Preventing Costly Site Usability Mistakes - #sepodcast 223

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I'm Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Thank you for turning into another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 223. That is one of the things you can actually read. You'll notice our new logo is here, and you might not be able to see it because of coloration, contrast issues that we did not plan for. So we'll do like a gray background, and then that'll work. Yeah, and if that one don't work, then the following week we'll try white, and then green, maybe. Yeah, and then we'll just do a new logo. Yeah. We can do that here. All right, this is podcast number 223. Our last podcast had a tip, and that tip was make sure you're going to be profitable. That's always a good tip. Assess the level of demand for your target keywords. Yeah, last podcast we were talking about keyword research. And so you want to make sure that when developing your keywords, whatever keywords you're going to use for SEO purposes or pay-per-click purposes, target your keywords that'll generate the most profit for you. You know, you don't want to go after what generates the least profit because if you happen to optimize fairly well and you get the rank that you want, then you will spend a lot of time on your least valuable asset. Yep. And that's not a good idea. So we would say target your most profitable keywords first, rank for those, market for those, that way you can get some revenue generating, and then go back and optimize for all your other things. Yep. That makes sense. Please remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. Yes. Where our mantra is. Don't be a douche. Do not be a douche. Not a good look. If you can and you have a device or you're in front of a device, please tweet now. Chuck, what should they tweet? You should be tweeting hashtag

SEO podcast. This is number 223. Be sure to tag us in it at eWebStyle at bestSEOPodcast. That way we can follow you back and do all of our social networking stuff. Cool. And you could do us a small favor. And there's three ways to do us a small favor. One of them has three steps. And that one is go onto iTunes, create an account, write a review. If you write a review, please send the, you can, nah, just write a review. Next. We'll get it. We'll figure it out. Next, you can go to our G Plus local page and write a review. Now, we've made it really easy for you to get to our G Plus local page. And the way you do that is you go to e-webstyle.com slash G plus. Or slash. G plus. Or slash. Google plus. Or slash. Google plus. I like how you're, that's awesome. That's good. If you're watching it, it'll make more sense. If you're not watching it, then just. Start watching it. Wait, first off, start watching. Thank you. Yeah. So, if you're not watching it, kick in the shins. If you are watching it, punch in the face. And finally, what you could. Yeah. Soon we'll have another way. Soon it'll be, it'll be Google. It'll be Google plus slash plus e-webstyle. And Google.com. Isn't it Google.com? Or is it Google G Plus? It's actually plus.google.com, but I think Google.com slash plus goes to the same page. It will go there with a little plus e-webstyle. So, scratch that. Yeah. e-webstyle.com slash G plus. Yeah, we're just going to keep that for now. And the final way that you can write a review for us, we really do appreciate it. We will give you a punch in the face. We're about to read some reviews now. Is you can go to our, what was I just thinking? We can go to our Facebook page. Our Facebook page is facebook.com slash e-webstyle. And on that, right there on the right, bottom down, you'll see some reviews, some

reviews people have already written. What you should do is go there and write a five-star review for us, please. Speaking of five-star reviews, actually, before I get to that, remember, we have a referral program. You refer an SEO client to us. You get paid as long as they're paying. Bring it on. You can get a free website analysis. Go to our website, e-webstyle.com. Somewhere, you will find a free website analysis form. I don't care if it's the old site or the new site. Which is coming soon. Slightly delayed. And you will find one of those forms. We'll get you guys' opinion on that. Especially some of our photos who tend to interact with us the most. Currently on our existing site, we use the sidebar for our website analysis form. On a new site, we did a, there's an image nav right in the middle. And when you click it, you'll get a pop-up that will allow you to do that. But we're curious to see which one is going to be most effective. Of course, we won't know until we launch the new site. But what experience have you guys had? Do you prefer to click an option, then fill out a form, or go directly to the form? Do we need to show the form, or do we need to have that kind of hover feature? Exactly. And it should be hover, right? I think it's hover. Yeah, as long as it's hover, I would be, yeah. Do we have any algo, Kat? Not right now, maybe. I just, I need some confirmation on it. I know something happened in January, but they haven't titled it. Google hasn't released a name. They can reach out to us, we'll give it a title. Yeah, I'd call it, you know, something. Google, what? But something happened, and from what I read on SEO Moz, it happened around the 18th. Okay. Well, we'll get some more details on that and get that to you in our next podcast, which will be 224. Finally, that'll be this

