Does SEO Conflict with User Experience?

/ Zach Heller

If you work with an SEO expert, you have encounter times when her recommendations or priorities conflict with the overall goal of improving the website. This will happen when content changes on the website are written for search engines and not for real people.

Let’s look at an example:

Say you are responsible for your company’s website experience. You sell books online, and some of your key pages are not the product pages for the books themselves, but the category pages for each genre of book that you sell. Your SEO expert tells you that “true crime books online” is a high volume keyword and so recommends adding that phrase into the text of the page sporadically, including in the main heading.

On the surface this is no big deal, but once the copy changes are complete, the page reads as if a robot wrote it and in the language that we use to communicate with other human beings every day, it sounds funny.

That’s because your SEO expert is writing for the search engines.

What should you do in this instance?

In my experience, user experience has to win out over SEO. While I agree that SEO is critical to any site’s success, at the end of the day you have created your website for people to use. And the user experience is priority number one.

A good SEO strategy understands that the user is the champion. We are solving for the user first, and the search engines second. And so every recommendation or assignment that they come up with should factor in the end effect on the user.

Most times, there is no conflict. Search engines prefer a page that loads faster, so does the user. Search engines prefer a domain with higher authority, so does the user. Search engines prefer a page that answers the question a user types in, so does the user.

Where conflict exists, it usually comes down to the phrasing that is used in the website copy. And though every attempt should be made to include text that searchers will use to find you on Google, it still must be written so that it can be read and understood easily.

Because at the end of the day, you are writing for the user.

A Simple Matrix to Prioritize Your Marketing Efforts

/ Zach Heller

One of the most difficult things to learn how to do as you grow your career is manage your time. That is because your responsibilities change with the roles that you serve in, the value you bring to the team, and the expectations put on you by various managers.

When you are just starting out, the expectations are often clearest. Someone else is setting your priorities, or at least defining clear goals. So the most difficult part about managing your time is learning how to do things correctly in the shortest amount of time.

But as you move up from that first position, more will be asked of you. You may serve on different teams, and wear different hats. You may have competing priorities, in service of different, but equally important company goals. Here, it is important that you learn how to prioritize your time on the most important matters. And often that means learning how to automate, delegate, or eliminate lower-level tasks.

If you are lucky enough to move into a management role, where you are presiding over a team of people and have more of a say in your company’s strategy, this skill is critical. You will fail unless you know how to set priorities. And you will be expected to help others set priorities as well.

Unfortunately, this is a skillset that is not taught in any class. It’s one that you are expected to learn on your own. If you’re lucky, you have a manager or mentor who can help.

If not, let me offer a simple 2x2 matrix you can use to determine where your team should focus it’s time and energy.

The Matrix

What you need to do to start out is create a full list of all the projects you are considering. Usually, this list is far too long for the size of your team and the resources allotted. That’s a good thing – a sign of an ambitious agenda. And it’s the precise reason that we need the matrix, to help us prioritize.

For each item on the list, then you are going to rate it’s potential impact and its level of effort required. For both, you are either going to list them as High or Low. For example, if you think a project is likely to lead to big gains in revenue but take your whole team six months to complete, you might rate it High for both impact and effort.

To construct the matrix, we need a sheet of paper with four quadrants. On the vertical axis, we are going to put “IMPACT”. On the horizontal axis, we are going to write “EFFORT”. Then divide them up into High and Low, so that you are left with something like this:

 

impact-effort-matrix.jpg

Once you have everything on your list categorized into one of the four quadrants, you are ready to prioritize.

High Impact/Low Effort

Always start working on projects in this quadrant. These are your easy wins. That you expect high returns for low cost, or low effort, is a sure sign that these are the projects where you will get the greatest “bang for the buck”.

Focus on these first and ignore the others until everything here is done.

High Impact/High Effort

We always want to maximize our impact. With that in mind, though some might argue to focus next on the other projects that don’t require much time or resources, I would recommend jumping to the high impact, high effort projects. These are those priorities that will require a significant amount of investment, but when all is said and done, your company will reap the rewards for your expenditure.

Low Impact/Low Effort

Low impact projects may not mean that much to your company in terms of improvement on the grand scale, but if it doesn’t take much to achieve incremental gains, they are still worth doing. These projects may make even more sense if your team is under pressure to produce short term wins, or lacks the resources to complete your higher impact projects.

Getting these items done checks a box and moves you in the right direction, even if it is in smaller steps.

Low Impact/High Effort

Anything that winds up in this quadrant should stay off your to-do list. It’s going to cost a lot to get done, without providing significant benefits to your team or your company. This is grunt work, and if you find yourself working on grunt work, you are ignoring potential successes elsewhere.

Prioritization Tips for Marketers

/ Zach Heller

Whether you’re in marketing or a countless number of other professions, managing your time can be one of the most difficult skills to learn.

Learning how to manage your time and prioritize tasks is crucial for succeeding.

For marketers, there will be a never-ending stream of ideas. How do we get more people to click on our ads? How do we reach people on Facebook? How can we improve our website?

For every question, there will be a million answers. And the questions don’t stop.

So how do you determine what projects are most important and what to spend your time and energy on, knowing you can’t do it all?

  1. Prioritize by impact – usually, the most important tasks or projects are the ones that will have the biggest impact. Your goal is to think through the many ideas you and your team have and estimate the results. If you expect one project to increase sales by 10% and another to increase sales by 5%, you go with the 10% project every time.
     
  2. Prioritize by timing – sometimes you will find yourself looking at a couple of projects, one with big impact that will take a long time, and one with smaller impact that you can get done much quicker. If there are things you can do relatively quickly that will improve your results, it might make sense to knock those out before moving on to the larger projects.
     
  3. Prioritize by skill – there will be some projects you or your team can do on your own, and others that will require outside help or the learning of new skills. Most people prioritize those projects that they already have experience with or expertise in. That will help you save time and money and get things done faster.

The most important tip I can offer when it comes to time management and prioritization is to figure out what you should not do. Most times, identifying those tasks or projects that you should not do is more important than figuring out which ones you should.

Once you get started on a task, push other things to the side. Free up your time and force yourself to focus on the task at hand. Too many people try to work on multiple projects at once, and they end up taking longer and turning out worse than they should have.