I recently participated in an SEO website audit for an industrial electronics manufacturer. The client was looking for a fresh perspective on their SEO efforts and had been working with an agency in the past to assist with their search engine marketing. They wanted to see how they could increase their search engine traffic market share.

Upon initial review, from a textbook SEO perspective they had done everything right. They were following all the best practices such as utilizing  a robots.txt file and an XML sitemap. No major coding roadblocks that could hinder search engine bots. Web copywriting best practices were employed with proper use of key tags such as H1, Title, Meta Description, etc.

Even though the website followed SEO best practices we identified design issues that were affecting our SEO efforts.

How Do You Know if Poor Usability Could be Affecting Your SEO?

Here are a few areas that might tip you off that your web design could be hampering your SEO (or overall internet marketing) efforts:

• Pages linked from the navigation aren’t being indexed or have low PageRank
• Content development opportunities are being hampered by the navigational structure
• Pages that should have been more prominent from an SEO perspective were at the same level as low-level pages
• Your on-site search engine has a number of search queries for terms that are related to pages linked from your navigation
• Overuse of drop-down menus (i.e. too many links within your navigation)
• Website copy is dominated by company terminology or industry jargon
• High bounce rate is undermining the organic search traffic that is being brought to the website

Yes, technically you can consider these elements as part of an on-site SEO audit. But these types of symptoms aren’t ones directly SEO related, they are typically more design and usability related. Areas that need to be addressed by a designer with a user centric approach in close collaboration with an SEO consultant.

Fixing these issues aren’t easy or straightforward as it usually requires a major website restructure. But it was a great reminder that SEO is only one element of an internet marketing strategy. A user focused design should be at the core of your SEO and internet marketing efforts.

I’ve been following Cuil since I first heard about it from Search Engine Land . I, much like everyone else, was very interested to see if a well-funded start-up that was backed by some of the original Google engineers could muster enough competition to give Google a run for their money. Everyone loves an underdog.

But after Cuil launched and I had my first few peeks into the search engine, so far I’m unimpressed.

Format & Usability

Let’s start with the format of their search results page. What’s up with the newspaper article format? A search results page with a jumble of quadrants.

Users have been conditioned to expect search results pages with the top 10 search results listed in order of relevance. Although I’m open to accepting new experiences and new formats, you shouldn’t mess with over 13yrs of search engine usability. It’s much like selling a new car with the steering wheel in the middle of the car, it’ll work but it doesn’t feel right.

Relevancy & Geo-Targeting

I’ve found the relevancy & geo-targeting of their search results to be off.

For example, when searching for popular terms such as “ford cars” although I got a page of search results from official ford websites and ford dealerships, it also displayed “.co.uk” results. Which is really not relevant to me since I’m located in North America.

Another example is when searching for “george bush”. One of the search results was for the GOP . Yes, George is a republican, but presenting me with the GOP website just isn’t relevant. I’d expect news results & blogs as well as official political websites.

Not sure if they wanted to launch in the midst of the Microsoft/Yahoo search merger talk. Or if eager investors pushed them to launch earlier than planned. But I think Cuil was a great idea that needed to simmer a bit more before being served up to the public. A little more R&D as well as a few rounds of usability testing would have really gone a long way in terms of improving this fledgling search engine.