SEO Fundamentals CH Room on Design in SEO Dec 07, 2021

Last week’s discussion is on “Design in SEO.”

The conversation started among the  Moderators:

00:10:35: How does design impact SEO? Please come up with one metric in KPIs that is important according to your experience

00:10:50:Firuze

A few of the most important KPIs are the bounce rate and dwell time. Bounce rate happens when a visitor lands on your website and leave the site without taking any action or clicking any other web pages. No click on any other link or page demonstrates that:

• We could not deliver what we have promised on the Page Title and Title Description
• Visitors could not find helpful information or what they were looking for
• We cannot create engagement
• Users do not want to stay on a page that provides any value.
• You do not do enough research on user behaviour and expectations in your industry/vertical/niche

00:11:40 Joshua

Once you have people at your site, I always prioritize what do we want to achieve with the incoming traffic in terms of conversions. I always try to tie everything with the business goals. Otherwise, traffic is like a vanity metric. Design is crucial because it helps my clients to turn traffic into a valuable outcome (conversion) for their business purposes.

00:13:50 Renee

Do your visitors take the next step you want to achieve on that page? Did you clarify what the next step should be on your website? In other words, do users have enough means to convert? Do they subscribe to your newsletter, download the e-book, click on the buy button or complete a transaction? Did they allow you to call them?

00:14:30 Karin

In addition to the bounce rate, Google also looks at how far your visitors scroll the page or how many pages your users visit when they are at your website.

How does Google know the Conversion rate, clickthrough rate or the number of pages you have visited?

00:15:00 Rob, Joshua, Karin

Setting up Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, using Chrome or Gmail or having Android on your phone allows Google to track your website. All these tools help Google to track our audience.

00:16:25 Rob

From a Web designer perspective, how can we decrease the page speed?

00:16:35 Kyla

Make sure your imagery is small because when you have large files, Google will not render those images and bounce back from your page.

00:16:57 Kyla

• User experience is the critical element. Therefore, web design is at the centre of the user experience. Whatever you plan to set as a goal, make sure that your site is trustworthy with a friendly and elegant web design.
• Make navigation easy and flowing but break your text to eliminate big blocks of text because they are unreadable and boring.
• Use images, videos, infographics, testimonials, or graphics when necessary.
• Your content might be perfect, but if the design at your site is not well-done, people don’t trust you, and they immediately get out of your website.

00:17:57 Kyla

• You also need to use headings, subheadings, stock photos or professional photography for your business,
• place text overlay onto your images and be consistent within your design elements and how you format your content.
• Always try to make your website very easy to read.

00:18:50 Ola

There is a theory called Foraging. This theory depicts early humans’ behaviors to find food. (https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-glossary-of-human-computer-interaction/information-foraging-theory) However, this theory also applied to user experience and web design and is called  “Information Foraging”.

According to this theory, you have five elements to consider: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-foraging/

         Animal Foraging                                                                           Information Foraging

According to Raluca Badiu From Neilsen Norman Group:

“When deciding which links to click on the web, users choose those with the highest information scent — which is a mix of cues that they get from the link label, the context in which the link is shown, and their prior experiences.” https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-scent/

 00:20:28 Itamar

Good navigation is essential for creating a functional design for the complete user journey. Having a high bounce rate is not always because your content does not meet user expectations. It could be a great content piece but, your navigation, Call to Action or internal link structure is not designed correctly.

00:21:30 Kyla

When using images to provide a better page experience for your users, ensure that you utilize keywording your photos with hyphens. For example, assume you are writing on home décor items such as bedroom makeovers, and you have a picture of a blue bedroom makeover, don’t forget to use “blue-bedroom-makeover” as a picture file name. In addition, don’t forget to write the picture’s description in the alt text.

00:22:10 Renee

• Applying colors judiciously is crucial in creating the right relationship with your user base during the design process. For example, if you are a software company or a financial institution, having a high vibe or tropical colors will divert your user’s attention since those colors won’t give them the assurance or trust they need.
• Use a variety of design factors nicely combined with the colors.
• Keep up to date with the design trends. If your design is still the same as four years ago, your site won’t assure trust and confidence.

00:23:45 Rob

What are the items that we can optimize for both humans and robots?

00:24:00 Kyla

If you are a blogger like me, you need to create additional pages explaining who you are, your background and your bio so that people get to know you better,

Show why you are an expert in that field

Gain the trust of your users by creating quality and unique content tailored to user needs

00:24:30 Joshua

SEO is a part of the marketing mix, and design is a process in the big picture of SEO. You need to understand from which entry points people are coming from. You can use proper design elements to drive them to the right place on your website if you know them.

