User Friendly vs SEO Friendly

March 8, 2010  |   Posted in Blog   |   0 Comments   Tags: SEO, user friendly

What’s more important: making your website search engine friendly or user-friendly?

Search engines rank your site…

But users must be able to find what they’ve come for… Does one trump the other? In short, the answer is a resounding NO!

Sadly, most builders’ websites do neither well.

I’m going to borrow an example from the current advertising world to try and make an analogy:

Best Buy has a new product line. And the company spent big bucks promoting it during the Winter Olympics. The product line: their Blue Label laptops. If you haven’t seen it, it’s basically Best Buy’s attempt (and it could really prove a winner) to respond directly to customer feedback. Based on customer surveys that asked computer users what features they’d most like to see in a laptop, Best Buy gathered all those wish lists and bundled the most popular features among them into this new line of laptops.

It may be a tall order, but Best Buy is betting that these user-designed laptops can’t lose in their market.

Back to my analogy…essentially this new line of “blue label” laptops is designed to be Best Buy’s most user-friendly machines. But underneath all this user-friendliness a machine also has to perform, and herein lies the relationship between search engine friendliness and usability.

Your website needs to be fine-tuned for search engines (site architecture, sophisticated but clean html, optimized graphics, meta tags, title tags, appropriate keyword density) but you have untold opportunity to work magic with users — as if this were a big blank canvas.

Maybe that’s too hard to believe?

Remember, one aspect of user-friendliness is ensuring that a site visitor finds what he or she expects to find after landing on your site. Do we know what that is?

It’s a good bet that a potential home buyer is looking for all or some of the following information:

• checking out your credentials
• wants to see your models
• want to learn about the surrounding community where your are homes are located

In addition to these bullet points, I have news for you: “what they’ve come for” may not be as easy to pin down as you might imagine.

From the moment one site visitor types a search query into Google, Bing or Yahoo! to the moment he or she clicks through to your site—they have expectations. They have expectations when they start shopping for a new home, in fact! They’ve already seen visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads. For many people the idea of a “home” is intoxicating and can take our emotions and even our senses to very powerful places.

I suggest you consider these intangibles as much as you consider laying out all the technical specs of a house.

Listen to what BMW has to say:

“What you make people feel is just as important as what you make. At BMW we don’t just make cars, we make joy.”

If you can pull this off with your website while having it rank well in the search engines, then you will be among a very small percentage of builders.