[Music] hello hello and welcome to another episode of search off the record a

podcast coming to you from the Google search team my name is Lizzie and today I'm
joined by John hi John hi and we have Rio today hi Rio hi hi lzy hi John it's so
good to see you I think the last time we saw each other was at bright and SEO maybe
two years ago is that right I think so yeah it's been two years yeah it was in this
in-person meeting that we had this idea that maybe we should have a podcast
recording to talk about ux and SEO sort of a spontaneous it's one of those like
magical hallway conversations
00:44
that they say that you have when you're in person at events and it happened to us
um when we first met I know um you told me that you are uh I think it was was it
your first uh SEO conference as well or it was maybe the first few it was mine as
well it was my very first time yes and uh you told me that you coming from actually
a ux background and not necessarily SEO could you tell us a little bit about how
you came into SEO World sure so yeah it was 2020 when I first joined this uh
industry uh as soon as I graduated from the college and the first couple of
01:21
years I had been Consulting our clients uh landing pages and websites uh using our
heat map solution so we we have we're a digital marketing agency based in Tokyo
Japan but um at the same time we develop our own SEO platform and also heat map
tool which is useful for uh optimizing web pages and yeah so I have been Consulting
our clients uh web pages using heat map tool and I think in total I analyz and
consulted around a couple hundred pages and since about two years ago I've been
managing our own websites in both SEO and C aspects and also doing
02:07
product management as well you mentioned cro what is cro cro stands for conversion
rate optimization SEO is a search engine optimization but C which was more
optimizing the conversion rate of the web pages oh that that sounds a lot like
usability yes ux and C they yeah get along is cro that's um is this the main metric
for uh ux in terms of like is this the thing that you're sort of optimizing for
when you're improving the usability of your website yeah I think that's one of the
metrics that you use because you know uh when you like own
02:48
your websites or when you manage your websites most of the time the main goal is to
uh get higher conversion rates from your websites right so in order to get higher
conversion rate of course you need to Pro provide a good user experience on your
platform okay and practically what would that mean like people can find the button
so if you if you cannot find a button there's nothing to convert you to do this
action or if the button is like at the bottom of the page how can you possibly
convert yeah that's one of the things I think uh like
03:21
placing the buttons at the the right places of the pages that's also a very very
important um tactics of C and that's also a good aspect of ux as well I think so
when you when the user come to your page they're looking for a certain information
and if they're engaging well with your content if they're satisfied with the
information that you're providing on your websites most of the time or maybe
sometimes uh they're likely to convert like they're likely to click the buttons
that you're promoting and well let's say you have your own products promoting on
your
03:57
website and say oh um free delivery or something I cannot really come up with but
any kind of promotions right and when users are really like engage highly engaging
with your contents you're satisfied then they're uh likely to click the buttons so
that they're look into like look further uh about your products or anything that
you're promoting there does ux and SEO also share a common goal or is SEO kind of
separated that I think pretty much ux plays very very significant role in SEO so
this is what I always say but what do you do SEO for like what's what's the
04:36
main thing that people are spending so much time and money and effort uh on SEO for
like of course getting your uh page ranking higher that's the main thing that
people pursue on SEO but the goal behind this is to gain more users gain more
sessions on your web pages and to ultimately convert them to your customers or your
users right so first of all you do SEO to get more sessions more users come into
your pages but after that what you have to do is to modify your pages satisfy your
users with the the contents that they're they're looking for so that they can you
05:22
know one day ultimately become your user become your customer so when you're
thinking about like the user experience or Journey end to end does the journey
start when they're on your website and then making a purchase or would it start
from before for example like when they're on the search results page I would say ux
which stands for user experience is a pretty broad term right any kind of
experience that user experience is defined as user experience ux so what your users
experience before or after they come to your website is
05:59
also your website or even your business ux ah so it's almost like how they're
experiencing your business as a whole it's not necessarily because I think like
when I think about ux I'm thinking about maybe UI or something that's like more
visual but if they're starting uh on the search results page then that the first
thing that they're seeing is maybe text if it's just a Blue Link U they're seeing
like the title of your page description and that is maybe more like writing side of
things and not necessarily the visual layout of your web page yes but maybe that's
writer hat
06:30
I'm wearing like Tech writer hat I'm thinking about ux writing that's my own bias I
think well yeah any kind of text images any kind of contents that your users are
