Why Can't SEO and Usability Experts Just Get Along?

by Randy Pickard, Vice President of Product Innovation at User Centric, Inc.

Usability problems can arise when a site is over designed to rank highly on the crawler-based search engines. The traffic generated from SEO is wasted if visitors abandon the site because they don’t find it useful or don't like it.

User Centric, Inc. has developed a list of 10 areas of direct conflict that can be challenging to resolve.

1. Keyword stuffing in headlines: It is important for SEO to insert keywords in headlines, title tag, and opening paragraph, but it often detracts from the readability of a web page. The terms that people use to search for something are not always the best terms to use when writing about it.

2. Repetition of terms in body text: Keyword density is important for SEO, but it is problematic for usability to add extra words repeated multiple times.  

3. Home pages: For best SEO results, prominent links should lead to pages with selected keywords as the primary subject of the page. Limiting the number of links may pass along greater link juice to the pages receiving the links. Anchor text should include key words. A flat directory structure is optimum, with three directory levels maximum.

   Usability best practice is to ensure that the home page communicates site identity and mission. The most prominent links should be to most important pages on the site, text links should be to directories and anchor text should clearly define where a visitor will land. Lots of navigational links are often appropriate. An intuitive, multi-layered hierarchical directory structure is often best.

4. Graphics and text: From an SEO perspective, lots of keyword-rich text can be valuable, and graphics are practically irrelevant. Pages that have been optimized for search are often fairly dense. Usability perspective says to minimize text and use effective graphics to communicate information. Pages that have been optimized for usability are usually clean, short, and have lots of white space.

5. Planned landing pages: Landing pages are critical for SEO, problematic for usability, as the visitor may not have context in regard to site/organization. Further, landing pages may not communicate the overall mission and identity of the website.

6. Search bot-selected landing pages: Inbound links to a site's pages may subvert the site's hierarchy. Essentially, all incoming links are good from the SEO perspective, but some may not be optimum for usability. It is challenging to design for usability with little control over where a visitor may land. Incoming links often send visitors deep within a website.

7. Redirects/cloaking: Redirecting a visitor based on their search terms or referring them to another page that may better suit them could be considered cloaking by a search engine, resulting in a penalty. On the other hand, redirects could be a good usability tactic if visitors are being directed by search engines to pages that offer weak introductions to the site.

8. Spelling: In the past, offering multiple versions of concatenated words (example: "eye tracking" and "eyetracking") demonstrated effective SEO, but this is potentially confusing to a viewer. Misspelling of words was previously an effective SEO practice, but obviously this tactic is horrible for both usability and credibility.

   Furthermore, improvements in search have greatly reduced the effectiveness of concatenation and misspelling as SEO tactics.

9. Creating individual pages for small chunks of information: Including all information about a specific subject on a single page can be good for usability (unless too much scrolling is required). Creating a unique page optimized for SEO for each subject discussed can be effective for ranking well, but can harm usability if too many clicks are required to get to each chunk of information.

   One type of page where this issue might come into play is a listing of company executives. It might be a good career move to create individual pages for each executive, including detailed, glowing descriptions and elegantly photographed head shots. This would give search engines a dedicated page for each person, resulting in potentially higher ranking for each individual. However, it is easier for a visitor to scroll down a single page, skimming for relevant information, than to explore multiple bio pages.

10. Meta title tags: Google only displays up to 66 characters in the title, limited space to stuff key words. From an SEO standpoint, the organization's name may not be a good use of this limited number of characters. The most important keywords should be the initial words in the title tag.

    Best usability practices may dictate that the organization name appear in the title. Often, it is included first, before any other keywords in the title, so that it will be visible in the visitor's browser in the border of the viewable screen, and so that the organization name will stand out in bookmarks. For SEO, it may be best to add the organization's name to the back of the title tag for interior pages, to improve interior page rankings.

Even SEO professionals acknowledge that making your site usable should typically be the higher priority. There is little point in driving traffic via SEO to a site if visitors do not like the site and exit immediately. Usable sites generate multiple page views, repeat visits, and transactions. Stating the obvious, it is best to optimize for both usability and search.

Effective SEO says "Look, we have what you want!" when people search for terms relevant to your site. When those people arrive at the site, good usability says "Look, here it is!" If you can design the user interface to say "Look, we have what you want, and here it is!" it is a win-win.

Conflicts between usability and SEO should be resolved in large part based on how visitors are finding the website. If visitors are arriving by searching for the name of the website, typing the site's URL directly into the address bar, or coming to the site via direct links from other sites or paid search, most usability versus SEO conflicts should be resolved in favor of usability. If the majority of a site's traffic is the result of algorithmic search engine referrals resulting from keyword term searches, it may be appropriate to consider resolving some conflicts with a bias favoring SEO considerations.

The best way to avoid usability and SEO conflicts is to address both at the beginning of the website development process, and during the information architecture stage.

About User Centric, Inc.

User Centric is a global consulting firm that focuses on improving user experience. We apply our expertise to projects involving handhelds, web sites, software, medical devices, print, packaging, and telephony services. Experience, quality, value, global reach and outstanding client services set us apart. Our services include user research, user interface design consulting, information architecture, usability testing, user interface evaluations, eye tracking, and online surveys. Learn more about us at www.UserCentric.com.