Friday. That'll be in four days. So, we've got a couple reviews. Let's blow through those real quick. Jane Hooper, excellent. A must-listen-to podcast. I subscribe so I don't miss a thing. Bottom line is this. If you have a website, you need to listen to this podcast. Boom. So, Jane, punch in the face to you. Punch in the face, thank you. And that's a good thing. Yeah, and that was a review on Facebook. Facebook. Yeah. All right. So, now we've got some G... Yeah, I can tell because it says like. Now we've got some G-plus reviews. First, G-plus review from Eduardo Garcia. First, thank you for writing a G-plus review. Appreciate it. Boom. Punch in the face. Great podcast. Thank you for sharing SEO. Help. Help. I prepare websites for our home-based business with decent results, but I was searching for help to improve. Your podcasts are both informative and entertaining, which makes it possible to enjoy the learning process. Infotainment. Infotainment. Love it. Punch in the face, Mr. Eduardo Garcia. If you don't mind, Mr. Garcia, podcast at edaswefstyle.com. Send us a link to the site you're working on. I'll be glad to do a webinar and check them out. All right. Next is Francis Bowman. This was about a week ago. One of my favorite podcasts. I never miss an episode. I learn something new with every show. Francis, punch in the face. Bowman, we like you and your review. Thank you. And those aren't, there are no stars on that one, although the Facebook one probably had stars. And then finally, we've got a title very helpful. Five stars. Five stars. This is by MTS LLC from the United States, and it is not very verbose. It says, well done, toks. I think that's thanks. Okay. Yeah. Or is it Texas? Texas. I'm going to go with thanks. Well done, thanks. I'm going to go with thanks. Appreciate it. Cool. No problem. Hey, it's our pleasure. A little bit of news. I know you're getting all excited. I thought you were hopping into

the meet. This is really cool. There's an app out there called Cycloramic. I saw it on Shark Tank, which is, by the way, one of my favorite shows. That and Profit. But, like, both of those are really cool. This app, what it does is you take your iPhone, it's an iPhone-only app. You take your iPhone and you set it on its end, so upright on its end, and it uses the vibration tool inside of the iPhone and causes the phone to rotate. And while it's rotating, it's taking pictures. Oh. So, what does? You set that there. Yeah, literally 360 picture tape. Right. With the little vibration tool. So, you don't need, like, a special Lazy Susan, or you're not, like, spinning around. Boom. That's just awesome. You know, my son has a case for his iPhone that's literally heavy at the bottom with a horn that connects to the speaker on the back. And so, the case stands it up and plays the music. And it shapes the music towards you. Yeah. That's cool. I thought that was kind of cool and lazy all at the same time. Some of the greatest things are lazy. Or encourage you to be lazy. Google Maps is now providing better Waze, and that's W-A-Z-E. So, Google bought Waze, the software, the app, W-A-Z-E, a while back, and is now incorporating, like, faster roots into it. That sucks. Kind of. Yeah. I mean, because I use Waze. Right? And I like having the option to, do I want to use Waze or do I want to use Waze? So, I haven't really seen how it incorporates it. Isn't it nice, though? Like, so, right now, if you click an address, and it's going to pull up in Maps. Well, I haven't made Maps my default right now. On my phone, I get the option. Do you want Maps or do you want Waze? Oh. Yeah. And so, it depends on where I'm going. Shoot, I'd already turned that on. Yeah. I'll be like, I might want to use Waze,

because I know how to get there. I'm just trying to find a different route, because Waze gives me a better route than Google Maps sometimes. That's true. All right. I'm going to have to remove one of the defaults, because I have the default going to Google Maps. Yeah. Well, and so, eventually, it's going to be the same quality of results, just in Google Maps. That's what I, that's kind of how I see it. Maybe. Yeah. Facebook Life in 62 Seconds, did you see that, the little videos that Facebook made for you? I hate them. You hate them? I thought they were cool when I first saw them, and then so many people did them, so many fasts, I hated them really, really quickly. Yeah. My wife did one. I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. We looked at it when she did it. Yeah. And then, by the time I got up in the morning, I had a timeline full of them, and I was like, oh. Skip all. Yeah. Where's the skip all button? I saw these pictures already. Yeah. I'm in half of them. Come on. That's why they're on my wall. I thought it was kind of cool, right? It was cool. The technology was cool. The concept of your little private movie, I dig it, but yeah. And Google G Plus did something like that. It took pictures and made a thing. I think I showed you mine. It did that all on its own. That was pretty cool. So, Google did it first. And it's called Flickr been doing it. Oh, yeah? Just saying. Yeah. Go Flickr. Does Google own Flickr now? It's a Yahoo property. It's a Yahoo property. So, it's not closed? No, Flickr's. Boom. Oh, my bad. My bad. What is her? Marissa. Marissa. Marissa's mayor. Mayor. She's been doing two pretty good stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty exciting. And finally, Flappy Bird pulled from the App Store. I don't know if you ever tried Flappy Bird. My kids were addicted to it. Yeah. For a