looking at so any kind of the content that you're promoting or it can be on your
website or it can be your actual product any kind of feelings or emotions that they
get from using that product or service can be set as a ux so it's sort of like the
whole end to end yes exactly any interaction it's almost like anytime that they're
like touching
07:03
your site uh before they see it even is maybe all connected it it is yes what did
you do with our documentation Lizzy when in terms of uix or did you did you do
anything specific or well I mean I think this is sort of like H how do we uh scope
ux like if we're saying that everything is ux then maybe everything that I do is
it's very philosophical conversation we're now having um but I think uh if we're
talking about converting people um like our landing page has that big blue button
so we're trying to get people to do a certain
07:40
action uh and like the primary action that we want people to do is to read the SEO
starter guide on our landing page um so we think that that's like the majority of
people should go over there so that's what we put as our first sort of above the-
fold thing uh and then we have secondary things that we think that people might
want to find um so we have case studies help resources search console and we sort
of ordered them by how uh important and common that action would be uh so if
everybody should be going to this first thing like that's the first uh uh thing
that we want to
08:13
point people to um but what Rio was saying earlier about uh converting people I
don't know how I would think about this or apply this sort of thinking to like a
documentation page that doesn't have a clear button that you're like trying to get
people to like add to card like it they're not buying anything on onz so what am I
trying to convert people to in for example like the favicon documentation or
structured data where there's some action that I want you to do but you're not I
don't know if you did it or not that's
08:44
something that maybe I want Rio's opinion on is how would I go about measuring that
they completed the thing like I'm I'm trying to get them to do it but I I don't
know if they did it because there's no button to say like yes like I added markup
to my website after reading your document ation it was me converting to the next
step if that makes sense so I'm hoping like that that's that's what you know the
documentation should get you to do but there's not like a clear thing uh for some
of our stuff that we can see that that's what led you to do that action if
09:17
that makes sense it's not as clear as like a e-commerce site I I think you also
have a quiz on on the bottom of one of the pages right or couple yes and our that
feels like a conversion thing or test like did you read to the bottom well we can
look at like the uh how far did you scroll so I think that that that is tracked uh
in Google analytics so we can see that you got to 80% uh but that's another thing
that I don't know if that is what I should be optimizing for because what if what
you wanted to find was in the middle of the page and like you had success uh like
you found the thing that you wanted to
09:54
you sent the link to somebody else uh because we have people who are reading the
documentation with different goals in mind it might be that you wanted to send it
to a colleague and then you completed your action that's like what you came to the
documentation for you didn't necessarily need to sit and read top to bottom in the
crawl budget documentation and complete the quiz and you spent 15 minutes reading
the thing maybe I don't want you to spend 15 minutes reading the thing maybe longer
time reading the page is not necessarily good for all of our
10:27
pages so that's one thing that I struggle with with the the metrics side of things
because it's not like there is okay two minutes reading for all pages is yes that's
the Baseline for at least onesie uh our [Link] search documentation
because there's many different goals and lengths of documentation I actually never
deeply thought about the conversion points of those kind of documentations but the
main purpose of those documentations is to get people learn about your uh the
contents that written on documentation
11:07
right and especially like Google's documentations those kind of stuff helps a lot
of uh people um when they want to start you know SEO when they want to learn about
SEO when they want to learn deeply about SEO and even the experts they still um you
know look into those kind of Google documentation so I think the one thing that you
can set as a conversion point is I don't know if you guys already have it but the
share button ah or the the copy like link copy button that might be a good point
that that indicates that users are actually engaging with the contents right if
they're if they're
11:49
satisfied or if they're like if they think that stuff that written on the
documentation is helpful then they of course they want to share it to somebody or
if they want to share it with SEO newbies that you have in your your team or
company right so I think that can be a good point as a conversion point for
documentation I think that's like a yeah a good thing to look at I I'm curious what
you also think about the like the helpfulness satisfaction rating so we have like
thumbs up thumbs down would that also be something that to to look
12:20
at in my mind it's not like a conversion stat but it would be helpful to measure
sort of like is the usability good or bad yeah you can just know if the users are
satisfied or you know engaging with the contents yeah I guess also it kind of shows
that people read as much as they wanted and now they have an opinion which which is
