INSIGHT
WHY UX SHOULD BE
YOUR TOP PRIORITY
Crystal Content’s Steve Lee explains why if you care about your traffic, you need to care about your
user experience as well.
AT THE RECENT LONDON Affiliate
Conference, I was approached by countless
operators with one question, ”What’s your
traffic?”
A solid question, and one we should all
care about. However, with the growing move
towards user experience (UX) and the way
it defines your website’s ranking in search
engines, that question needs to change.
Mobilegeddon
The focus from Google (and the other
guys) towards UX influencing SEO isn’t
a new one. Search engines have always
existed to provide the user with the best
results and the best experience possible.
hoping a few drip through — that many
have focused on until now.
In my talk at LAC I covered some quick
and easy steps that affiliates can take to
prioritise the user experience to make sure
their sites aren’t left behind. homepage on the screen, stand up, take 10
steps back, then five steps forward. Then
ask them what they see and what they
should do as a user. More often than not
it’s a real eye-opener and leads to some
great insight.
Know your audience Keep improving
As with any business, you need to build up
a picture of your ideal customer and use
that to focus your efforts. As a first step,
find out who they are, how they found you,
what they like, what keeps them engaged.
This will allow you to create engaging
content across all channels that will keep
them coming back for more. As Google refines its algorithm to focus
more on UX, you need to make sure you
are continuously improving your site. Our
motto is that a website is never finished.
You should always be testing your site
and looking for ways to improve its
performance to make sure you don’t get
left behind. Run short tests on key pages by
making some small layout changes. If they
work, great. If they don’t, try something
new. The whole point is to remain flexible
and keep improving.
Following the talk, I was asked a great
question on what affiliates can do to stay
ahead of Google and the answer is simple.
If Google is prioritising the user experience
you should be too.
“Hotjar is a great piece of user-tracking software that
shows you what’s working and what isn’t”
But it wasn’t really until March 2015 when
Mobilegeddon (Google’s mobile-friendly
update) hit that people started to sit up and
take notice.
In response to a dramatic increase in
the number of users searching on a mobile
device, Google started to promote websites
that displayed well on mobile devices over
sites that did not. Why? To provide their
users with the best results and experience
possible, with no pinching or squeezing the
screen required.
Now, two years and countless Google
updates later, the focus remains firmly on the
user, and websites that don’t prioritise the user
experience will be quickly left behind.
There are some great examples in our
industry of affiliates that are really driving
this movement forward, with some now
hiring UX designers. But there is also a lot
of work to be done to move away from the
‘attrition’ model — stacking them high and
Analytics is a necessity for any site, but
I’m still amazed at the number of affiliates
that don’t track what users do on their site.
Google Analytics is quick to install and
gives you a wealth of data. Once you have
customers on your site you need to find
out what they do there, what works and
what doesn’t. Hotjar is a great piece of user
tracking software that shows you what’s
working and what isn’t.
Don’t make them think
Once you know what your users like, make
it easy for them to find it. Create clear
signposts and calls to action that will lead
them through your site. Too often I see
websites with a flashing myriad of offers and
promotional banners, or long screeds of text
that only serve to confuse or bore users.
When redesigning a website, we like t o
ask the site owner to take the 10 step, five
step test. We ask them to bring up their
STEVE LEE is head of design
at Crystal Content, a digital
marketing agency specialising
in the igaming industry. He
believes the key to a successful
online campaign, no matter the size
or budget, is understanding the user
and knowing how to take them from a
visitor to a paying customer.
iGB Affiliate Issue 62 APR/MAY 2017
51