It can be hard to put things in perspective with a site that you control. Whether you run a big business or a small one, your close personal involvement with your site means that there are some things you overlook. This lack of perspective can be fatal to your SEO.

Most of the time, companies get around this issue by hiring an SEO firm to conduct their search engine optimisation. You can talk to us at SEO Consult about your SEO campaign. Even when you do seek outside help for your main optimisation, there are times when a pair of friendly eyes can be of immense help to your website.

A lot can be gained simply by asking a friend to glance over your site. As a friend is unconnected with your business, they will be able to provide a fresh interpretation of how your site works. It’s important to find a friend that is as near to your target user as possible. Asking your elderly aunt to review your computer programming site, for example, will have highly unreliable results, but similarly asking a technical-minded friend to look at your ‘knitting help’ site will be of little use. Once you have selected your fresh eyes, provide them with a list of questions to consider.

• How swift was the load time? It is a good idea to get your friend to access the site from their own machine. This can give you more insight into the average user’s experience. Ask your friend to note down the time and day they access the site, and also what browser they us.
• Home page effectiveness. Your home page is one of the most important pages on your site. Ask your friend what information they noted on the page, where they were tempted to go from the page, and also design questions like whether the font was easy to read
• Design considerations. The graphics and objects on your page can influence your users, as can the colours you’ve chosen for the basic design. Ask your friend how the design of each page makes them feel, and whether they felt the images added to or detracted from the information on the page
• User paths. Ask your friend to note where they go on the site, and roughly how long they stayed on each page. Ask them to explain what drew them to that page and what made them stay or leave
• Problems. This is possibly the most important question to ask. Ask your friend to note slow or broken links, awkward content and anything else that annoyed them on the site

It is possible to lead your friend’s opinions with your questions, and you have to be careful when forming the question list to avoid this. It can help to talk to your SEO firm for advice. To get a broader idea of how users interpret your site, you can ask several friends to undergo the process, but even one outside eye can provide useful feedback.

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