2 replies to this topic

[bwelford]

Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox to be found at
http://www.useit.com...x/20030825.html
is entitled Usability 101

It has a rather striking statistic in it:
<snippet>
Current best practices call for spending about 10% of a design project's budget on usability. On average, this will more than double a website's desired quality metrics and slightly less than double an intranet's quality metrics.
</snippet>

There's not a single mention of Search Engine Optimization in the whole article. So what would we say on this?

What % of a design project's budget should be spent on SEO according to current best practices?

And on average, how would this affect a website's ROI?

Barry Welford

[compar]

There's not a single mention of Search Engine Optimization in the whole article. So what would we say on this?

What % of a design project's budget should be spent on SEO according to current best practices?

And on average, how would this affect a website's ROI?

That's a very interesting question. I don't imagine there are any good statistics available. But as to cost for SEO it will be a lot less if it is done as part of the creative process rather than after the fact.

As to the difference in ROI it could be unlimited. The value of a first place listing in Google versus being in the 500th place could be 1000 to 1.

[Bill Slawski]

It's not a surprise that Dr. Nielsen doesn't include a figure for SEO.

But, I'd expect that he would anticipate some marketing cost entering the mix, and many of the alertbox articles in the past have included ideas on how to make a site work well for search, regardless of whether that search was onsite or off.

It's just that the article is usability 101 and not other aspects of developing and designing a site.

Like usabilty, optimizing a site for search probably does benefit tremendously from begining at the planning stages of a site, when audience is being targeted, and market is being defined.

Site architecture, copywriting, application development are all influenced by how a site's targeted audience will use the site. Search engines are a part of that targeted audience.