Search is the Destination
Trusted sites are dead, or are they?
Past behaviour: Find a source that provides good service, good content and is credible. Return there whenever you need more information. You trust that it is the best.
New Behaviour: Loyalty is dead. When I need something I search. I cannot recall the sites visited. When I find what Im looking for I stop, use and move on.
Hypothesis: Your homepage is no longer the doorway to your website, the search engines are. They will deem the most appropriate page in your site to the search engine query and then deliver that page to the user, the user can drop in anywhere. Users don’t necessarily want a user experience they want specific information or knowledge, thus the query. A user process or experience also usually starts from the homepage and works ina logical manner, most users don’t, due to search.
Impact on design: Traditional design focuses on the homepage as the entry point, traditionally a clean splash type page and the usage or words, considered cool
The world has changed: When designing or building your new website consider the following, to
ensure you are maximising search engine opportunities:
-
Landing pages occur throughout the site and are user to a user immediately. In fact consider every page in your site a potential landing page
-
Landing pages are identified and driven by search user phrase popularity, which the search engines query model with respect to user intent
-
The conversion path should be clear from every page. Show people what you want them to do, make it easy and tell them when they’ve done it
-
The conversion path should be short. i.e a click away.
-
Use visual cues to support the conversion process
Example:
There is a property group which runs magazine type fashion websites. These may be a good example to illustrate this. The homepage identified amongst other things the following key landing pages: “Whats Hot?”, “Whats Happening?” etc. No doubt great concepts from a marketing perspective and logical to a human being when they land.
“What’s hot”, apart from all the porn connotations has around 3,200 searches on average per month and “Whats Happening” around 300 searches on average per month. All these are Australian search numbers.
Some examples of highly searched on, fashion related terms. (Note these have been fiddled slightly to take into account search engine market shares and some other factors) :
-
Designer clothing (25,000 searches per month)
-
Designer clothes (16,700 searches per month)
-
Shoes (5,6m searches per month)
-
Costume Jewellery ( 37,000 searches per month)
-
Fashion (10,3m searches per month)
Surely, you would want to optimise for these terms, have landing pages for them and deliver a good user experience when people landed on them. I would say the searches are the language of the people, what they are using to find what they want.
Final Point
(1) User groups and focus groups are usually far smaller than the search population. (2) These groups may not be on top of keyword use and search engine trends. Search engines are around 10-15% of Internet traffic in Australia and around 25% of all traffic to websites. (Source : Cebit E-marketing conference : Hitwise presentation)
