Marketing Profs: Good Design Supports SEO

Great, short little article from Marketing Profs on how good design supports SEO. Sure, there are little tricks and copywriting best practices you can implement to improve the search engine optimization of your pages, but like everything else in user experience, those activities should be part of a bigger plan. This is essential to developing a comprehensive Creative Strategy.

 

 

Here are three quick tips from the Marketing Profs article with my own comments:

 

Understanding your customers’ needs and then providing them with a solution is the core of good user experience. Anticipate their questions and provide links to the answers/solutions.

 

Users don't need the first search-results page to contain a link to the exact page with their answers. This is the most common mistake we see on pages: the owner tries to meet every need on the landing page and the individual user lands on a confused and cluttered page. You don’t need to answer every question on the landing page, you just need to provide a path to the answer. People are willing to click through if they’re confident that the answer is within reasonable reach.

 

Users don't want to have to choose among a ton of options. This may seem contradictory to what’s written above but the point is to define the objective of the page (based on what users are likely looking for and what you’d like them to do) and then provide those paths mentioned above. Anything that doesn’t support the completion of that objective is a distraction and likely to frustrate your user. Focus!

 

I’d add one thing to the Marketing Profs recommendations and that is to balance your brand needs and requirements with your SEO objectives. If you have a strong visual presence associated with your brand, make sure you’re implementing practices that allow for the design needs and still facilitate search engine crawling. If you need headers that use non-system fonts, then make sure your images have alt. tags and can gracefully degrade. It takes a little more time and effort but it can be done.