Is Your Website Suffering from Over-Optimization?

How can you best优化您的网站？首先是什么？

It’s been a lifelong debate between designers, marketing gurus, and SEO experts. There’s lots of checklists, tips, and opinions to sift through on the web. Some articles are geared towards functionality, while other content is geared solely towards design or SEO. How do you find the balance in this tug-of-war? And, if you don’t strike that balance, do you risk over-optimizing your website?

The short answer: yes, absolutely.

当所有三个要素都争取聚光灯时，网站可以很快从优雅变成混乱。可能缺乏流动和清晰的品牌标识，使您的用户感到困惑和不知所措 - 就像厨师无法下定决心要甜还是咸的菜的菜一样。

为了避免过度优化的问题，您首先需要了解网站的意图和目的。只有这样，您才能决定将哪个领域集中在哪个领域。

We’ll start with highlighting the different priorities of design, marketing, and SEO. Understanding these priorities will help you avoid over-optimizing and instead optimize with intention.

When Design Is the Priority

通过研究表明94％的第一印象与您的网站设计有关，您不能否认看起来很重要。

美是优先级时,设计师可以让choices that are more visually appealing than necessarily functional or方便使用的。You might have noticed many creative agencies’ websites use cut-off typography, cool image transitions, parallax effects, and时尚配色方案。这些设计选择的重点是让访客感到高兴并提供异常的数字体验。

Prioritizing design in this way can be beneficial. According toWebFX，如果有15分钟的时间食用内容，则有66％的人喜欢看一个设计精美的网站。

但是优先考虑设计也有其缺点。设计精美的网站可能不是可访问的一个。通常，诸如添加之类的设计选择parallax scrollingor carousels to a website are made without considering users with physical disabilities or disabilities related to vision.

Design and accessibility aren’t necessarily at odds. There areseveral steps you can take to create an accessible — and beautiful! — website。但这可能需要时间，需要开发人员预算。

因此，您必须问自己谁是您的目标受众？他们有时间和耐心与animations？Do they care about bold colors? Do they want淡入过渡as they scroll down the page?

如果答案是肯定的，那么您可以创建旨在给用户留下深刻印象和喜悦用户的数字艺术品。如果答案是否定的，那么最好选择优化工作的另一个优先级。

当营销成为优先事项时

尽管设计师将优先考虑美容，但营销爱好者将优先考虑让用户采取行动。

当优先考虑营销工作时，网站可能会在其中采取措施导航栏，，，，header，，，，footer，侧边栏和其他部分。它甚至可能具有Lightbox弹出窗口with a CTA. DifferentCTA可能会鼓励客户与销售代表安排电话，预订约会，联系客户服务，注册新闻通讯等等。bob官网官方网站

了解的有说服力的本质社会证明，，，，marketing experts also favor content likecustomer reviews and testimonials，，，，award badges, and image and video galleries connected to their social media accounts. This type of content can help push users along thebuyer’s journey。

But if your only focus is converting prospects into customers, then your website might seem like it’s making a hard sell to visitors who aren’t ready to make a purchase yet. Or it might overwhelm visitors with too many choices, causing choice paralysis. According to asurvey by zoovu，，，，42% of consumers said they have abandoned a planned purchase altogether because there was too much choice.

Looking at网络分析像浏览量，会议和跳出率一样，可以帮助您告诉您您是否为访问者提供了太多选择。如果您的转换率很好，但是您的流量相对较低或趋势下降，那么您最好优先考虑SEO。

When SEO Is the Priority

While designers want to make a beautiful website and marketers want to make a website that converts, SEO specialists care about ranking highly on Google SERPs first and foremost. And why wouldn’t they有49％的网络用户说他们使用Google查找新项目或产品？

With acomplex and somewhat secret algorithm，，，，Google uses many factors to rank web pages. Some of them are related to technical aspects of a website, like load time, while others are related to what’s on the page, like keywords and backlinks.

A focus onSEOmight mean improving your website’s navigation and page speed, removing duplicate content and broken links, and publishing more long-form blog content.

The latter in particular is a big focus for SEO experts — and for good reason. When combined with keyword research, proper backlinking, and more,business blogging可以帮助您建立主题的权威，吸引网站的流量，并与目标受众产生信任。

But too much focus on SEO without any consideration for design or the用户体验can actually end up hurting your ability to rank. Keyword stuffing, link spamming, and otherblack hat SEO techniques是臭名昭著的over-optimization的例子。但苏btler examples today include trying to rank for keywords that aren’t relevant to your business, using multiple H1 tags on a page, and linking to sites with low domain authority — and these are just as important to avoid.

Now that we understand the different priorities of design, marketing, and SEO, let’s look at how you can balance them to avoid over-optimizing your site.

如何避免在网站上过度优化

过度优化的网站将以不平衡的方式投资于设计，营销和SEO的所有三个重点领域。可视化一个带有视差部分，大量CTA按钮的网站以及具有过长标题和矮胖段落的博客文章。听起来有点熟？

不用担心。如果您的网站是过度优化的受害者，那么补救措施比您想象的要容易。

Start by assessing your website’s main purpose. Is it design, marketing, or SEO? These priorities are not mutually exclusive — in fact, they’re interdependent. But you should maximize your efforts in one area and prune back in the others.

Here are some questions to help you assess your website’s purpose:

1. Is your intention to create a memorable and emotive experience?
2. Do you want to captivate your user?
3. Do you want to impress your audience?
4. Do you care more about驱使您的听众采取行动并转换？
5. Do you want to develop a closer relationship with your audience through social media?
6. 您的听众时空吗？
7. Do you want to rank on Google?
8. Are you relying on organic traffic through Google?

可能很难缩小您的头等大事。以1-8的评分量表回答这些问题将有助于您订购优先级。考虑一下您的目标受众是谁，促使他们的动机，对行业的期望以及您的业务目标是什么。

问题1-3旨在设计设计，问题4-6以及对SEO的问题7-8。因此，如果您的最高成绩位于列表的顶部，那么您应该专注于设计。如果它们处于底部，那么您应该专注于SEO。如果他们处于中间，那么专注于营销。

Once you have figured out your principal driver, you can realign your optimization strategy and elect a leader in that field to drive the new strategy. If it’s design, that might mean enhancing the visuals on your site. If it’s marketing, then you might need to cut down on visual effects so visitors can see and access your CTAs more easily. If it’s SEO, then try shifting your focus from engaging and delighting visitors to attracting them to your site.

最终，由您进行正确的剪裁，为您的独特网站创建均衡的优化策略。