00:26:04 Firuze

• In that sense, it’s essential to segment your audience and create personas for each segment. It’s all about getting into the mindset of your user personas and understanding where they are coming from. Suppose your personas are attracted to a particular color (for example, if there is a pregnant woman who is expecting a baby girl and looking for a baby room decoration, purple or pink colors might be appealing for her). Maybe they are attracted to specific design elements, images, videos and text (they might want to see user testimonials easily).
• Another thing that should be done is to run a competitor analysis on the search results. Seeing what type of content, color, pictures, and multimedia your competitors are using
• Follow how your competitors designed their website to appeal to their users and create something better than what they did.

00:27:57 Karin:

Often, the users are skimming the page to understand whether the page matches their demands quickly. Therefore, make sure that you break your text into meaningful chunks, add a table of contents, include pictures, graphics or tables, use proper headings and create jump links (anchor links)

00:29:15 Renee

Implementing structure on your design is essential. You need a system of categories and subcategories. Your site gets understood as trustworthy on a specific topic when you also support it with the related categories.

00:30:35 Noah

Let’s investigate the SEO of the eCommerce sites in terms of design

Some of the local businesses I help use eCommerce platforms with many plugins. Here are my findings:

Design matters in eCommerce, but sometimes it just does not. Sometimes boring websites with bright backgrounds, clean and plain pages that are easy on the eyes, straightforward navigation (within three clicks, users can find what they are looking for) works the best. Besides using clean spaces between the lines, easy-to-read typography with good spacing, easily recognizable search bar, conversion rate tools such as chatbots, card abandonment recovery tools and mobile-friendly websites are driving a lot of revenue.

If you have generated more than $1,500,000 in revenue, securing a person for chatbot communication helps increase your sales up to 30%, which is enormous.

00:34:20 Rob

What have you found about infinite scrolls versus pagination?

00:34:38 Noah

The page size that he is opting for is usually the middle.

00:35:15 Rob

I have just worked with a client having three million pages. After running multivariant testing, I found out that infinite scrolling is causing the loss of a significant amount of revenue.

00:35:45 Emmanuel

Emmanuel has a drop-ship t-shirt website. Since it’s a heavy image website, he could not optimize for Core Web Vitals; instead, he is optimizing for Pinterest to receive traffic. He primarily optimizes images for Pinterest and uses Shopify even though it causes low page speed. Otherwise, he could not make any sales.

00:37:00 Kyla

Pinterest is huge for image search, and if you get ranked on Pinterest, you can also rank on Google.

00:38:30 Rob

 Joshua, can you explain Core Web Vitals and how they impact SEO?

00:38:34 Joshua

Core web vitals is simply how Google sees your website and understands your impact on user experience. Google aims to help people find what they are looking for with a positive user experience. Part of this experience comes from how fast your pages are loading and how easily you can navigate the page. Google has a tool called “Page Speed Insights” https://pagespeed.web.dev/ If you use this tool and test your website’s speed, you can understand whether your site is fast enough functional enough to use. The test also lets you know where the problems are coming from and how to fix them.

There are three primary (CWV) types: https://web.dev/vitals/

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How fast your website is loading (how your largest image or most considerable text content is uploading) Desirable speed is 2.5 seconds or less.

First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. How fast the users can get input when they click on an item (button) on the page. Desirable when it’s 100 milliseconds or less.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Computes your page’s visual stability. Once your page is uploaded, it will create a bad user experience if your screen shifts up and down. Any ads or popups interfering with the page’s visual stability causes an unpleasant user experience and lead to your users dropping off from your page. (Desirable CLS is 0.1 or less)

CWV has started to run in June, and it’s still continuing to roll out.

00:45:12 Rob

Have you seen any adverse actions for popups or ads showing up at the top of the page or any sort of animations? What have you seen with regards to shifting page items?

00:45:53 Itamar

We look at Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) when we talk about shifting pages. This is the most critical metric for page experience because everybody can wait one or two seconds more for a page upload. This situation is specifically essential for e-commerce sites. Assume you are on an eCommerce site, and you click on a button, but during that moment, the page has shifted up and down, and you accidentally click on the buy button. If your payment details are already available on that website, you end up accidentally buying an item that you don’t want to buy. As a result, you have a terrible experience.

00:50:17 Noah

They are putting ranking factors aside when it comes to conversion. Fast loading pages make a huge difference, especially on big enterprise websites. One of Noah’s friends working with the European banks ran tests for page load times. They found out that page load time decrease or increase generates millions of dollars of revenue or loss for every half a second.