short period. That dude was making like $50,000 a day. Yeah. And then he pulled it because it was too popular is what I read. Yeah. And it had no answer that made sense. It's like it was too popular. Okay. It does not compute. Automatic kick in the shin for him. Yeah. That should be what? Yeah. We'll add that at the end for a while if we don't have anything else. So, all right. That is the potato. I did have one. I can't think of it, though. I had it already Friday. Okay. That is the potatoes of our podcast. Now, let's get into the meat. Yeah. We definitely get to the info part of infotainment. And basically, I pulled this article from Search Engine Watch. Gave a punch in the face to Lisa Barone. She put out a great article, Six Usability Mistakes That Kill Conversions. And I thought this was pretty good because- We harp on this all the time. I mean, conversions are a huge part of what we specialize in. We often don't send traffic to something until we've reworked it from a conversion perspective. I mean, that's one of the reasons we harp on having one company to manage your marketing and your site because that way they can be in full control over your conversions. If you have one company, you know, sending traffic and the other company managing your site itself, you know, who do you fire if you're not getting business? Both of them, right? And so, we don't want to be that company. Yeah. We don't want to be both of those companies. Exactly. We get fired twice every time we get fired. I know. Yeah. And so, look, we don't get fired much. Well, and when we do, they come back. And they do. So, our appliance customer, as an example. Yeah. So, anyway, you want to, you want to, so here's, she wrote six usability mistakes that kill conversions. And then, one of the questions she started off asking was what, you know, for an example,

if you're on a, let's say, a home site, what category are the vacuums in, right? Home, electronics, or tools? Great scenario. And I like her example because that's a good question. And that's the problem that most people with, especially some sort of e-commerce site have. You begin thinking about SEO and things of that nature. And so, you want to put these categories, these products in all these different categories. And with certain cases, that could be the best thing to do. But in certain cases, it cannot, right? If you give people too many options, which we'll get to in a minute, then it gets confusing and they don't get anything. So, her first one is you aren't keeping it simple. Definitely keep it simple. I mean, if people are shopping, you understand that, especially if they're shopping from a mobile device, which is likely to happen because mobile commerce is growing, you definitely have to keep it simple, right? You don't want to give people thousands of options to click and thousands of places to find the same thing because they won't find anything and then you'll lose them. You definitely need to make sure that you keep it simple. Simple from a desktop perspective, they can quickly click and find, maybe find any frequently asked questions or see any videos. Keep it simple from a tablet perspective. Make sure that they can scroll easily and tap with ease and find the things that they're looking for without having to expand and turn to landscape and do things of that nature. So, definitely keep your site simple. Number two, she says... Just to note, we had a question on our chat here. Hello, is this live as in Monday afternoon, 7 p.m. Eastern Standard Time? Yes. And it's actually E.D. Garcia. Dude, we just read your review. Punch in the face to you if you're listening live right now. That's awesome. Thank you. Yes, this is live. That's what's up. That's crazy. So, number two, she said you try to be pretty, not useful. We run

