Optimising SEO? Make sure you don't make your customer experience worse.

16 May

There rarely is a conversation about optimising onsite content without someone in the room mentioning the three letters that became ubiquitous within the space.

So much focus is given to SEO, that it can become easy to forget the main reason why content on your website should be optimised in the first place - to provide the best customer experience possible. That is how we end up with poor experiences with unnecessarily long titles or descriptions, twenty bulletpoints that could actually confuse the customer, or alt tags that look more like paragraphs.

As such, we at Ocula take a different approach when it comes to optimising keywords, page performance, alt text etc.. Namely, we put customer at the very heart of our assessments, making sure the content that is presented serves them well and adheres to best practices, rather than a one dimensional approach trying to reverse engineer Google’s algorithms.

If your content is not written with your customer in mind, you may lose the crucial conversion which drives the business performance when a customer lands on your site.

Our Approach

With customer firmly at the centre of Ocula Boost, we run our analysis and surface the insights to help you improve your conversion rates AND have a positive impact on SEO.

Here are just a few examples of customer-centric insights that are either already live, or are in development at Ocula Boost:

Contextually relevant keywords - we combine analysis of terms that you know matter to you and your customers with generative AI technology to identify gaps in existing content, understand what your competitors are doing and where they are pulling ahead and to suggest contextually relevant terms that are meaningful. We don’t simply provide a list of adjacent words that could be relevant. If you’re selling a sweater, we won’t suggest to call it a cardigan just so you can rank for that keyword as well.

Auto-generated Alt Tags - utilising image vision, we can automatically ‘describe’ image in a concise way that will work well with screen readers and any other assisted technology that your website visitors may use so that they know exactly what the pictured products are, even if they can’t see them for themselves.

Minimising bounces and exits - nobody likes waiting ages for a page to load, and most customers will leave if their experience doesn’t match their (potentially rather lofty) expectations. As such, we estimate how shortening those load times can help retain additional sessions and secure more revenue from those users who didn’t leave.

Balancing rich content with performance - with a 360-degree view of page performance, you can easily see if enriching on-page content impacts your website speed. With progress tracking between analysis re-runs, you can easily see if enhanced content had negatively affected load speeds.