The Importance of a Good User Journey.

The majority of web-design companies will design a beautiful looking website first and think about optimisation later – in a lot of cases, it’s not even their concern.

More often than not, Brandseam adopts legacy website’s that have been developed in this manner and, after the site has been delivered, the client appoints us to start driving traffic to it through organic search. However, specifically in competitive search markets, the structure of the website is actually what is suppressing the website’s ability to rank, that’s why we stress the importance of user journey.

Of the scores of metrics search engines evaluate the site’s relevance, one of the most important is a site’s ability to convert the traffic its given. A website can look amazing yet, at the same time, be cumbersome to use.

It is important to understand that Google sees itself as a customer-service engine, therefore, if it grants you traffic and you fail to satisfy the query, it will give that traffic to someone else that can.

The ultimate result is that you find yourself dropping down the rankings, all because the user’s ability to navigate your site efficiently was never considered at the design phase.

For this reason, Brandseam’s initial considerations when designing a website are as follows – first, we need to understand the search terms it needs to gain authority in. We can then understand how we need to categorise the products/information, and which pages need to appear in each search target search term. At this point, we will research the target audience, understand their expectations and what it is they are most likely to find appealing.

And we do this before pen touches paper.