaMetrics, if ClickTale is out of your budget, another great option is available to you now in GA.
One of the best new features Google has added recently was Flow Visualization in Google Analytics. Jim does a great job in the videos on that link explaining the basics, so let’s put them to work in figuring out what people are doing.
When you go to the Visitors Flow report, it may be confusing at first. I believe the default view is by Country, which probably isn’t useful for the majority of you out there. I typically choose by “Medium”, since that’s usually the most interesting for understanding how different types of visitors flow (since organic search comes in at the index, affiliates go to the deepest level, and cpc goes to landing pages).
Quickly you can see some interesting things, a quarter of my affiliate traffic is going to 404 pages! Also, almost all of the organic and referral traffic is going to the index of the site.
Keep adding steps on the right until you see all the large patterns. Don’t get too hung up in the outliers that only have a few “connections”. Look for the trends… are people clicking to search and then going back to home? That probably shows they can’t find what they are looking for. Does it seem like an abnormally long set of steps to get to the Checkout? Maybe your sales funnel can be optimized.
I’m sure some of you might be thinking “What about GA’s In-Page Analytics?” Well, it’s there…
But because it doesn’t differentiate between clicks on different buttons (any links with the same URL will be counted equally), I would only use this for the most barebones analysis.
All of this is just the first pass at UI changes to increase conversions. Use these tools to solve the big problems preventing users from converting, next time I’ll show you how to get to really get down to the heart of things.
View Comments (2 Responses) | Categories: Analytics, Conversion, Usability
Posted on October 25, 2011 by Travis Loncar
I think you’ll agree that an ever-changing search algorithm is dynamic in its engineers’ consistent efforts towards development, refinement, and ultimately, improvement. The end goal of any algorithm update, however large or small, is certainly not detraction from quality. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. An update is made, we can assume, to improve upon the quality of the results – no matter how insignificant-seeming the percentage of results affected. When I search “all about poodles,” I want to learn all about poodles – not play minesweeper with pop up and banner ads. Mind you, overall improvement does not necessarily translate to individual ranking increases; we know this all too well. With positive change comes almost certain hardship for those that are oppositely negative. Fortune favors the brave – yes. Similarly, though, misfortune handpicks the irresponsibly audacious. Just ask BMW or J.C. Penney – both of which have suffered the unrelenting punitive blows of Google’s “manual action.”
An algorithm update, in some sense, is the addition of an automation process to carry out an action that was previously executable only by handpicking or “manual action.” As you can imagine, penalizing (or rewarding) sites on a case to case basis is both laughably uneconomical and far too permissive of subjective, human analysis. It’s fairly intuitive, then, that the more frequently a particular rule needs applied, the more likely it is that that rule will become an integral part of the algorithm. For instance, when I search to learn more about our fluffy, white friends, the results at the top of the SERPs are largely informative and (more importantly) exactly what I’m looking for. Before Panda (which came with harsh penalties for websites with thin content), I might not have been so lucky. Anyways, that’s for another day. For now, we’ll focus on sentiment in search. Where is it going? Where has it been? And can its analysis be translated effectively and efficiently into the current search algorithm? Let’s have at it!
The Current State of Sentiment in Search
First off, let’s define the “sentiment” of an online vote (be it a link, review, service testimonial, etc.) as the connotation (positive, negative, or neutral) with which said vote is casted. While the link is traditionally recognized as the primary vote metric, developments in social technology and online listing review systems have broadened the user’s ability to convey relative, measurable sentiment within minutes (or even seconds). If you liked Christina’s recent blog post on ‘keyword not provided‘ or tweeted about Jim’s take on flow visualization in GA, you’ve engaged socially in conveying positive sentiment, or casting a positive vote for the respective post. On the other hand, if you found such disfavor in the stale-tasting coffee at the local donut shoppe that you felt obligated to share that negative experience with potential customers online (perhaps through a Google Places listing review), you’ve conveyed negative sentiment, or casted a negative vote for that business.
While we can’t be sure how these signals are weighted in the current algorithm, we can certainly infer that the integration process is well under way. With Google’s release of the +1 button and specific markup for reviews and rich snippets, it’s a reasonable assumption to make that the link is no longer the lone indicator of online sentiment. Notice, though, that the majority of these indicators are geared towards users sharing positive experiences (perhaps with exception to negative reviews). Although many custom blog platforms allow users to cast a negative vote for a given post with a thumbs-down, major social platforms (from which search engines actually collect data) like Facebook have yet to implement such an option. How, then, without clear-cut social signals, do we derive negative sentiment from a given comment or review? And perhaps more importantly, how do we go about deriving negative sentiment from the original vote metric – the link?
