Empirically investigating the relation between SEO and Usability (T-0671) (MFN 4240)

Abstract

The popularity of Internet and the efficient use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have motivated millions of companies to sell their products and services through the online web marketing by the utilization of the appropriate websites. The rate of increase in web community captures the interest of companies to grasp the user attention to promote and market the products or services online. With the help of the online websites, the visitors can reach a website through search engines. Therefore, search engines are considered as the main source of finding and retrieving information on the internet. Search engines are designed, developed and implemented to search the required information on the web. The search results consist of web pages, images and other kind of files types. SE’s are considered as the silent public relation firm that quietly works in the background and helps the visitors to find what they are searching for. Moreover, since last 10 years, Search engines are making lot of efforts to launch the algorithms which ranks only those websites which assures to satisfy the needs of the customers. Those ranking algorithms were based on how the Google is assuring to rank websites for users but not search engines. However, literature has not shown that usability is a part of ranking algorithm by a Google search engine. Therefore, it is important to empirically investigate the relation between SEO and Usability. In this research study, two experimental websites were designed and developed to find out the relation between SEO and Usability. However, the investigation is based on the number of experiments. The major experiment was to rank both websites with the help of search engine optimization techniques. Moreover, the usability was measured with the help of web analytics stats and heuristic evaluation. Furthermore, it was found that the website-B which was more usable was ranked in less time than the website-A which was not much usable and had some of the serious usability issues. The evaluation conducted within research study had proved that usability is an important ranking factor to rank a website on search engines whereas, it has also been observed that the usability has the higher conversion rate which proofed that usability affects conversions positively.