SEO Blog

Occasionally you’ll receive feedback on your website and its various elements. Sometimes it’ll be complimentary, often it will be tainted with a little constructive criticism.

Whilst nobody wants to be told that they’re doing something wrong and we all enjoy positive comments; criticism is often one of the most important pieces of feedback you’ll receive. Whilst you might want to bury your head in the sand and hope that problems just sort themselves out, the reality is that nothing is ever perfect and you need to seek to improve constantly.

So if somebody phones your customer services and says that your checkout isn’t working properly, they can’t find the product they’re looking for or to enquire further about certain aspects as the content isn’t clear enough – take action!

Of course everybody is unique. Whilst one person might see your content as being uninformative, another might just think it is succinct. However, feedback is vital to every part of running a website, including marketing.

You don’t have to change everything immediately, but you can at least review the issues that have been raised. If people are finding it difficult to navigate through the site, use your Webmaster Tools to check for any broken links and then test the site itself. Look objectively at the architecture and see if there are any ways that you can speed up navigation and make it more obvious where visitors should go. This might also include a distinct call to action on some pages to explicitly point out where next to click.

If there are more substantial changes being requested, including moving buttons, reformatting the page layout or an update to your content then you might want to consider split testing. This way you won’t have to disrupt your SEO work or permanently remove any page elements without properly testing it first.

Split testing is basically where you have variations of the same page live at the same time. Half of your visitors will see one and the rest will see the other. Once you have reached a decent level of traffic you should be able to accurately ascertain which has been the most successful in providing conversions.

This of course can be an ongoing process, with numerous tweaks – both small and large – taking place over a period of time. When you achieve clear results, temporary changes can be made permanent and you’ll have a site that better matches visitor expectations.

So you shouldn’t look to hide from criticism, in fact you should welcome it. If your site is to become stronger, your SEO more targeted and ROI is going to improve, then you have to develop your site in accordance to objective opinions. Your website isn’t just for your own self-gratification; it is there to serve visitors. So make sure it is doing its job and embrace critical comments.