UX is SEO duh.
Winter is looking less gloomy with sales and enquiries on the up, with some categories experiencing historic highs. There was a big Google algorithm update this week focusing on user experience, something we’ve been ardent followers of for some time. This update means it’s now more important than ever to make sure your customer has a smooth purchasing journey on your site.
What I learned
- Restrictions are relaxing; revenue is rising.
- You can rank without backlinks.
- Google’s new algorithm update.
- Why UX is SEO.
Transcript
Hi, welcome back Rankers. How you going? It’s been a great week here. Winter has started. Sales have started. Getting lots of leads and inquiries. Lots of people selling stuff. And have a look at this. This is, I’m looking at home and garden as a category only. And this is for the last 12 months. Look at that. So this is the peak of COVID, the end of March. And up here, we’ve had our restrictions; I keep going to say released. That’s not the word I’m looking for. Relaxed. Thank you.
We’ve had restrictions relaxed. And even though we’ve had them relaxed, we still work from home pretty much. So it’s like there’s been a renewed enthusiasm for the home and garden category. So back here, this was all year, your outdoor furniture, your outdoor bar tables, all that sort of stuff. But there’s all sorts of things going on out there around the home. So if you’re in that category or if you have something to sell still, it’s still bigger than it’s ever been. And to give you a five year view on that, that’s 12 months. So I can see what I’m doing. You can see it’s unprecedented, right? We’ve never had. And what I’m looking at here, I’m looking at Google Shopping. So this is people looking in ads, looking to buy things, okay, keep that in mind. But the big news, big Google algorithm update everyone.
So before I get onto that, this conversation I had on LinkedIn this week. Someone was, well they didn’t say they weren’t going to sell me backlinks, but I assumed they were going to sell me backlinks, they did try to at the end of it. But they were basically saying, “Hey, I’d like to know what you do with backlinks. How did you acquire them?” And I said, “We don’t.”
And they said, “Really? Why not? I thought you were into SEO?” I said, “We are.” They said, “Well, how do you rank?” I said, “Well, quite well.” And I said, “We focus on applause, not performance.”
New Google algorithm update
Now the Google algorithm update that’s coming out that everyone’s got papers about is about user experience, right? Stuff that we’ve been banging on about for quite some time, which is why we have a mystery shopping product. Now it’s important to understand that the UX is not for Google. Okay? It’s user experience. It’s not GX. All right. It’s UX. So you could argue that the Googlebot is a user, but seriously SEO has never been about Google. It’s always about the user. Okay? And Google knows what the user wants. That’s why they have these changes to their algorithm. Right? Makes sense.
So I just got off the phone from a potential new client. I was explaining, it’s like I always say, “Well, how much money do you want to make? How much are you doing now?” And as I said last week, the conversation was, he’s not really sure. I’m not really sure. And that’s because there are so many different metrics. We don’t quite know what’s going on with our own sites. We don’t know where the roadblocks are. We don’t know why people aren’t buying. That’s why mystery shopping and user experience is so important. And one of the things, this potential new client I was just talking to said, “Oh, you mean you do user testing and stuff like that.” And I said, “No, no, no, no, no, no.” That implies some sort of technical look.
The mystery shopping we do is non-technical people doing the mystery shopping. And the reason for that is because if they can’t buy from your site, who cares if a technical person can? The technical person can find the things. If it was me going through and doing a mystery shop, I’ll go, “Oh, there’s the search bar. Boy, I had to, that was hard to find.” Whereas a user who isn’t technical is just going to go through and go, “I can’t find any. I tried to buy something.” Have you ever had trouble buying something from an eCommerce site? A lot of people have.
So the user experience Google algorithm update, one of the best things that you can do to prepare for that is actually buy something from your own site on a mobile phone and work out the things that make it hard for you to do that. Or you can speak to us and we’ll help you out as well. Hopefully that’s helpful. Don’t get too upset, excited, worried about a Google update. If you’re focusing on your customer, if you’re focusing on the user, and you’ve got a good technically solid site, then you should be fine. If you’re worried, please always reach out and like, share, subscribe and hit us up on the tweets or on LinkedIn, if you’re there too. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
