How to future proof your SEO

90 Digital CEO, Aferdita Pacrami, shares her advice on how to improve the user experience and conversion on websites

There has been an influx of news over the last few weeks on Google updates and changes. The mobile friendly ranking boost and changes to the appearance of SERPs have been anticipated and speculated about for some time. So I want to take a step back from this and talk about what often gets overlooked.

As SEOs, we can sometimes get too obsessed with what Google says, does, and wants that we forget who we should be obsessing over: our users. It might sound obvious but Google itself focuses on the user, that’s why they keep updating their algorithm, to ensure users get the best, most relevant results in the fastest time. In fact, Google is always striving to improve; they run so many tests that everyone will be seeing a variant at some point.

If you don’t have the same drive for marginal gains and constant improvement to your own site, then you run the risk of stagnating. In fact, I see this the most in the egaming sector where the product is the technology but there’s so much technical debt that IT departments are working on catching up and fixing bugs instead of getting ahead.

If you give users what they want and you improve their experience on your site, then you will be who they want. Since Google also wants to give users what they’re looking for, if you’re in that spot, then you’re the one to rank. This isn’t a revolutionary idea at all. This is what ‘future proofing’ your SEO strategy should be about instead of trying to predict what Google will do next so you can game it.

In April, I spoke at BrightonSEO, the biggest UK SEO conference, about conversion and user experience. So, I’d like to go over the main points of my presentation here to give you some ideas on what areas to focus on your site and how you can improve user experience and conversion.

Navigation through visual cues
Good navigation is a key element of good user experience but sometimes it’s easy to miss the mark in sites that have so much information or visual noise (I’ve found this especially on casino sites with so many different visual elements from the games that the calls to action can sometimes get diluted).

Using traditional art and photography composition techniques effectively on site design can have a huge impact on site navigation. Using imagery and layout to guide users’ gaze to the more important elements of your site – your sign-up or registration section, or depositing – can be more effective than labelling.

Guiding lines can be effectively used in hero images on landing pages to direct users to your CTAs. Our eyes naturally draw along lines whether they’re the more obvious arrows or more subtly placed in an incidental way. Look out for the images you use to ensure that there aren’t any lines pointing away from your CTAs and opt for images with strategically implied lines to help increase conversions.

Your use of colour can be strategic as well. By setting colour conventions on your site you can start to educate users on what to expect when they see a certain colour. For example, your accent colour should be used on your dominant CTAs only, instead of throughout your site on buttons, headings, backgrounds, etc. By using a single colour for all buttons throughout your site, you’re setting a convention; it won’t take long for users to learn that green means go if all signup buttons, and only them, are green throughout the site.

Something I’ve noticed a lot on bookmakers’ landing pages is large images of action shots of footballers, tennis players, horses. But what I don’t see is much consideration taken on the focus of these images and how this affects the CTAs.

Having any kind of action shot like players running across a field will direct users gaze to wherever the players are running towards. So CTAs need to be placed in front of this movement, not behind it. All these visual cues combined allow users to make split second decisions on your site and make their experience seem intuitive instead of strained.

User flow
With that initial registration being such a huge focus for a lot of marketing departments, what happens aſter can at times be overlooked. When the cost of acquisition is so high, you need to ensure that you’re retaining those customers and getting real lifetime value. Retention is usually something reserved for email marketing but this can actually be done right on the site as well.

Start by mapping out user flows on your site, go beyond registration and see what happens aſter users sign up and deposit; when users are actually looking at placing bets. What I see often is a single user journey that can be as simple as selecting market, add to bet slip, place bet.

However, user flows are not linear. Users can take so many different paths on a site, instead of a linear narrative you’re looking at more of a choose your own adventure story. This is what ecommerce sites do very well. They give users the ability to take different routes through their products and successfully cross-sell and up-sell.

If egaming sites were more like ecommerce sites and had more advanced user flows you’d start to see more cross betting. When a user is looking at a specific market they can get recommendations for similar markets based on data collected by similar users. The same thing could apply when adding bets to a bet slip; recommended bets based on when they’ve been added.

I haven’t seen any operator do this. What’s happening now is the responsibility is placed on the user to find and make his own bets with little to no encouragement from operators. Instead, this is all left up to the CRM team. When presenting users with the next best interaction based on where they are on their user journey you stand a better chance of increasing player value.

Customer loyalty
User experience can go beyond what’s on your site. I touched on the subject of email marketing but I want to delve deeper and discuss the importance of all your off site marketing channels.

Your site should absolutely be the main focus because this is where people interact with you and how you make money. All your other owned marketing channels are there to assist your site, they should be a reflection of your site. Having one voice across all your channels reinforces your brand and creates a connection between all the different touch points. Paddy Power does a great job of this, they have the same voice across all their channels, they all work together to reinforce their message. When your social media accounts communicate in a different tone to your site or your email campaigns your users feel disconnected.

When your average user has multiple accounts – you, and all your major competitors – you need to find ways to stand out. A strong message repeated throughout your channels is a good start but what’s stopping them unsubscribing from your newsletter or unfollowing you on social?

You need to create value for your users. While having a strong brand represented throughout your channels through the same tone of voice is important in creating continuity, the exact same message repeated across all your channels can get repetitive fast and doesn’t give users a reason to follow all your channels.

Instead, think about exclusivity, unique content (news, information, offers) to each channel so that following you everywhere is worthwhile for them. Creating exclusive content can make your users actively seek you out and prevent you from being buried in all the noise from all the competition.

As a major search engine Google does have a significant role in your marketing strategy, and it is useful to stay up to date with their changes. However, your efforts should always start internally, making sure everything is in order there before you start chasing traffic.

Creating a great experience for users on your site and encouraging loyalty there first and then nurturing a strong brand presence so that your users are seeking you out instead of being passively marketed to. If these are in order then you know that whatever traffic you acquire all new visitors to your site stand a good chance of converting to high value users. This is the best way to future proof your SEO efforts.