Though there are numerous ways to make money online without having your own website, most internet marketing business models revolve around building one or more sites. And for most purposes, many of the objectives are the same: traffic & conversions. But as with so many things, it’s often the details that make the difference between success and failure.
In this new “Internet Marketing 2.0″ world, we’re seeing more critical and more frequent changes in how sites are ranked, how and where traffic is generated, and the viability & success of monetization methods.
Way back in the “1.0 Dark Ages” of internet marketing – before 2011 - many of us focused on traffic & conversions from the perspective of “more”, often to the exclusion of anything else – even ‘user experience’. For better or worse, things have changed; not only will this perspective no longer work, it can have serious and long-lasting repercussions.
(Note: the main focus of our soon-to-be-released ‘R100k’ is how to achieve success in this new “Internet Marketing 2.0” world.)
In order to compete & win going forward, we must shift our perspective, making ‘quality user experience’ the driving factor in our businesses. It may sound hokey or ‘old fashioned’, but this ‘new world’ will increasingly reward ‘quality user experience’, and penalize ‘poor user experience’.
But how exactly does that translate when we create our websites, and how do it while simultaneously optimizing for traffic & conversions?
While we’ve touched on some of these issues on our forum, there has been a spate of posts driven by Google’s recent ‘page layout’ algorithm update announcement (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/01/page-layout-algorithm-improvement.html). Google understands that any way you slice it, their goal of ‘quality user experience’ must take into account the landing page. Whether that’s the homepage, or sub-pages optimized to rank for specific searches or keywords, if it doesn’t provide a ‘quality user experience’, Google doesn’t want it to rank well. One obvious characteristic of a ”low quality’ page is a ‘low quality’ layout, a page that doesn’t quickly and decisively provide the ‘answer’ to a search that brings it up.
For this recent algo announcement, Google is targeting “ad heavy” pages – those pages that have a high ad-to-content ratio above the fold (the part of a page that’s visible when you first visit). Of course, there are other factors such as clear navigation and page load time that impact the ‘quality’ of a page or site. – obviously a page that takes forever to load, or a site that makes it difficult to get around is not of very high quality.
However, perhaps the biggest ‘quality’ factor is the harder-to-quantify ‘content quality’. This is why Google posted questions for webmasters to ask themselves, to “step into Google’s mindset” in understanding what they want to see: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html.
Search Engine Land recently posted an article that can help further understand ‘Google’s mindset’.
The article is an interview with a Google Quality Rater. For those not familiar, Google employs a few thousand “Quality Raters” who’s job is to manually rate webpages, search listings, etc. This became ‘big news’ when the “Quality Rater’s Guidelines” document was leaked, once in 2009, and again recently.
Just to be clear, these ‘Raters’ have no impact on a site’s listing or ranking, and has nothing to do with a Google team ‘Manual Review’ where someone from Google actually looks at a site and takes action on it.
It’s worth understanding what they do and why – I’ve also excerpted a few things from the article that I thought worth highlighting. You can read the article at: http://searchengineland.com/interview-google-search-quality-rater-108702
The job of these ‘Quality Raters’ is two-fold. First, to ‘manually’ rate a site on some particular criteria, so that Google can see whether their algorithm is producing results consistent with what a real person would think. Second, as changes to the algorithm are considered and rolled out, these ‘Raters’ do a side-by-side evaluation of search results before & after the change, to score whether the change has the desired improvement.
What I found particularly interesting and highlighted below were the perspective of these ‘Raters’ regarding quality and user experience. Note that sites are rated in relation to a search query, with one of five ratings being assigned: vital, useful, relevant, slightly relevant, or useless.
Keeping in mind that these are closely synonymous with the actual algorithm, it gives you good insight into what you should be shooting for with your sites and pages. In other words, ‘reverse engineer’ these answers to see what you should be doing in terms of content, layout, etc.:
Can you share a specific example of one of your recent tasks?
I can’t think of the exact URLs I rated, but the keyword was “Nike Women’s Running Shoes.” It gave me a list of 20 URLs to rate and I visited each one in order to determine whether they were vital, useful, relevant, slightly relevant, or useless. With a recognized brand name like that, it wasn’t hard to determine quality. For example, I think the Nike site was one of the options, so that would get a “vital” rating. I remember a couple of sites sold the shoes, so I gave them a “useful” rating and the Wikipedia entry on Nike was giving a rating of “slightly relevant” because I believe not many people searching for Nike Women’s Running Shoes want a history of the company.
When you click through from a Google search result page, what are you looking for on the web page that you visit?
When looking at a site, I always check for spam signals first — keyword stuffing, hidden text, sneaky redirects, and the like. Once I know it’s a good site, I start to look at the page as a person who would type the query in Google and whether or not the content on the page would help me fulfill my needs.
Do you ever look at the source code or anything like that? Are Raters asked or trained to look at source code of the web pages being rated?
There is a quick primer on looking at the source code in the guidelines, nothing in depth. Basically we look for hidden keywords and other spammy tactics discussed in the guidelines.
You mentioned URL rating tasks and Side-by-Side tasks, but also some that involve design and layout. What are those tasks like?
Design tasks ask if the page has a good ratio of main content, supplemental content, and ads. It also asks about the overall design, is it easy to read, clear communication of information, and the like. It’s not about whether the page is beautiful or amazing, but whether or not the normal user could find what they need on the page without getting lost.
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From this we can begin to shift our own mindset; instead of concentrating on how to maximize rankings & conversions, we’ll do much better to focus on how to maximize the experience our visitors have. This will have the added benefit not just of helping our rankings, but of providing stronger long-term sustainability all around.
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