As hard as it pains me to say this, as an SEO myself, SEO and keywords alone won’t get you sustained traffic and visitors. Creating and maintaining a winning website is more about understanding human search behavior. Take this recent article from searchengineland.com, it points to the top 10 traits that most top performing websites have in common:

1. They understand human search behavior, the reasons why people find and stay on a website.

2. They have invested in strategic information architecture.

3. They develop and deploy high-quality content on a regular scheduled basis.

4. They understand that a quality user interface is vital to successful user experiences.

5. They conduct usability tests and understand that human search behaviour changes.

6. They don’t let technology gimmicks impact the user experience in a negative way.

7. They know that SEO page markup needs to be based on quality content, not gimmicks.

8. They understand how crawlers and search technologies impact content find-ability.

9. They understand that a first-page search engine ranking has to do with high-quality content.

10. They understand strong search rankings have to do with first building a superior user experience.

Are you keeping all these factors in mind when developing your website strategy?

But what if your customers don’t like what they see on your website? Or worse, what if they don’t trust your website?

Yesterday, Small Business Trends ran an article on the 11 Reasons Customers Don’t Trust Your Website. The reasons included:

Your website reads like a brochure: Its too technical, not engaging and not conversational.

No one likes spelling mistakes: Typos and bad grammar reflect badly on your company as a whole. Mistakes scream not credible and unprofessional.

No updates in over a decade: I’m exaggerating of course, but if your site isn’t up-to-date with your industry expectations, you’ll appear lazy or out of business.

It’s not user-friendly: Visitors will get frustrated if they can’t find what they’re looking for with ease and they’ll look for products and services somewhere else.

Cut the marketing jargon: Have you every heard of ‘business buzzword bingo’ (or what I like to call bullshit bingo)? Well you’re playing it if you’re using terms like “innovative”, “think outside the box” and “credible service organization” to describe your business.  Your product or service should speak for itself and your language should be clear and conversational (as if you were speaking about your business in person).

There’s no ‘About’ page: The easiest way to gain trust is to let your customers see the person behind the curtain. Tell them a bit about yourself (in a professional sense) and why you’re passionate about your work. This puts a face to your company and adds expertise to your business.

These are just the first 6 reasons why customers may not be positively responding to your website. Read on for the full 11 reasons why your website might not be trusted to find out if your site is guilty of these online boo-boos.