Posts Tagged ‘Web usability’

What is the Outlook for Online Shopping and eCommerce?

Monday, January 24th, 2011
Mobile shopping is becoming more and more popular. Photo from InternetRetailers.com.

Mobile shopping is becoming more and more popular. Photo from InternetRetailers.com.

According to a recent article on InternetRetailer.com, online shopping has gone mobile. More consumers shopped via mobile devices during the holiday 2010 shopping season than ever, and stores like Barnes & Noble, StrandBooks.com, Walmart.com and Dell stood out as the best performers in both reliability and load speed. It appears that now, not only do retailers need a Website with great usability, but also a reliable, full-service mobile store to keep up with the competition!

For more information, read the full article on InternetRetailer.com.

B2B Websites Can Learn from B2C Websites About Web Usability Models

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

Do you have a Website that primarily sells products or services to other businesses? Are you seeing a high ROI, or just some interested bites? B2B Magazine reported in April 2009 that B2C (business to consumer) Websites have a remarkable 66% success rate of providing information to their visitors with fewer obstacles, while B2B sites have only a 58% success rate.

What is the difference between the Web usability of B2C and B2B Web sites? According to the article, and SEO experts will agree, B2C provide valuable and easy to understand content on every page of their Website; provide pricing and product or service information directly on the site and secure contact or order forms.

The greatest lesson B2B sites can learn is to provide product/service pricing. When visitors don’t know how much something costs,  the Web usability fails and visitors will go elsewhere to get the information and pricing they need to make a decision.

Google’s Wonder Wheel – Increase Web Usability

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

We at Search Circus, love images and graphics depicting Web usability tools, and Google’s Wonder Wheel is a really cool feature if you need more search term ideas.

Type any search term in Google, let’s use Search Engine Marketing, for an example. At the top of the search results, in blue, is “Show Options.” Click on this and a menu appears on the left-hand side of the screen. Are you thinking, “Looks like Bing”? Now click on “Wonder Wheel” under Standard View. What do you get? A diagram I have seen so many times in schools across the country, a graphic organizer. Yeah, we thought it was pretty awesome too.

Search Engine Marketing Wonder Wheel

Try Googling your name as well, what other terms are linked to your name? Hopefully ones that will lead visitors to your company.

Ok, it’s a cool graphic that also brings up additional search results on the right, which match those additional keywords, but what is the Web usability? Google’s Wonder Wheel is a great way to find additional keywords for your Website, or if you need ideas to write blogs, articles, corporate newsletters and more. Send a Twitter to your followers about one of the search terms to increase Web usability among social network searches, heck, you can put a hashtag (#) next to the term and see how many people talk about it as well.

Stuck on finding a synonym? Try the Wonder Wheel! Want to know which words your competitors are associated with? Try the Wonder Wheel. Google still has its advantages as a super search engine.

If you’re a curious tech geek, or just curious about other features on this menu, try clicking “Timeline.” You’ll get another bar graph of sorts that tracks the history of the search term. See below for “Search Engine Marketing.” As you can see, the earliest recorded term was in 2004 and the associated results are also visible.

Search Engine Marketing Timeline

Search Engine Marketing Timeline

Want to find images for your search term, click on “Images from the page.” A return of all the images related to the search term which are found on the page. Here’s one I found, great circle diagram, which also offers additional buzz words if I wanted to search more on this topic.

SEO Chart for Web Usability

SEO Chart for Web Usability

Try it, have fun with these Web usability tools and see where it leads you! Need more tips about Web usability? Call the certified experts at SearchCircus.com.