Business Psychology Factors

We normally never see this issue mentioned attached to SEO discussions, however it is an important element. In fact many of the basic Site design elements are rooted here.

The primary goals of any website include the realization of desired visitor actions being materialized during their visit.

Depending on the Site "Desired Visitor Actions and Responses" come in many forms such as downloading information, buying a product or service, becoming educated customers before making contact or any other action required to achieve certain goals which almost always include creating value for the Site Owner.

To accomplish targeted goals and meet ROI (Return on Investment) a certain amount of trust has to be presented for the visitor immediately! There are a number of facilitating methods that help present a Site's demeanor and character which address these psychological needs adding value and subsequent ROI.

1) Comfortable and Appealing Environment (Presentation, colors etc..)
2) Authoritive Presentation
3) Quick and direct Information, Product or Service Presentation
4) Personal Security and Trustworthiness

These more esoteric business psychology elements hold the key to a great deal of Site value.

In the 3rd quarter of 2005 a new client contacted us to see what we could do for them. We immediately did Competitive, SEO and SEM analyses and identified the issues to be more related to SEO than SEM.

There were several problems, besides the typical owner reluctance to depart from his personally designed Site from years ago.

1) The code was bloated
2) The navigation wasn't organized
3) Product Categories were buried under a "Product Page"

4) The site had huge text in multiple colors all over the place

There was absolutely no trust factor there at all! The SE references were lower than what one might expect, but at the same time they were well established, realizing an overwhelming majority of visitors from "Favorites" (bookmarks and/or return visitors) as they should for a well established Site.

Even though the majority of Internet traffic comes from Search Engine References, 80% by some estimates, that is not always the case with a well designed, informative, maintained and established Site. When you provide what the visitor or customer is looking for, you quickly gain revisits by visitors saving your Site as a favorite. These accumulate over time.

The accumulation of visitors and customers over time will be phenomenal when a large contingency of visitors save your site as a favorite.

Detailed reviews let us know that we needed to focus more on customer conversion through SEO elements than SEM, in order to improve desired visitor action and maximize ROI for the client as quickly as possible.

We subcontracted a very clean W3C validated new Website and dynamic aspx.net templates including external CSS control, along with having the proprietor join "BBB-online" and posting that logo in a prominent position on the Site.

The owner also depended heavily on his opt-in mailing list which new membership options were not prominently displayed. On top of that we flattened out the navigation system using interactive CSS links to promote product categories on all pages. After all, that was the main purpose of most visitors coming in. We also had the webmaster install a dynamic GOOGLE Sitemap.

These SEO changes alone made quite a difference in the last quarter of 2005, just in time for his most important season, Christmas.

All of thes changes were strictly SEO oriented and most were initiated out of the business psychology factors of delivering what the visitor (potential customer) wanted as quickly as possible while creating an environment more conducive to visitor trust.

A clients declining or undesired position doesn't always require extensive SEM to recover.

Every case is as individual as it can be, requiring full analysis before presenting a plan or acting.

Although there are a number of good tools on the market to assist with SEO, a site can't just be plugged into SEO software and a few keyword changes ground out the other end like hamburger meat. That's not what effective Search Engine Optimization is about.

Mountain Eagle Marketing offers Site analysis, SEO and SEM consulting.

Contact us today for a cutting edge advantage.