How to give a better user experience and bring unique value

[seoanalytics]

Hello everyone,

I have between reading a lot, watching a lot of video from Rand also been trying many things in  terms of SEO over the last 10 years. I am starting to come to the conclusion that the number one solution to rank is to satisfy the user and give the user an amazing experience.But what does amazing user experience and unique value really mean ? I can’t seem to get a straight answer or example.

I am in the travel industry and I sell bicycle tours. I have tried to write amazing content but I guess I am like 99 % of us on the planet I don’t know how to write … It never changed my ranking whatever I wrote.

I tried to talk to the visitors like google mentioned and not about the features of my product, get a unique selling proposition etc… but so far nothing worked… ( I am currently doing one test and waiting to see if anything changes but so far the content has been indexed quickly with the webmaster tools and no changes after 2 weeks ? Is there a a longer delay once indexed, I don’t know maybe someone can shed some light on that ? I don’t believe so but maybe I am wrong.

Getting back to user experience. From what I understand it needs to answer the questions people have in a unique way. Let’s take the bicycle tours for example. I you type bike tours all my competitors already do what I want to do, which means they present either all their tours on the page or have you select a tour by level, by country, by region, by type, by price, by date etc…

How I can beat them and do better than them, that is what I don’t understand ? I feel like there only a limited number of ways to present a product ?

I conclusion, how can I bring more value to my user, if I have them search a bike tour by level or country, I have the same thing as my competitors  I don’t bring more value do I ? or does bringing value means designing it in a different way ?  If so unless you have a team of graphic designers how can you do that (is the color of a button, the shape of it, the images you have ,the size of your font going to make google tick ? or is it adding information ( to me this 2 nd option not a solution because that means to rank in the future you will need to add more info that your competitors ) ?

If anyone could give me some advice or examples on how they do it that would be great because as off today, the user experience thing and unique value is not clear.

[seoanalytics]

Thank you for all your help, this answers my questions.

[ChrisAshton]

No problem at all, happy to help

In theory, once you see a ranking bump for a single change, where it settles is where you could expect it to stay if neither you or your competitors make any changes at all.

In practice, it's unlikely that is going to happen. A strong campaign will mean a bunch of ongoing changes week after week both onsite and link building and your competitors will be updating and earning new links as well.

What all of this means is that ranking improvements will be turbulent with exciting days of massive gains, disheartening days of almost-back-to-where-they-came-from drops and everything in between.

About the closest anecdote I can offer here is the rare instance where we'll stop work for a client for a week or two (maybe a new website on the way or something). In those instances we'll generally see the rankings steadily improve over this time and eventually plateau, though I would expect this is Google picking up on other changes we'd made and steadily painting a picture of an even more rank-worthy website, if that makes sense.

As for the images, it makes no direct difference to the rankings. Indirectly, well-selected stock photos can be the difference between a mediocre website and an impressively polished one. Having said that, I'm still an advocate for using your own images in certain contexts too - photos of the actual staff at work or user-provided photos can be very powerful tools to build that rapport. It tends to give a "warmer" feel to the site rather than a cold, corporate one.

As an example of this, think about your local mechanic. Would you rather see stock photographs of models in overalls under a nondescript hoist or actual photos of Steve the Mechanic in the same workshop you're thinking of visiting? This is purely personal opinion so take it for what it is

[seoanalytics]

Thank you Chris for your detailed reply. This confirms what I thought.

I just have one more 2 more questions.

1. Concerning the delay, once my page is indexed and ranked is it the final ranking that I see right after the page was index  (not taking potential future links and social shares into account) or is there a 2 to 3 months delay and the rankings climb slowly overtime ?

2. In terms of images, can google detect if I use tock images or my own images ? Is one better than the other ?

Thank you,

[ChrisAshton]

Firstly, it's great to see that you're asking the right question rather than "how can I manipulate rankings"! Your head is definitely in the right space.

It sounds like you've probably already seen it but Rand did cover this in a Whiteboard Friday a little while back too. Offering unique value doesn't necessarily mean that you have to come up with a complete game-changer where you do something radically different to the rest of your industry (though that certainly doesn't hurt either!), it's about giving the users what they're looking for in the simplest way possible.

For me, the best way to do this is to look around at the first couple of pages of competitors to see what they're doing right and compile a list. Then, ignore what you've got on the current and walk through the process you'd want to take as a user. For a service like yours, I'd be walking myself through a hypothetical situation where I wanted to take a bike tour somewhere I've never been and writing down all the questions I'd want answered.

For example, "if I was visiting Rome and wanted to take a bike tour around the Colosseum, what would I want to know? I find this helpful because when you know everything about your particular service, it's hard to effectively put yourself in the shoes of a prospective customer.

In answer to my hypothetical question, I would come up with answers like:

• What do they look like?
• How much?
• How do I book?
• What hours are they open for pickup/drop-off?
• What if I get lost and miss the cut-off for returns?
• Are there guided tours?
• Do you have phone mounts or GPS units so I don't get lost?
• Can you offer pre-mapped routes for me to follow and see interesting things?
• What if the bike breaks?
• What if it gets stolen?

The list would go on but spend a good amount of time thinking about these things and not only answer what you'd need to know but also what would be great if you could have. This could even spark new ideas that could set your business apart from the others.

Once you've got all of this together, the final challenge is working out the best way to present this information to users without making them trawl through three thousands words of content to find what they're looking for. Get creative and answer questions in various ways. Rather than relying on a large block of content describing bikes for example, have a handful of hi-res photos of them right there on your home page and the key characteristics pointed out.

Don't forget, this sort of service is all about fun and excitement so be sure to build the user experience around that sort of a vibe - users should be excited to throw money at you after looking at your website.

Hope that helps!