Why SEO matters when you create your navigation etc?

While usability is important you should not forget that while you can have the most beautifully designed and easy to use site in the world, what good is it if you are not getting visitor traffic to it? For Marta Eleniak the user journey, behaviour analysis and even user testing of a site starts with what the users might type into a search engine to find a product they are interested in.

The online world is simply too competitive not to take a ruthless approach to being found otherwise you might as well not bother having a website amidst the tens, hundreds and thousands of 'me toos' out there. Marta likes to shoot aggressively for number 1 - the first 5 results are the ones to strive for on page one of Google so you need to choose keyword battles you can win too. You don't need the resources of a big corporate or people building links for you in our experience - just the savvy. You do need to pull out all the stops in how your content and pages are organised to yield decent rankings on search engines and be a serious contender in your market. 

Marta's real world experience of many years running sites to be successful in commercial terms has led her to hone a blend of usability/SEO (search engine optimization) skills which mean her own etail site www.onceuponabelt.com enjoys sales generated 95% from appearing in unpaid search results for belts. The remainder come from word-of-mouth recommendations. They are number one on Google UK for 'ladies belts' getting there within a few months of site launch and holding on to it apart from a few days when TK Maxx usurped them to the 2nd spot. Findability on the likes of Google has won them requests for products to be used in photoshoots for Vogue etc where an expensive London PR agency with similar fashion clients on its books did not. With these brilliant results how can you focus on usability without SEO?

In short Marta has worked hard to combine usability and SEO, planning her site from the off with SEO in mind, and she does not have to spend any money to get visitors. Trialling some other paid methods to drive traffic did not generate a significant enough ROI to continue them and when you can attract relevant Google searches for free, why pay?

When you work on the navigation and wire frames (rough plans of a page for what goes on and where) for your site you really need to be doing it having done keyword research which you should refer to all the way through, making strategic decisions about what pages are aimed at which keywords. Your navigation should tie in with what users are typing in to search engines as well as be usable and make sense immediately to users who have never been on your site before - you can test this quickly and easily using a simple paper prototype which I will discuss in a future article.

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