Nowadays, online marketing like Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is huge. If done well it can tap into a huge market of idle web users who may or may not be looking for your exact business (which is great). If done badly, your website will drown in the noise and volume of Google Search results and you run the risk of searchers never seeing your business at all.

Business’ are creating entirely new roles for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), or often calling upon one of many SEO agencies to increase their search result ranking (although selecting a good one from your Google Search would probably be tricky)! Amid all the trending though and having done a small amount of SEO myself, I can’t help but notice that there’s a lot of looking at numbers and not enough looking at people.

In this piece, I want to put my user-centred spin on SEO. I’ll be discussing how to strike the right balance between maximising your keywords, and designing good and unique content which will keep users on your website once they’ve arrived.

Keyword variations.

Search engines determine page ranking through a number of important factors, including inbound links, but one aspect that’s often underestimated is the value of quality content.  In the past, the general belief has been that the amount of content on a given topic suggests its level of importance. This led to some bad habits, most of all with keyword stuffing, which led to the creation of some mind-numbingly repetitive content across the World Wide Web and held no real value for readers at all.

Fortunately, for those of us who care about user-centred design, or just our user’s sanity, Google has changed things around. According to the complex world of Google algorithms, if too many repetitions of the same word are recognised on a page, it is automatically marked as junk – i.e. useless content designed to drive users to a page and do nothing else. Instead, an emphasis has been placed on keyword variations. This approach still makes use of one keyword phrase per page, but takes advantage of sophisticated Google technology in natural language processing which picks up related words.

Here are some reasons why I think this was a great move:

• Keyword stuffing isn’t useful. OK, it may have helped bring users to your page but does this count when your bounce rate is close to 100%? People just aren’t interested in repetitive content, and if you think they can’t detect it, they can. Whether expert or beginner, people are driven to the internet to learn something and they won’t be interested in your site if it has nothing to say.

• When people attempt keyword stuffing this often means targeting one keyword and lumping all relevant information in one place. The problem with this is that everyday businesses provide broad and complex services which need to be explained in context to really understand their value. Some people get around this problem by spreading content across their site and increasing the SEO with hypertext links and slightly altered keywords on each page. Whilst pushing the same content with different themes can lead the reader to develop a more holistic understanding of your business, it can still look like you have no real content to push. More importantly, however, you run the risk of your users getting lost, especially if the website is too deep. Spreading might be an option for less in-depth topics, but with anything that requires a lot of explanation you don’t want your readers to be searching in different places. This is when Google’s use of keyword variations is really useful. Keep the content in the same place and keep it clear.

• By using keyword variations you get a better opportunity to make your content compelling. Whether it’s the meta-title or the real content of your page, your choice of language has a strong influence on the reader and you need to draw them in straight away. For meta-titles (where use of keywords is crucial), you need to make sure you arouse your readers curiosity and make them wonder what is behind that link. Therefore, think about what your user is searching for and what they are hoping to achieve when you choose your key word variations. Furthermore, when you write your page content you still want to maintain this human perspective. Remember that users will always be more attracted to unique, interesting content that they haven’t read before. Keyword variations will give you a bit more flexibility to do this.

Should UX and SEO researchers work together? Absolutely!

This shouldn’t seem like a strange one, especially given the fact that SEO and keyword analysis is based exactly on what the public (our users) type into Google search. Although SEO and UX teams clearly have a lot they can learn from each other on any given project, we increasingly see companies dividing their user research between different teams. Most often ‘what they do’ and ‘what they want’ is seen as the consideration of social media and search term analysis experts, and ‘why they do it’ is seen as the traditional focus of UXers. Many people, myself included, believe UX and SEO researchers should become much more integrated in their work. This wouldn’t just be more interesting, but it would be more efficient too. I wonder how many times UX researchers are told that what they have just discovered about their users was seen in the search results. Indeed, information about our users can be borrowed from all manner of sources and separate teams which aren’t deemed as the normal responsibility of a UX researcher. Check out FAQs, call centre feedback and service use surveys for all kinds of additional information.

In conclusion, online marketing like SEO can create huge opportunities for new business and it only makes sense to maximise this effort by using borrowed knowledge from other teams. In the same way, SEO and social media teams can offer considerable insights to UX teams about their users.