into this all the time. Where you spend so much time designing a site to get the look and the feel that you want, but it's not really useful. And I go back to the same appliance client. When they originally came, you know, they had this big banner with the helicopter flying around. We still talk about that helicopter. You came across it the other day, right? In one of our archives. You're like, yeah, it got me for another minute. It got me again. Where's that helicopter going to land? What if that's a life flight helicopter? I know. Is that a news cop? Yeah, you know, what was they flying over? But, you know, the objective is not to distract people. And sometimes you design for beauty and you design for what you like personally, but that's not really useful. And so, you know, some things you should, you know, she says build a site that is useful by understanding what your audience needs. And I think this is key. I'll give you a good example. I download music, right? I can't think of the last time I actually bought a CD. And so if you're marketing to me and my demographic and you're trying to sell music, it's your best interest to make the digital download link prominent, extremely prominent, you know? Possibly the only option. Exactly. I don't want to accidentally order a CD. I don't want to pay for shipping. I don't want to wait on the CD because when I get a CD and somebody hands them to me, I make music. So people give me CDs all the time. I literally rip it, put it on my phone, put it on my iPod. Once it's digital on my computer, this CD becomes dust or a paperweight or a coaster and things like that. Or a very elegant display. A square Frisbee. Yeah. Because the whole case goes flying. I was like, square? I don't know what kind of CDs you're getting, but the whole case is going. The whole case. Like, I

don't need the case. I don't need the sleeve on it. I may read it one good time. Yeah. And so, yeah, be aware of your audience, right? Because you don't want to have that experience. You don't want to lose the sale because you're offering the wrong type of product. Number three, she said you forgot words or you spelled them wrong. This is key. You know, you don't want to be promoting a product and you leave out a very important word, like maybe some descriptive word, like blue or red or green or whatever color your product comes in. And they can't find what they're looking for and therefore they don't purchase. Yeah. Um, so, or, or maybe, maybe you're, maybe it's not a product. Maybe it's a service you're offering and these people are looking for, you know, a tankless water heater and you just didn't mention tankless. You just mentioned water heater. Right. And so now you're getting form submissions from people who, who need water heaters and you don't have water heaters. You don't have tankless water heaters. Kind of like what we talked about relative to the tip. Maybe water heaters make you some money and tankless water heaters make you a whole lot of money. Now you're gearing towards the wrong thing. Exactly. So, so don't forget the words. Um, you're right. It's kind of, it's kind of funny that you even have to put that in there. And we've all read the site that's missing something. Something. Is this what, this is what I want? I don't think this is what I want, but that's the picture of what I want. But they're not talking about the tip. Yeah. Number four, you give too many options, right? Uh, and you give a good example about the guy, you know, selling the, uh, jelly. So there's a, there's a, there's an old psychological study. Um, it was on a university campus. Basically they were selling jams and they, one day they had four jams and the next day they had 30 jams

and they may have run it for a couple of days or whatever. So they could get some statistically significant data. And what it turns out, you would, your intuition is, Hey, when there's 30 jams, I've got everybody's favorite jam here or more people's favorite jam. And what they found out was, is that the more options there are, the more attractive, no thank you looks. And so four jams actually outsold four different types of jams outsold the 30 jams or whatever the number was, the more significant number, uh, in, in, in a significant way, it was like, you know, by 60% or, or something. It was, it was surprising. Counterintuitive. It goes back to keep it simple. Reduce the number of options. And it's funny how true that is. That happened to me, um, me and my wife in the store the other day, looking for coffee cream, right? We've been trying to find a cinnamon cream ever since we had it. Right. And with the Lucerne kind, they had like nine, 10 different kinds. None of them cinnamon. I was like, we're just not going to get anything. Yeah. Even though we needed cream. Right. I hold it kind of, part of it's kind of holding out for cinnamon. The other one is kind of like overwhelmed by too many options, right? Yeah. Because if they would have had four, I would have probably made a decision. You know, I'll take a hazelnut or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. We just didn't get any. So yeah, simplicity works. Uh, number, number five, she says, um, you didn't make the action obvious. Um, this goes back to what we were saying. If your objective is for me to download, then let it be known that I will be downloading this. Make it easy to find, use a bright color, make it stand out, um, do something to make it obvious what you want me to do. Um, and this goes for service providers as well. If your CTA is call, then make it obvious that they should be

