Small Business SEO – Functional Website Design
SEO Gets Visitors to Your Website
For small business in Cumbria, SEO techniques allow your website to be found. It is at this point that your website design becomes critical. The new visitor to your web page is interested in finding the information that they typed in their query, i.e. the answer to their question. Is your web page optimised for that keyword that you want to bring visitors for? More than one click, and you will have lost your visitor. Mike Byrne, today’s guest blogger illustrates this problem nicely. Good web design goes hand-in-hand with small business SEO, local SEO techniques and is not necessarily about being easy on the eye. there are many but ugly websites which work phenomenally well, because the visitor can find what they’re looking for without distraction.
Is Your Website Design Functional Enough to Follow up Good SEO?
Have You Got a Functional Website Design to Back Up the SEO?
You’ve spent the time and money to attract visitors to your website using small business SEO. Now what? What do your visitors experience when they get to your pages.
What do visitors do when they get to a site? A lot of research has been done to figure that out. This includes Google Analytics action tracking and even studies that have logged visitors eye movements as they respond to new information on screen. In truth the search has just begun. The search engine results page (SERP) is only the first step in search.
Understanding the search process is important to your site and page design. For instance I need a new car and I’m thinking about a Peugeot 3008. I type – 2011 Peugeot 3008 Review into the Google search box and back pops 14 results – 4 PPC, 8 regular and 2 video results.
So, I have 14 results and the next step is to pick one to continue the search. I’m not finished searching, I’m merely going to step 2. The results have been narrowed down to one page, but I now must go to those pages to see if they have what I want.
I selected the Peugeot 3008 search term because it’s fairly competitive (about 2,400 monthly searches), but also the results returned are very good. When I click on any of the results I’m presented with a specific review page for the Peugeot 3008. There are pictures, facts and in some cases videos. The pages are laser focused on the 3008- exactly what I’m looking for. These have done a good job.
Now that I clicked through to the first site, I’ll being reading. No, I won’t. I’ll continue the search process by skimming results. I’ll look at images, headings, lists and so on to determine if I’ve found what I’m looking for. If not, I hit the back button and move to the next listing in Google.
What is Functional Web Design?
Functional website design makes it easy for site visitors to find what they’re looking for. It answers the question, “Am I in the right place?” Functional page design makes it easy for visitors to understand what that page is about.
I needed to know the hours and nearest location of a national chain store a while back. It took me 4 clicks to find the information. That’s bad design for users. On the other hand, when you go to weather.com, there’s a big orange button at the top of the page that says, Find Weather. Perfect. Type in the zip or town and you get the results. Weather.com knows that people are coming to their site to find a weather forecast so they make it easy.
Now, how does your website and its pages do against a functional design test? Is your purpose clear? Is your intent obvious? If not, changes are in order. For small business SEO and local SEO, it’s even more important. We don’t have the reputation and trust of national brands. We need to establish fast that we are a solid and valuable resource for visitors through rich information and good design. That starts with the visitor knowing immediately that they’ve found the right site.
Functional Web Design and SEO Go Hand in Hand
Mike Byrne walks through the process followed by many visitors when they land on any web page. Our culture has trained a very short attention span into our habits. As generators of information we can either bury our heads in the sand and hope our visitors are persistent enough to fight against our poor web designs, or we can work with the way the majority of our potential customers think and make the relevant information immediately visible. Functional website design allows websites to generate customers when successful SEO practices have brought you visitors.
To find out how your Cumbrian business website can benefit from current SEO practices and functional web design, contact Ray Cassidy via this or the link at the top of this page; or phone me on 01228 649 795.
You can find out more about Local SEO and Small Business SEO at Mike Byrne’s SEO10x website