kind of the goal right even if they say I I wasn't happy with this page then it's
like it gave them the information that they needed to make that call yeah even that
is like sometimes difficult because you need to sort of do analysis or like I don't
consider what this means in the
12:59
context of the page that you're on because it could you could apply metrics to mean
different things based off of other information um so for example the removals
documentation has really negative ratings and people the comments that we get about
it is that they're frustrated with the actual process so to remove a page or an
image or like some personal information they're frustrated with how it works which
is not necessarily the documentation page and this is sort of ort of a common
problem with documentation and like the way that the product works like are they
upset with the report or the thing the function
13:36
itself or the way that we wrote about it is like that was the best that the tech
writer could do in that situation um based off of like this just just how the thing
works and we need to fix like the root problem to make it better um but maybe
that's like a an example of just like how you can uh look at the unhelpfulness
rating and sort of figure out you need to do like some sleuth work uh to figure out
like why are they so unhappy and what thing do you need to fix to make it go up and
is it the way that it's written is it the way that the page is laid out um is it
the process
14:13
itself like can they not find the thing like the the button to then go remove uh
that URL maybe we need to make the button bigger so that they can then go to the
next thing and then that can be uh like a conversion rate thing that we can look at
I mean it also sounds like our doc are a weird Edge case that a lot of people don't
have with regards to content on the web I I imagine most people who are
commercially active want people to buy stuff okay well I mean that's a good like
discussion Point what are the other sites that Rio that you looked at that were not
14:50
e-commerce when you were analyzing like heat map stuff was it all sort of like
shopping minded or was there other type of content like news or like article these
kinds of things most of them are advertisement landing pages so it's pretty much
like a page that leads to e-commerce site or service site yeah and other Pages
service sites and also like articles SEO articles as well so not always uh e-
commerce s so e-commerce site is really uh simple like the conversion point is very
very simple either they purchased a a thing or not
15:26
right it's really simple but also like Pages if you're navigating the users to your
actual service Pages product pages then the number of the clicks of that the button
that navigates to the actual Pages can also be a conversion point and for SEO
articles most of the time they're also promoting something on their uh Pages like
they promote something their own products or it can be somebody else products on
your web pages right so if they hit the purchase button or if they hit the like
inquiry buttons you know ask for demo or
16:04
something like that that can also be a conversion Point like there are so many
different kinds of conversion point I think for the search console help center
documentation it would be that open the report uh so the pages that are about uh
like the URL inspection tool then the conversion event is probably that main like
open that tool and then go use it perhaps uh but maybe it would be like secondary
things to yeah that could be yeah that could be one have you seen any cases where
uix has a conflict with SEO where it's like you do things for
16:39
uxix but they're bad for SEO I think there are couple things that people do for SEO
but it's not good for ux for example maybe there are only like few people nowadays
I believe but still you know I see sometimes like people stuff a lot of keywords in
their contents so that they think those contents can get ranked higher but that's
terrible for ux so I have this one experience with my customer um they were
stuffing a lot of keywords because they were expecting that could help the content
rank higher but that was actually causing a lot of like clusters on the pages so it
was really really hard to read the
17:19
visualization of that contents was really bad it was it was terrible and so I I
recommended them to remove all the unnecessary keyword on that page which doesn't
make sense for the context and that actually helped improving the conversion rate
and then did you see also some positive impact in like the SEO side of things like
did their ranking improveed so they're already ranking pretty high so it doesn't
like added any positive side for SEO but that didn't affect SEO so the customer the
clients were believing that stuffing
17:58
keyword is good for SEO so they were like are you sure it's okay to remove all
those keywords because I don't want to you know affect our content yeah yeah yeah
but that that didn't happen ah okay so they had no uh negative impact from what
ranking side of things they got rid of the keyword stuffing they thought if we get
rid of these words then we our ranking will fall yeah and that didn't happen to
them no that's great cool so good for both SEO and ux yeah cool okay maybe we
shouldn't take it to an extreme
18:30
and remove all words though just keep the button is there like a certain balance
for um I guess like maybe that's another ux thing where you want something to be
more streamlined and not so cluttery like if you have a really text Heavy landing
page where it's like paragraph paragraph paragraph and it's hard to see the button
that is maybe not so good for ux it depends on what kind of contents I would say so
if the the purpose of that content is to provide a lot a lot of information then
