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B2B Marketers: Should The Usablity Of Your Website Influence Organic Rankings?
Because I am so involved in the search marketing community, I am constantly looking for the latest news from the big players in the search engine game. I am hoping that this is the year search engines will stop putting so much weight on easily inflated website analytics like links and link popularity, and more weight on website usability.
Dysfunctional Algorithms
Why are search engines relying so much on metrics like link popularity to determine relevant results when they have a vast amount of user data at the ready? Why are the engines still putting so much weight on pre-click factors when they have substantial post-click behavioral data about the user and what that user is doing after they click? Search Engines could be putting more relevant results in front of their users if they just start using the data they already collect.
Relevant Results
If I land on a page with useful information about the topic for which I searched, and if that site is easy to understand, navigate and use, I will stay on the site and engage with the content. Alternatively, if I immediately leave a site and return to the search results or perform another search, this should be a red flag to the search engine that I did not find a relevant result.
In my opinion, the following usability metrics should be utilized more prominently by search engines to help determine relevancy and should be assessed by each search term/phrase:
- The website’s bounce rate
- The average time spent on that page
- Are users engaging with what is provided?
- Number of actions
- Succeeding searches
Implications for your B2B Website
What would this mean to you as a B2B marketer? It means that you could spend significantly less time doing things like link buying or link baiting. This is also why just getting traffic to your B2B website will no longer be enough.
You must do more than track general website analytics to fully grasp how people are behaving after landing on your site. By using software like CrazyEgg or ClickTale, B2B marketers are able to see a visual representation of where users are clicking, what they are using to engage, and how they are navigating your website.
These tools will enable you to see where users are engaging with your site, point out any glaring problems, and help determine where there is room for improvement.
Boost Actions And Conversions For Your B2B Website
Specifically, B2B marketers can use this data to analyze and improve desired online actions such as:
- registration form completion
- subscription or webinar sign-up
- contacting a sales representative or other team member
- download a whitepaper
- admittance to pages with product specification information.
Benefits of Usability And Conversion Improvement
B2B marketers should take the time to ensure an optimal user experience on your website. Not only will website usability and conversion improvement help the overall website performance, it will help the search engines deliver cleaner, more relevant search results. If a search engine wants its users to return and ultimately conduct more searches, search results must provide sites that are relevant, easily understandable, and deliver the best experience.
Will there be a day that rankings are based on quality content and website usability factors over keyword spamming and links? Maybe this is the year; will you be ready?