Original Research

An empirical study on website usability elements and how they affect search engine optimisation

Eugene B. Visser, Melius Weideman
South African Journal of Information Management | Vol 13, No 1 | a428 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.4102/sajim.v13i1.428 | © 2011 Eugene B. Visser, Melius Weideman | This work is licensed under CC Attribution 4.0
Submitted: 25 May 2010 | Published: 25 March 2011

About the author(s)

Eugene B. Visser, Faculty of Informatics and Design, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa
Melius Weideman, Faculty of Informatics and Design, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa

Abstract

The primary objective of this research project was to identify and investigate the website usability attributes which are in contradiction with search engine optimisation elements. The secondary objective was to determine if these usability attributes affect conversion. Although the literature review identifies the contradictions, experts disagree about their existence.An experiment was conducted, whereby the conversion and/or traffic ratio results of an existing control website were compared to a usability-designed version of the control website,namely the experimental website. All optimisation elements were ignored, thus implementing only usability. The results clearly show that inclusion of the usability attributes positively affect conversion,indicating that usability is a prerequisite for effective website design. Search engine optimisation is also a prerequisite for the very reason that if a website does not rank on the first page of the search engine result page for a given keyword, then that website might as well not exist. According to this empirical work, usability is in contradiction to search engine optimisation best practices. Therefore the two need to be weighed up in terms of importance towards search engines and visitors.

Keywords

search engine optimisation; website usability; content; images; trust; credibility; keywords

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