How To Drive Your Website to Achieve Your Business Goals

One of my friends (Heather) is working real estate managing director in Canada. She had worked with a team to redesign company project. The website launched with lovely look and whistles that created by a company graphics designer – but his call was relating with an issue that impact company’s website and was calling me to help with a problem. !!

The problem is - Her beautiful new website wasn’t getting many visitors!  - Please Yasser we need your suggestion.

“Why don’t people want to visit our lovely website and check the properties list and other promotions we have there?” Heather wailed, genuinely puzzled that the results of her intensive efforts weren’t as rosy as she had expected when the redesigned the website.

From the first glance I knew what the problem is, but I couldn't point out where is the defect and I had to soften the impact, and gently explain what went wrong.

Together, we quickly checked the site’s ranking on Google for her top 50 keywords.  They weren’t anywhere in the top 10 results. Or even 20.  You see, the not-so-apparent reason for the ‘failed’ website was the lack of something essential for both higher search engine rankings, and to enhance the visitor experience which can convert a prospect into a customer.  What’s that, you ask? 

Heather’s company new website, though visually appealing and technology-rich, was sorely lacking in a well-planned information architecture and website structure.  But you will ask what “information architecture” is? And how does “website structure” differ from design? 

I would define “information architecture” The art and way of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, online communities, and web plugins to support usability and fundability.”

To understand this better, imagine you strip the website from of all its clothes and look at it as skeleton, shorn of flesh and skin. Focus on the basic fundamentals of building the page from shapes and strengthens it.

In computer engineering school, trainees begin by learning about computer hardware. Knowing what makes up the computer works (and later treat) hardware-software integration that not only focuses on how computer systems themselves work, but also how they integrate into the larger picture.

 

Think of your website like a cake your links, paid search, and social media acts as the icing, but your content, information architecture, content management system, and infrastructure act as the sugar and makes the cake. Without it, your cake is tasteless, boring, and gets thrown in the trash.

At the heart of understanding website structure, and planning your strategy for information architecture, lies a need to know about terms like semantic search, latent semantic indexing and SEO automation.

Semantic search is an attempt to improve search accuracy by predicting the intent of a searcher. The shift from blindly matching keywords typed into a search box against a massive database, to a more “intelligent” form of search that attempts to understand what those words actually mean to the user, has serious implications on strategic SEO for many business owners.

Latent Semantic Indexing is an indexing and retrieval method that was designed to identify patterns in the relationship between terms and concepts within any text.

By providing unique context for each search term or phrase, it ensures that a search for ‘Apple’ computers will retrieve pages with iMac or iPad on it, while a search for ‘Apple’ fruit will pull a different set of results on gardening and growing apples.

I would say, your information architecture must be based on the best ways to serve your visitor, based on an intimate understanding of ‘user logic’. For instance, good SEO begins with good keyword research. After all, if you don’t know the ways people are seeking your content, it’s pretty hard to ensure that your content “speaks” to them using the words they search for.

So for this company’s website, the primary way of organizing information was by target part of segment not by audience and by type. Because of this, I asked Heather (my friend) to modify the primary navigation and relevant page interlinking on the website. I did not discount the keyword research data. I just used the keywords in the right context.

I explained to her and to the team, that search engine optimization is optimizing a website for people who use search engines. Understanding searchers, their contexts and environments, behaviors, and intentions is just as important as understanding how search engines work.

In my opinion, if SEOs are optimizing websites without considering query classification and searcher personas, then they are optimizing more for search engines than for searchers (technology-centered optimization). Keyword classification is crucial for long-term search engine visibility and conversions.