Is SEO Dead?
Business leaders across the world are realizing the competitive advantage of offering a great customer experience and the value that resides within. This is not only in terms of how they interact with their customers and prospects throughout their life-cycle, but the way they shape their overall experience to increase conversions, lifetime business value, and brand loyalty. Where businesses once thought that differentiating themselves by product and efficiency was the best way to strive through tiff online market competition, distinction today lies in optimizing customer experiences to make them seamless and omnichannel.
You are losing users and probably money if responsive web design is your entire goal of your website strategy and your only solution to delight your mobile users. UX is the future – but in order to provide your users with unique browsing experiences, you should always wear a pair of empathy glasses geared to optimize your website with users as the main consideration.
Let’s get something straight: We’re all marketing to humans.
“The customer-experience landscape is changing rapidly, and knowing how to operate in it is becoming more and more strategically imperative.”
Yes, customers’ perspectives, experiences and industries may differ. But at their core, all current and future customers are humans who don’t want to think too hard when they’re on our websites. There's been an unhealthy shift in the business world toward trying to get people to visit websites versus providing users with a valuable experience once they get there. There's no point in trying to increase your search engine results with the goal of increased traffic to your website if, when visitors arrive at your site, they are uninterested, uninformed or unmotivated.
Contrary to the thinking on SEO, the perspective of Traditional SEO relied on optimizing sites for search engines. Traditional SEO is dead and its now heavily focussed on not just relevancy but also user experience. The main focus for Search Engine Optimization is to optimize the site for humans, which was what Google and other search engines have brought down their focus on.
In the realm of the design world today, the term “web design” has become something of an understatement, especially when we look at where web design has come from compared to 20 years ago.
The traditional idea of web design has evolved tremendously, especially in the last couple of years. The web is all around us, no matter if we think about smart glasses, Virtual Reality or other IoT devices. This article takes a deep dive into User Experience Optimization and steps for a strong online presence.
What does user experience mean?
The term “user experience” is straightforward. It refers to the overall experience of a person who is consuming an app or website. It’s a relative term, and most people expect the rating of that encounter to be pleasant. User experience design is a discipline that arose to create ideal experiences for users. UX crosses over into search engine optimization and conversion optimization.
Things like navigation, multiple ways for the visitor to contact you, good navigation and a nice layout are all part of usability.
UX Vs. UI
UI is a component of UX and relates closely to graphic design. UX goes a step further and brings in technical aspects such as research and testing. There was a time before UX existed when people didn’t have a way to prove whether a user’s experience was right or not. The idea is evolving, but at some level, it involves watching real people use products in real situations. Developers who don’t spend time around non-technical people don’t always have a grasp on how they use interfaces. By watching them, they can remove many of the bottlenecks that make using certain products unpleasant.
UX Design Disciplines:
Online visitors are smarter than ever today. They have access to an array of tech tools that allow them to get exactly what they want and when they want it. And hence, they appreciate brands that strive to make their website journey an easy breeze. In the dynamics of value creation here, delivering experiences which are simple, immediate, and personalized, is what experience optimization typically focuses upon.
Rather than paying much attention to individual interaction touchpoints, such as billing, onboarding, service calls, and so forth, experience optimization urges businesses to move from ‘delivering services’ to ‘shaping experiences’.
A) To Match Business Goals with Visitor Expectations
Individuals today look for value in everything they do online – be it buying products, subscribing to services, or as simple as browsing through a website’s content. More so, technology has also armed them with the unprecedented power to dictate the rules of how online vendors conduct their business. The reason being, a major chunk of website visitors expect online players to work in the ‘now’ framework – establish a connect within seconds of them landing on the website and offer them the same kind of immediacy, personalization, and convenience which retail stores provide.
To connect better with visitors, online players must put in place the right experiential building blocks which not only directly align with their business goals but effectively match visitor expectations as well. Businesses must explore the basic fundamentals of a visitor’s interaction with their various communication platforms and take the necessary steps to redesign their presentations (in a more customer-centric fashion) to maximize business outcomes.
B) To Drive Persistence and Retention
Recognizing the importance of customer relationships is not only vital to initiate initial interactions but to develop healthy engagement loops as well. Meaning, rather than finding opportunities to optimize a visitor’s experience, businesses must create such opportunities to ensure their target personas get incentivized everytime they land on their website. This could either be through the means of personalization or offering loyalty rewards to recurring visitors, and so forth. Many pieces of research[2] also showcase that individuals are more willing to build long-term relationships with brands which pay much attention to visitor needs and retention through improved communications than transactional efforts.
Experience optimization suggests that businesses must deep dive into the nitty-gritty of a visitor’s online journey. Make use of sophisticated measurement tools to understand what visitors expect, empower business frontlines to match their visions, and lay down the foundation of customer-centric platforms which compel customers to turn into loyal advocates.
The following infographic is a an easy-to-follow design guide to optimize your website and help improve user experience to delight your customers and achieve your business goals.
To conclude, experience optimization not only lends companies the ability to craft and deliver an integrated customer experience (turning visitors into brand ambassadors/advocates) but opens doors for enormous business opportunities as well.
Sources & Excerpts
https://www.rswebsols.com/tutorials/web-design/improve-website-ux-user-experience
https://cglife.com/blog/usability-making-better-websites-dead-simple-user-experience/
https://zacjohnson.com/seo-is-dead-long-live-user-experience-optimization-ueo/
https://vwo.com/customer-experience-optimization/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/seo-dead/
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/204906