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If you’re SEOing your website, you’re obviously trying to draw visitors or customers from the search engines to your website for a purpose.

Usability is a measure of how easy it is for a user to find information they are looking for or complete a task like buy something from a website. It’s basically ease of use, and can include customer or user satisfaction.

It’s extremely important to SEO for three main reasons:

One, You’ll make money and actually get something from your search engine traffic if your Usability is good.

Two, almost all off-site SEO will be enhanced if the quality of the website is increased. So usability will increase visitor satisfaction, which in turn increases traffic, which then increases your link opportunities.

Three, search engines are slowly factoring usability into their rankings.

For example, one past client had a website with no additional product information, just an off the shelf shopping cart. It ranks with targeted traffic, but guess what? Hundreds of targeted visitors, NO sales.

The most important step in ensuring the usability of your site is having people use it after it is designed and check for what people like, what they use, and what they don’t. You can never totally predict what customers will do, but by testing your site and avoiding some common errors, you can increase the usability of your website, which in turn increases your traffic and conversion ratio.

One way to get usability information tips is to visit competitor websites and identify what you liked about the site and what was annoying. Tell friends, family and colleagues to do the same, and consider their complaints and compliments as they navigate your site.

For past articles in our basic SEO series, please see the links below:

Researching Your Keywords - SEO Basics Part 3

What is Search Engine Optimization? SEO Basics Part 2

What is a Search Engine? - SEO Basics Part 1

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