Sentiment Analysis – A Work in Progress
To preface this section, I’d like to recommend some light reading – a New York Times article (which Robbin suggested to me) that inspired this post (as it probably has many of the more recent debates on sentiment in search). The article details the much-chagrined success story (and subsequent fall) of an online eye glasses vendor who utilized the power of negative votes (provided by intentionally provoked customers) to leverage his company’s organic search presence. I’d like to spare you another poodle analogy, but honestly, I can’t resist. This should paint a fairly representative picture of the article (for those of you who are saving it for a rainy day).
If a fictitious John from John’s Poodle Emporium trains his dogs to be utterly disobedient to their renters, there’s a good chance that John’s business is going to receive plenty of negative reviews online. With no sentiment analysis, though, a review is a review and a link is a link. Online poodle forums and blogs are abuzz with horror stories about John’s Poodle Emporium (occasionally even linking to his site). Little do they know, they’re fueling the very fire that they seek to put out – sending link juice from relevant websites onto John’s site. John punks his Poodle-loving patrons and moves onto the next group of clients the town over (who haven’t bothered to check out some online reviews). All the while, his rankings are shooting through the roof, providing him with a healthy influx of new customers to mistreat intentionally.
Okay, back to reality. That was bad, but you get the idea. While Google affirms that the the real vendor’s rankings should be attributed to link juice from high authority news outlets (like the New York Times), citing the presence of the rel=”nofollow” link attribute on many of the negative review sites, the causation is there, nonetheless. Be it direct or indirect, in this case, negative sentiment yielded positive results.
How Do We Combat This?
Needless to say, the article prompted almost immediate action from Google. After doing their due diligence, they found that cases similar to that in the New York Times article were not as uncommon as they had originally thought. As we discussed earlier, a high volume of problematic, penalty-deserving websites can often complicate manual action. However, when all of these websites are linked by a common infraction, the likelihood that the penalties can be distributed algorithmically is much higher. In this case, the search engineers at Google were able to implement a quick, algorithm-intensive fix that penalizes online vendors who treat their customers poorly or unfairly. While we can’t be sure that this solution is completely free of sentiment consideration, we can be sure that sentiment analysis is not the foundation of the underlying framework. In fact, Google has admitted that although they have a “world-class sentiment analysis system,” they’ve yet to find a way to effectively implement that system within the current algorithm.
The Way of the Future?
It seems simple, doesn’t it? Just introduce an algorithm update that mandates that all crawls take into account the sentiment of the text surrounding a given link. If the connotation of the “context clues” is primarily positive, treat the link as a positive vote. If negative, weight the link with a negative value. Simple enough, right? Actually . . . not so much. We could pick the simplicity of this solution apart all day, so I’ll spare you the countless refutations in place of one (for which I’ll pose a rhetorical question). Aren’t some of the most important modern issues also the most polarizing issues? And, in our context, should a website pertaining to one of these issues be devalued because the negative sentiment nearly washes the positive? Hardly, in my opinion. A vote, whether positive or negative, is still an indication of care. As long as people care about a given issue or web page (and are willing to pay testament to their sentiments), as things stand, the results that they see will be based on sheer popularity.
With all that we’ve considered, many points remain mute. Incorporating user sentiment in search, whether socially, through review aggregators, or by sentiment analysis, is a tricky little game. Considering the tremendously impactful implications that a major sentiment-related algorithm change could have, it’s a game that needs to be played with the utmost tact and care. That said, I’m rather confident that user reviews, testimonials, social votes, context clues surrounding links, and even the sentiment of anchor text will continue to play larger roles in both organic and local rankings. Undoubtedly, the technology behind these metrics (and consequently, their popularity among users) will continue to develop in the future. This puts further onus on coinciding algorithmic development targeting search sentiment. Again, the end goal is better results for the user – or better information about poodles for curious dog lovers. If, by implementing a functional, discriminatory sentiment analysis system in the search algorithm, we’re able to achieve this, then I’m all for it. Personalized search is the way of the future. Sentiment analysis is just another step in the right direction . . . well, at least on the timeline.
What are your thoughts on sentiment in search? Are all votes created equal, or should positive and negative sentiment play a role in valuing a link? Have you observed any noticeable ranking changes since you’ve enabled social “voting” on your pages? Share your thoughts and experiences!
View Comments (No Responses) | Categories: Search Engine Optimization, Usability
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