calling. Give them why they should call. Maybe it's a free consultation. Maybe they're calling because, um, you're going to answer the phone. You know, we have an attorney and he called him because it's his cell phone. He will answer the phone, which is, which is huge for attorneys. And talk really, really fast. And talk really, really fast. Exactly. Um, but, but make the action obvious. What you don't want to do is confuse people, you know, call us, click here, do this, do that. And now this person is lost on your page. Just like, just like people who are doing social media marketing, right? And you're giving way too many options, you know, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, share us on Reddit, do this, um, put me on your Instagram, put me in your G plus circle and everybody's like, Whoa, that's 30 jams, right? It's not four jams. In fact, it should be one jam. In that case, focus on one at a time and maybe you adjust that component. Maybe two. Yeah. But so definitely don't give so many options that you turn people away. Um, yeah, you didn't make it obvious. And the last one is, um, there's no communication. Um, I think this is huge for, I want to make a, remember to note about making it obvious a problem on our website. If you go to our website, the current one before we upgrade, which by the time you listen to this, it may not be there. We may archive it so you can see it. Uh, over on the right, we've got our phone number and our phone number is also the way you contact us, get to the contact us form. That's confusing. I was on, um, another website. I can't remember. I think it was, um, uh, the logistics company and they, they had the same issue. It was contact us phone number and I was like, so the tabs were all identical and that one was the only one with two lines and it

said contact us phone number. It wasn't clear that that was the way to get to the contact us page and they didn't have in that case, they didn't have a form everywhere where we suffer less because we've got a form on every page. Yeah. But ours is as is a button actually at the top that says contact us with the phone number. So it kind of looks like a CTA, but you don't realize you can click it and actually get to the contact us page. Yeah. So that will be corrected in the next part in the next website. The last tip she left was, um, there is no communication, right? And so, um, that's important, especially for e-commerce sites. Um, if you're selling online and you're not a big brand, a, you know, Amazon, Walmart, overstock, you know, eBay, something like that, where people have purchased from before and everybody knows you, then you must supply the proper communication. Uh, you have to give people a phone number. You have to give people an address. They need to know where it'll be being shipped from, uh, a way to contact you in case they're having an issue with their order. Uh, because if they can't communicate with you, that will equal a bounce and I will buy from your competitor because I can probably contact them. Uh, so make sure that you have a viable ways to communicate. Maybe you're offering a product that requires them to do extensive research on your site and therefore you have tons of content and white papers and things like that. A chat feature may be good, uh, because they may have questions. Uh, and, and by may be good, he means will be good. Definitely. That's it. The may applies only if you're able to man it, right? You don't want to have... Some people, yeah, I hate going to sites and it's like, chat's not available now. Chat now and fill out a request form. I'm like, uh, no. Yeah. I'll just go back. So, uh, so

yeah, definitely have some communication. Um, so that was it. Shout out to, uh, Punch in the Face. Kicking my shin for saying that. Punch in the face to, uh, uh, Lisa for the article. We'll be posting that on Facebook and Twitter. And so you guys check it out. All right. So we'll just get to make our what sound and our what faces for, you know. Oh, that was good. Yeah. That was good. I was totally surprised. Flappy birds. Shut down. I don't get it. Yeah. If I were making $50,000 a day on an app that I, he, I think he spent like a couple hours making the app and put it out there and it went nuts. And it went nuts. Like. Maybe he's a criminal. You know, that's probably what it is, right? He's like a reasonably significant criminal and knows that he doesn't need this kind of publicity. Yeah. Maybe, yeah. Too many people are knowing out who I am. They want to interview me and that would be. I'm going to tell you the ironic thing. This is the ironic thing about Flappy Birds. When you play it, you look like a Flappy Bird. Oh, really? Because you. More arms. More arms. Yeah. My arms getting tired. Cool. So that's our what. This has been podcast number 223. 223. Thank you guys for tuning in. And a special thank you to Eduardo Garcia. What's your face to you, dude? All right. Yes, we do know that Ustream runs commercials. I think it's every 30 seconds they run a three-minute commercial or something. No, it's like every 12 minutes or every. I don't know. I know in my church it's every 12 minutes you get a 30-second commercial. Yeah. And it's probably really loud. Yeah. And it came right when we were making a good point. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to go back and catch that podcast when we get it up. We're actually getting caught up in our podcast. I think within two months we're going to be broadcast Friday, podcast

available on iTunes on Tuesday. So we're pretty excited about getting that caught up because the news will be a little bit more relevant. Thank you guys for tuning in. Well, then they'll be on YouTube as well. Yeah. So you'll see the little ad at the beginning of YouTube, but then you'll be able to watch the podcast in its entirety ad-free after that. Yep. Excellent. Again, thank you guys. We are the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of all y'all in up to 76 different countries. Thank you. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Charles Burris. Bye-bye for now.