When working in big companies, where every person has his own speciality, many conflicts can happen. Social media, SEO, UX designer, developer, content manager: everyone has his own reasons, and it seems impossible to reconcile every request. The consequence is a less than optimal compromise.
As SEO, I too often hear statements like “I understand you need this for SEO purposes, but we can’t do it because it would be bad for usability”. A big misunderstanding.
No, it’s not what you are thinking: we are not talking about keyword stuffing all over the page (that shit stuff stopped working before I started studying SEO in 2004 – 10 years ago…).
And every time I hear that, I can hardly keep calm, because it’s immediately clear to me that the other person is totally missing the point. And I’m not referring just to the specific SEO request; I’m talking about completely missing what Google wants. Because in the end, doing SEO is a lot about understanding what Google wants. And what is it?
Google wants to make his users happy.
Once you understand this, deeply understand this, the question “usability or SEO?” becomes suddenly meaningless. SEO and usability have the same goal!
This very simple truth has a huge consequence: the conflict between the SEO guy and the UX guy becomes a joint effort to find the best way to implement some improvement. Not anymore a less than optimal compromise, but a possibly new best practice to experiment.
Unless the SEO guy and/or the UX guy are not good at their job, of course.
By the way, there’s an interesting 2 years old article by Jakob Nielsen about SEO and Usability, and the few possible conflicts he mentions there aren’t in fact an issue, if the SEO guy really knows his job.
SEO and web usability go hand in hand.
If a solution is not good for both sides, chances are that the solution is not good for any side!
In that case, please reconsider your options.
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