Impression’s Head of Behavioural Science, Mike Weir and Head of SEO Performance, Charlie Norledge explore how siloed departments can cause challenges for digital teams when it comes to creating optimal digital experience for users.
Charlie explores why better communication is required between teams to create an integrated approach to SEO and digital experience, as sometimes the aims of a team may negatively impact the overall site experience when another isn’t consulted.
- 00:06 – Challenges between SEO, CRO and UX teams
- 04:10 – The importance of an integrated approach to SEO and digital experience
Mike Weir: Recently, there’s been challenges in different divisions and teams having sort of siloed ways of working around User Experience, Conversion Rate Optimisation, and SEO. From your experience, what sort of challenges arise?
Charlie Norledge: Often when the SEO teams are running a strategy, they will have lots of changes they want to make on a site. They’ll be adding new content, changing templates, maybe moving navigation around. Often what happens is we do not communicate any of that with the team who is involved in the user experience of the site. So we can make decisions and changes in the site, but then we have no consultation there. So we’re doing something for a search engine and for a user, to a certain extent. Really, we don’t have that second level where we want someone looking at it, thinking about the whole user journey, which is fair because we are designing for, we are trying to increase ranking in the search engine, so we’re thinking about what Google sees and often that can be at the detriment to what a user has.
Mike Weir: I suppose when we’re thinking about some of the challenges that could arise from like, digital experience and working with SEO, UX, and CRO. What type of challenges have you seen out there in the industry?
Charlie Norledge: One of the main challenges that as SEOs, we’re often making lots of changes to websites, we’re moving content around, we’re maybe changing navigation, changing templates. What we’ve seen in the past, when working with some of our clients, some of the agencies they’ve worked with, they haven’t had that UX involved when making those decisions. A really good example of that would be, you could run a content strategy for SEO, you could put lots of content on the blog. You feel like it’s optimised, you’ve got the keywords in there, you’ve got it targeting what you want it to. But then sometimes you look at those blogs and they look terrible. They don’t have very good user experience and that’s what we need to make sure that we’re on top of.
Mike Weir: It’s really interesting, the blogs perspective. I’ve seen clients have challenges where spending lots of money historically on blogs that have come to us with a challenge where they’ve got some level of visibility, but actually the blog doesn’t convert and then there’s this weird tossup where the website or the page is visible from an SEO perspective, but perhaps the wording of it or the layout or the design in some way, perhaps isn’t optimum from like a people-first perspective. And I think that’s one of the interesting challenges. What tools have you used to overcome that?
Charlie Norledge: The tool we use here is trying to get the DX team involved. The SEO team, we’re great at writing content, but User Experience definitely isn’t in our wheelhouse. So being able to use and lean on the DX team to be able to go away and support us when we’re making those changes, doing user testing, getting help and understanding ‘does a blog convert?’ That’s where we can really start to succeed.
Mike Weir: Yeah, I suppose some of those sorts of challenges that we needed to work together, but also we need to come up with a really slick way of basically creating a website that works for the best of both worlds, which is why we came up with total testing, which is like our road map, where effectively we combine our ways of working so that we’re testing both from a Google perspective and a people perspective. And we’re working together on things like wireframes, workshops to then get the best outcome for the client.
Charlie Norledge: Yeah, and we’ve been able to use that total testing framework not just to have tests made in the background that only the user is seeing. We can use that total testing framework when it comes to the actual SEO work. So Google is seeing those things as well. So we actually use our tools to aim to achieve that.
Mike Weir: We’ve seen some really strong results with Queensmith around that. Queensmith is one of our clients where we work with them to help them increase the number of bookings and the number of leads on the website. They are a Hatton Garden jewellers and what we’re trying to achieve here is making them the best possible website experience. We’ve run several experiments over the past few months for them. Both with SEO and with DX, and we’ve seen some really, really strong results. Historically, those tests would have been done, but we would have made those changes as an SEO, but now with the new way of working, having that testing involved in the UX team has been really effective.
Charlie Norledge: Absolutely, I think they’ve seen 137% increase in visibility, which is great and also a combined revenue impact of between 1.3 and 2.3 million over the next 12 months.
Mike Weir: When we start to think about like the models and frameworks, the way we’ve evolved over the past 12 months, obviously, EEAT+ has become something that we wanted to talk about. For those people who aren’t familiar with the EEAT model, can you just talk a little bit through that?
Charlie Norledge: Yeah, so EEAT is Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trust. That is a framework Google gives to their quality raters. The team that look at if algorithms are being successful and that’s what we’re trying to use as part of our SEO strategies now. And what really helps is making sure that sites show all of those things that you have experience if you’re reviewing products. If you have expertise, are you viable to review that product. Authoritativeness, do you have authority to speak on that topic and then Trust, are you trustworthy as well.
Mike Weir: That’s so interesting because from a behavioral science perspective, we’ve got lots of models like PEAT, persuasion, emotion, trust, and MINDSPACE, which is basically a tool that you use to influence people. And what’s interesting is a crossover. So like, experience, being able to demonstrate you’re credible in a space or like being able to demonstrate that you’re trustworthy. These are types of levers that we pull when we optimise for conversion rate or optimise the website. So it’s interesting that like even though there is an algorithm that they’re optimising for in theory, the people behind that algorithm are clearly considering some level of human factors.
Charlie Norledge: So EEAT is not actually a part of the algorithm, it’s what is used to judge the success of the algorithm. So if you follow those concepts, hopefully you’ll have the rankings off the back of that.
Mike Weir: Exactly, that kind of thinking is kind of what led us to like EEAT+. So, EEAT+ is the idea that there is this crossover between these two worlds and how can we take this model and extend upon it. So for example, considering things like Value Proposition, considering things like Trustworthiness, but from a person perspective as well, considering affinity, so like how can we make a product have an affinity to a person? How can we be hyper relevant? How we put content in the right place at the right time? And how can we understand a bigger picture around that human element? In a way, I suppose what EEAT+ means to us is trying to humanise something, humanise our processes and humanise our ways of working to get the most out of it.
Charlie Norledge: Yeah, I suppose building on that model is very much an SEO-focused part and then adding on to the user experience pieces, they give it a full picture.
Mike Weir: Exactly and we’ve got the model now and some more information around that coming out in the next couple of weeks. Obviously, we’ve got the download checklist to people who want to consider the model as it is.