Therefore, CWV is crucial for conversion rate optimization.

00:52:50 Kyla

For image-heavy websites/verticals like fashion home décor, it might not be easy to increase page load speed time. If that’s the case, try to have a faster page load speed than your competitors.

Don’t forget that anything or any metric can be relative depending on your niche, competitors, or circumstances.

00:55:00 Rob

How can we understand how our site is doing with the Core Web Vitals?

Having Google Search Console set up will help you run tests for CWV.

Questions from the Audience

Question 1: Her client has four pages for the services tab. Now her client wants to change the names of some services and discontinue some of the services. However, the existing services pages have good SEO. So, what should be done? Shall we still keep the old services pages and direct them to the new pages or move them from the menu tabs?

1:06:37 Karin:

 There are two ways to do:

• Replace the old pages with the new content. Redirect pages of discontinued services to something similar.
• Another method you can use is to put on a head bar saying that “This service is not Available any Longer” and direct them to the most recent service page. If she is not offering those services, just delete those pages.

Should I keep the names of the services not available on the navigation bar because they have good SEO?

01:07:43 Rob

No, you don’t have to keep them, but if you have internal linking, that’s going to be a problem (because it complicates things)

When you redirect your pages be careful about the syntax, you are using. In Rob’s experience, instead of using “This page is no longer available”, a negative phrase, use a more positive word.

01:12:00 Question: Is there a sweet spot for the number of keywords we can rank and the number of pages we put on our websites?

• We need to focus on the topic and the keywords around that topic.
• We need to understand how people are searching for that topic.
• We need to understand what’s the search demand around that topic.
• We need to check whether we satisfy that search demand with our pages or not.

Therefore, there is no formula that will yield how many keywords we should use in a specific niche. However, you need to do a situational analysis of your niche market. Similarly, don’t forget to check out your Google Analytics.

01:15:42 Question:

 What is your feedback on white space? How is it affecting the search experience? Is there a certain ratio between whitespace and the amount of text when putting your web page?

01:16:21

• A lot of times, the simpler the site, the better.
• It may make your site easy to read and navigate
• It might make it easy to see what is not white
• It creates a better mobile experience by making things easier to read. Sometimes too many colors or design items complicate things and distract users’ attention.
• Using Hotjar or any other heat map will help you see how people are browsing your page, moving the cursor, whether your users are getting lost etc.
• Setting goals on Google Analytics will also help you.
• If mobile is essential for you, using too much white will cause friction when scrolling. Thus try to add some colors or design elements.
• Spreading the white space and adding more space or negative space will enhance the user experience by directing their attention to the header, subheader or Call to Action.
• You divert their attention to the places you want them to see or click by creating nothingness.

01:22:08 Question: My company has a lot of pages, but the most traffic receiving ones are the product pages? We want our customers to land on a page, click the CTA and calculate the insurance rate. Almost 50% of the people either click on the CTA or bounce.  The rest scroll down the page. The question is should we have another CTA (Call To Action) for those people who are scrolling down? Can we have more than one CTAs on a page? Should we have CTAs for different personas?

Rob:

• Understanding the user behavior with the Fogg Behavior Model will help you assess different personas who scroll down. Find out their relationship with you and their relationship with the problem. (https://behaviormodel.org/)
• Analyze your users’ personas with the corresponding Customer Journey Stage. Then you can use a very low CTA such as “Learn More” or “More Info”. As a result, you advance your users through the process of “Convince and Convert”.

01:26.35 Carol:

Ultimately, we want to help our users navigate our site and help them to get where we want them to be as their next step. If there is only one CTA and this CTA is not appealing for them, they scroll down or leave the site. The more people scroll down, the more they drop out of your website. Think about what kind of questions they might have at this stage and how many CTAs you need to answer those questions.  It’s important to ease them and give them another direction to go. The wording around the CTA’s is critical. Always run A/B tests to see how your CTAs are doing.

01:28:27 Varun

His observation is to stick with one CTA and not divert users’ attention elsewhere.

01:28:12 Renee

Some pages should not have multiple CTAs, such as landing pages running paid ads. In contrast, in a blog post, you want to give information and convince post readers to buy an e-book. On this occasion, depending on the part of the post (depending on the persuasion level of the user), you can create multiple CTAs.

01:30:30 Rob

Depending on the page’s context, whether they have enough information about your company or at what stage of the user journey they are in, at least one CTA is necessary on every page.

There are a few more questions which I’ll add soon:)

If you have any questions for your website I will be more than happy to offer you a 30-minute FREE Consultation for your business.