maybe it's hard to place a lot of uh bottons between the
19:07
the paragraph right but maybe you can like add some like images videos or any kind
of visualization so that user can interact with those content without getting bored
so placing a lot of buttons is not the only answer for improving the ux but adding
the the visual assets like images and stuff like that that that can also help the
user to engage more with the content and they can you know satisfy with the content
they can keep reading keep they will keep scrolling down and then eventually
they'll find the bot and they convert that's also a case Okay so it sounds like
adding gifs to a page is good for
19:47
uxix I actually don't know about that I don't think there's any like bad influence
or you know anything from U ux aspect so I don't know if this is like a maybe need
to look up like where did I read this is it a personal uh opinion or did I read
this in like a best practice somewhere but I read that gifs are not something that
we should be doing too much within documentation because they're distracting and
you can't pause them so from like an accessibility point of view like they're like
flashing and like constant movement so if you're trying to read Focus documentation
it
20:21
might be like something that's distracting that uh sort of like calm reading vibe
that you want to be having and so like a pause playay video Loop would be better
but that's not necessarily like ux or SEO maybe well that actually makes sense but
I me personally never faced any trouble putting GIF images between the the the
paragraphs in the article but you know when the image quality is pretty bad that
that it that leads to bad ux so and it's hard to maintain the good quality on when
you put gifs right like J sometimes it can like really blurry and
21:02
the quality might be bad so in that case that's terrible ux I would say but the GIF
itself I don't know I don't think GIF itself has a bad effect on ux ux or something
would it have a positive effect or could you measure whether or not it has a
positive or negative effect on user experience by adding or like an AB test for
whether you have like a gif or yeah yeah you well you definitely should do ab test
and any cases but actually we once replaced an it's not a video but it's an image
to a gif and it generated a higher conversion rate oh
21:40
okay okay so we have remove all the keywords and add more [Laughter] gifs okay
maybe I shouldn't look at it this extreme uh but it really depends though I feel
like that's part of the user experience is like looking at does it make sense to
add that drift for this user in this context because maybe it is weird to have a DF
on your landing page or maybe it's really helpful maybe that's very important to
show like how to use a product for example and then that helps them convert because
they saw oh that's what that product does I put this thing here and that's how that
22:17
thing works that makes sense yeah I don't know Rio have you seen that people do
things differently in Japan for uix or is uix mostly global I don't know if there
is any particular thing that people in Japan do for ux but there is one unique
thing about the user Behavior or ux Trend in Japan I would say so it's not like
people intentionally do but people actually prefer to have a visual assets like
videos or so many images on their contents so I once did the the research there was
uh two articles one without any visual contents and one with
23:02
few visual contents between like each paragraph and the the content with few images
that has higher uh user engagement rate and in Japan we see a lot of content that
has a lot of images uh visual assets but when I do when I search something in
English when I read like English documents I rarely see a pages with a lot of like
visual assets so maybe that's one thing that is different from how people react in
Japan and in other countries you see anything different about like site navigation
or the way that people are like going from
23:40
page to page in Japan compared to maybe English content I don't think there's
difference in that aspect only the the visual contents more image heavy or like
more illustration yes exactly okay interesting what kind of common mistakes do you
see people making with when it comes to uix are there such things or do people just
do things differently well stuffing keywords is definitely one of them I've seen
I've seen few people still doing that so that's definitely one of them oh and also
I've seen a lot of cases where they put Carousel and
24:21
that actually have a lower impact on ux I would say so us have to like keep
clicking the the to to show the different images right to display the other images
and in the study that I read users actually don't really click that much so if you
have a lot of information that you want to provide to your users that doesn't
really do good so a better thing would be to do some other like flow like lazy
loading or like something that your user doesn't need to like click so many times
or what would you recommend uh for a website that has this Carousel what would be
better for ux it's better to just put
24:59
the the image in the content ah okay so just uh like six images like like this yeah
or if there's too much then I think you should reduce it because that means you you
are providing too much information that can cause the users to you know get
confused H or to go away if like all they're seeing is like image image image image
image yeah interesting I don't think that we have like any Carousel I'm now like do
we have any carousels in onesie and now I need to eradicate them we have carousel
structured that on right yes ah for Carousel in search results so the carousel
feature within uh that is like
