It’s perhaps no big secret that usability, if done with both a coding and user-facing mindset, can provide a lot of SEO benefits. The same synergies exist between a lot of different aspects in the creation and successful execution of a website, and perhaps more so in an e-commerce setting.
It’s all about Traffic and Conversion
Whether you have a small personal blog or a large enterprise e-commerce website it typically boils down to 2 things:
- Get traffic – Regardless of the website you want some traffic, the amount you want or expect might be different but everybody wants people to visit their site.
- Convert traffic – Once people are on your website you typically want them do do something. You want to convert them from visitors to users, customers or subscribers. For a blog you might want them to comment on your post or share it with their friends, or perhaps subscribe to your newsletter or podcast. For an ecommerce site you’d probably want them to buy something and even better tell their friends so they buy something as well.
Whilst simplified these are the two things that is common for most sites and each can be equally difficult to achieve.
Getting traffic can be achieved through a huge number of avenues. Traditional and online marketing, social marketing, email marketing, word of mouth, viral content, paid search engine marketing and many more. Perhaps the most cost-effective, scalable and long term option is organic or natural traffic from search engines. The main factors in organic search is content and Search Engine Optimisation. However as I’m about to illustrate there are a number of other factors that have synergies with SEO, getting traffic and more importantly converting your traffic.
Converting traffic is even more varied in both what it means to different websites as well as how you go about achieving it, this is where User Experience Design comes into play along with your content, value proposition, brand, credibility among other things.
Diagram of factors that impact on Conversion
In an attempt to visualise these synergies I created this diagram to show the different aspects in play how they can overlap. Whilst not entirely correct or complete, as there are a number of additional factors that are in play, it should give an overview of things to consider.
