David Meerman Scott’s post yesterday about SEO and your crap filled site reminded me of a recent conversation I had. A client had just hired a new CEO, who was gung ho about SEO. He’d gotten good results at his previous job and was all excited about applying the same principles at his new company.
Sounds good? Well, it wasn’t. The trouble wasn’t lack of traffic. They had a well-known brand, and lots of visitors to the site. The problem was that the site was huge – hundreds and hundreds of pages. The content was hard to find. It took 8-10 pages to register for an event. You couldn’t use credit cards directly, you had to go through paypal (and leave the company’s site). It was confusing and took too much time.
The problem wasn’t an SEO issue, it was a usability issue. The site needed to be streamlined, updated, and re-tuned for the customer (not the company).
Face toward your customers, not toward yourself.