THE ADNEWS NGEN BLOG: User-first mentality

30 April 2012

Why do you visit restaurants that are rated well or that are recommended by your friends? Why do you skip restaurants that you have heard has gotten bad reviews? We do it because we feel that the well-reviewed restaurants are trust worthy for us to visit we are happy to spend our money there.

I am the same and I go to restaurants that are either rated well on review sites or are recommended to me by friends. For me, it’s simple; it all comes down to the quality of the food. I am not too much into ambience, or value. Value is whatever you perceive it to be so it’s different from one person to the other.

Websites are the same. Some sites provide lots of value to users and others are just spammy with too many ads above and below the fold. A search engines goal is quite simple and that is to give people the most relevant answer to their query. During 2011 and continuing on in 2012, Google has made some big algorithmic updates to improve the quality of websites its showing in its SERPs. We can no longer ignore the facts and that is to make sure that brands build high quality websites to provide the best user experience for visitors landing on their site. Below are some best practices to build a high quality website.

Create a site for the users and not for the Search Engines:

As you know, users buy your products or services and not search engines. Therefore, create a quality site that provides valuable content whether it is with articles or videos. Your site must also provide answers to the query the user has entered into the search engine, so make sure each page of your site has a purpose when they land on it. Also have a clear call to action once the user has visited your website and read your content. This could be by showing other related content elsewhere on your site or signing up to a newsletter to make the user want to come back to the site and recommend it to their friends.

Create Original content for your website:

Never put duplicate content on your website. This provides no value to the user as they may have read the content before and search engines may also penalize that part of your site which has duplicate content so avoid it at all costs. Focus on creating a high quality website with original relevant content than creating a site with large amounts of pages of duplicate content.

Only provide relevant content for your website:

It’s important to provide original content for your website but it must also be relevant to the site. Say for example, if the topic of your website is about “home improvement ideas”, then having content on your website related to “car insurance” does not make sense. Relevancy is very important so stick to the relevant topic of your website as this will also provide the best user experience for your visitors.

Setup Analytics and monitor user behaviour on your website:

As William Edwards Deming once said “You can’t manage, what you don’t measure” and it’s so true. You must have analytics setup on your website so that you can see which parts of your website are generating traffic and what keywords users are entering to access your website. You must also set up different goals on your site to measure performance and measure the bounce rate of the urls on your site. If you have URLs with a bounce rate of over 30% than you must see how you can improve the quality of the page to make it more valuable to users.

Summing up, look after your users first and do the right thing by them. For further reading, I highly recommend that you read this article written by Amit Singhal (Google Fellow) which will give you a better understanding of how Google assess the “quality” of a page or a piece of content.

Aman Talwar
SEO Executive 
DGM Australia

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