How does Usability affect your Search Engine Rankings?
June 20, 2008
Traditionally Usability and SEO have been considered two separate disciplines. With the popularity of Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns however, Search Engine Marketers (SEM) marketers spent a lot of time working on the usability and conversion of their landing pages to ensure positive ROI metrics.
Can’t blame them, can you 
? On PPC campaigns you are paying per click, so if your website doesn’t convert visitors into revenue you are simply losing money.
However, this is not exactly the overlap between SEO and Usability I am talking about today. I am talking about how the way a user behaves on your page has a direct impact on your website’s chances of ranking in the engines.
Let’s look at the following example: your visitor arrives to your site, she spends 2 minutes at the home page, then she clicks through to one of the website sections, she spends 1.5 minute, then she clicks though to another section and spends another 3 minutes, then she subscribes to your RSS feed.
Conclusion: your visitor was definitely interested in your website. She considered it relevant and useful. If 7 out of 10 visitors follow a similar path, it means that this is a quality, resourceful and useful website
Now let’s see another example: your visitor arrives to our website. She spends 30 seconds at the home page and clicks the back button of the browser.
Conclusion: she obviously considered it useless. If 7 out of 10 visitors follow this path… it’s just not speaking too well about your website, is it?
How can the search engines find out what occurs during a visitor’s session in your website, you may be asking? Let’s think for a second all the tunnels that Google alone has access to, if they want to “watch” (let’s not say spy, it’s not PR) internet users’ behaviour:
· Google toolbar (comes as default on many IE installations)
· Feedburner (a popular RSS subscription management tool very popular among bloggers owned by Google)
· Gmail and Google Accounts (which allow users to personalize their search settings)
· Google Analytics (free statistics script very popular among webmasters)
· YouTube and Google Video embeds (the option that webmasters have of embedding videos in their websites)
Am I saying that Google is using all of these channels to track browser behaviours? I can’t say that because I (as any other SEO) don’t have access to Google’s algorithms, but what I can say is that it would make perfect sense for Google to move into this direction. After all, in the very competitive market that they operate on, they need to keep ahead of their competition and ensure they keep providing the very best results to their users, so why would they not use this information if it’s available to them?
Besides what our common sense dictates, there is a lot of evidence that suggests that variables such as high bounce rates and low RSS subscriptions have a negative effect on rankings.
All of this information suggests that there should be a close interrelation between your usability team and your SEO campaigns.