25:36
a ux pattern that we have for some of the rich results interesting huh huh what is
your take on uh the zippies like the expando kind of like collapsing content real
from like a ux perspective is this nice is it not very nice I don't think that's
necessarily bad sometimes you know when you you're using that for a specific reason
so let's say you have FAQ Pages where there's so many like questions and answers
then you definitely you cannot like show the whole content without you know
clipping it so in that case it's better to do
26:13
that so that it's easier for them to look for the the questions or information that
they're looking for but if you're doing that too much sometimes it's hard for the
user to notice that you know that's clickable so if you're provid the very very
important information that you definitely want your users to notice then it's
better not to do that it's not about like ux aspect it's more like your information
delivery thing yeah I see people doing that as like a way to sort of uh like make
the page look more scannable or like it's more minimal like not overwhelming with
all of this content so
26:50
they sort of like zip up zip up zip up and then you need to drill in to see more
yeah U but then what if you miss it for example or you can't do like command find
let's see it's a really long page and you can't find that piece of thing that
you're looking for because it's hidden behind a zippy um but I guess John would
that be like no implication from a SEO perspective or how do you see that from like
another angle I think from from an SEO perspective that's that's okay because the
the primary information that people will be searching for is probably visible
immediately anyway so it's almost like
27:29
well if the answer is somewhere drilled down it's like like you don't know the
answer when you're searching otherwise you wouldn't be searching so uh it's kind of
like you find the question and you can expand that that seems that seems okay I
guess it's also trying to show you uh like visual hierarchy like importance of that
content so if it's behind a zippy then you're kind of signaling to the user as well
that this thing that's hidden is not as important otherwise we would have shown it
to you like either bigger or like in a larger
27:59
font or something cool okay so kind of wrapping up is is there one thing that you
think seos should do to get started in uix or conversion rate optimization it's
like where would you tell them to start this is one thing that I wanted to talk
about but uh heat map tool it's not like I'm trying to promote our product or
anything but heat map tool actually helps a lot every time we do ux Improvement
conversion rate Improvement cro we always need heat map tool so heat map tool is
basically visualizing the users's behavior on the pages so it
28:39
shows which part of the content users are reading at and which bottons that user
clicking or if the users are leaving the page at which part of the content so it
visualizes the the whole user Behavior so you can actually learn if the users are
engaging with the content or not or if they're satisfied with information that
you're providing or not so let's say you are writing something that you really want
your users to notice or you want users to understand or to you know promote
something and what if the the the part that you're trying to promote so hard is
29:15
not actually the users are not actually reading that point then it you know there's
no way that you can convert them or it's just waste of time and effort doing that
right so it's really really important to know what your users are engaging and
interacting with on your content and heat map tool visualizes that ah okay so you
can see like more quickly where on the page like there's some sort of like visual
element to not just seeing like I I mean I think I can look up in Google analytics
like where people like they're going 80% to the
29:46
page but then I have to think in my head where is 80% of my page and like where are
they and you're saying the heat map thing would show me exactly uh where that would
be on the page and I don't necessarily need to make up my mind where is 80% it yeah
it's really easy to analyze it so like you said when you use Google analytics you
have to like do the settings to know if the users are reading 80% of the content or
not you don't need any those kind of you know settings you can just like implement
it just by inserting the like to uh one
30:17
JavaScript tag and then you can get the data of your users's behavior on your web
pages and then you can learn oh they're reading this or they're not reading this oh
maybe we should fix this maybe we should place this information higher so that you
know more users can learn about that that sounds really cool we should look into
that try it out I now want to analyze the SEO starter guide put it into a heat map
tool and see where if they are reading 100% of my gigantic document cool okay well
this has been really insightful Rio thank you
30:50
for joining us that's it for this episode and again thank you for joining us Rio if
folks have any questions or comments where can they find you I'm always on X
formerly Twitter I cannot I'm used to saying Twitter so I'm just going to say
Twitter but yeah you can find me you can just search Riri ichikawa it's pretty hard
to pronounce but yeah Riri ichikawa and then yeah I'm always on Twitter so you can
you guys can find me there cool okay we'll we'll definitely add a link thank you
folks for listening and goodbye bye
31:26
bye we've been having fun with these podcast episodes I hope you The Listener have
found them both entertaining and insightful too feel free to drop us a note on
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[Music]