Usable SEO Services for Maine Businesses

Usable SEO involves results-driven techniques that get more and better leads for your business.

If your pages aren't easy for users to navigate or aren't well organized, they won't stay long enough to get the information you want them to have, and you'll get fewer and less valuable leads.

SEO gets people to your website, and usability gets more of those people to convert. Both those things need to happen for a website to make you money. Good SEO but poor usability will get you lots of nonconverting traffic. Poor SEO but good usability will get you higher conversion rates but from fewer people.

Ways in which SEO and usability support each other:

The critical importance of SEO arises from the fact that Google Search is #1 way people navigate around the internet. Even more importantly, searching via Google is the most important strategy people use to discover things they need or want to buy.

While it's also true that people use social media to find things, social media are biased toward frivolous content and so are used significantly less for finding “serious” sites with offerings like B2B resources, finance, real estate, construction and repair, medical/pharmaceutical, and professional services sites.

FACT: Search is how most people who visit your site found it the first time.

And having good SEO ensures that your most important pages that answer users questions show up high in search returns. So that you get plenty of prequalified traffic.

But if once on your site users are unable to find quickly what they're looking for - because their attention span is measured in only seconds - poor usability will cost you lost leads, lost customers, lost money. Rather than wander around your site, they will go back to Google and click over to a site of one of your competitors.

Google's ultimate goal is to help users find the best solutions to their problems. Google is really an answer engine - the answer is the goal, and the query is the user's means to achieve it.

For that reason, high SERP placement will eventually be determined by how well your site supports users in getting their questions answered. In the past, Google has had to guess at each site's quality using indirect signals, such as how many other sites link to it. But as Google increasingly learns more about user behaviors, search rankings will increasingly be based on usability criteria. In today's environment, focusing on providing a high-quality service is more likely to generate sustainable high Google rankings.

Some aspects of good usability that contribute to effective SEO include:

• Stable URLs to which other sites can link as resources
• Writing in the vocabulary of your customers, and making it readable by an 11-year-old
• Not hiding key ideas in images and other non-text formats
• Having clear navigation that both Googlebot and human users can follow
• Creating and constantly updating compelling content that attracts backlinks and social media interactions

The bottom line is: Having both good SEO and good usability will increase your Google rankings. More importantly, it will also increase your clickthroughs, leads, customer numbers and sales.

Successful SEO + Usability initiatives are the product of thoughtful observation and analysis of website traffic and conversions, and continuous improvement. To get the most value out of every marketing dollar you spend, I'll:

• Perform expert heuristic evaluation of the current usability of your website
• Document what happens when users visit your website and convert (or not), and identify any leaks in their path to conversion
• Analyze how well your navigation tells users where they are, how to get where they want to go, how to get back to where they came from - recommend changes
• Ensure that your pages have the right easily identifiable links in the right places to keep users moving toward conversion
• Identify your most important pieces of content
• Assess the readability of your pages, and recommend changes as necessary
• Recommend any changes needed to ensure that contact information and a booking link are in front of users at all times
• Make actionable recommendations for website changes to improve usability and conversion rates