How to annoy shoppers on your website.
Sometimes you can be so close to your website that you don’t see flaws. That was the case this week when I was speaking to someone who swore they had search on mobile. It was in the hamburger menu. That means you have to search for search. See the problem? Little frustrations will see customers leave, but you won’t know.
- Avoid the tiny frustrations.
- You won’t see people leave, so how will you know?
- Searching for search is stupid.
- Why Google wants your site to be great.
Transcript
Hey, welcome back Rankers, back to standing up this week. Still out of the shed, I just like it more around here, bit of the fields in the background. I want to talk to you a little bit today about a few things, but first I just want to say thank you to all those businesses in Victoria who have stood up for their employees and chosen not to abuse their human rights. Well done. Excellent. And just acknowledging what a dark week in Melbourne it has been.
Finding frustration.
Enough said, let’s move on to what I want to talk about today. I’ve been talking to a lot of retailers and I’m just having conversations, I’m not necessarily looking for new clients right now, but there’s certain categories that I’ve been looking into, because I’d like a client in that category, which I don’t have, so tool sales would be one.
But I was talking to a guy this week, good day Allen, lovely bloke, knows his business inside out, been in business for 30 years. So really knows what he’s on about, but when it comes to his site, he’s very opinionated, which is fine, but just something simple, and I’ll explain this to you. And I’ve used this analogy before, when you go into say a large store, like a Bunnings or maybe a Kmart or something, that you might frequent on a regular basis, and you can’t find the thing, you might want to ask someone who works there, where that thing is. Not unusual, right? When you can’t find that person, like in Bunnings sometimes, or that person gives you the wrong information, it kind of sends you a bit crazy. As Heath said, you just want to get in front of Bunnings and start waving the tools around, saying “Someone help me!” Because it’s frustrating.
And that’s what we’re doing on websites. You just don’t see it. You don’t see people leaving the store. You don’t just see them walking out there. I can’t be stuffed looking for that thing. And this, and Allen, who I was talking to at the beginning of the week, last week said, I said to him, “Mate, just a simple thing, put search on your mobile site.” He said, “It’s there.” I said, “No, it’s not.” He said, “It is. You click on the hamburger menu.” I said, “It’s not there.” Tim, what do you mean? He said, “If you click on that,” I said, “It’s not there. If I have to click on something, it’s not there.” He said, “Everyone has to click on the hamburger menu.” I said, “That’s because you haven’t got search visible.” Pretty simple, right?
Don’t make me search for search.
So not having search visible is the equivalent of searching for search. It’s like going into Bunnings and spending half an hour looking for someone who might know the answer. It’s a terrible experience. And it’s all these sorts of little things that we don’t understand. And that’s why our industry, because our industry has grown up from this idea of SEO and ads, separate things, and UX is a separate thing. These are things that all affect your shoppers. I said to someone else yesterday, we talk about SEO a lot, but we use Google Search Console a lot for making ads work better. Now, when you think about it, Google Search Console doesn’t mention SEO anywhere. Nor does Google. It used to be called webmaster tools. What does Google want? It wants to make more money. How does it make more money? Selling more ads. How does it sell more ads? Make them work better. How do they make them work better? Well, their own technology, but making your site work better.
So look at Google Search Console and those sorts of things to work out how you make your ads work better. A lot of ad agencies don’t even know that you can find out everything the ads bot crawls inside Google Search Console, and they may not even have it set up. Ask your ad agency. And of course, if you want a second opinion, give us a bell; send me an email, [email protected]. Hopefully that’s helpful, and we will see you next week. Exciting times, eh? See you later.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
