Usability or Advertising?

Every website owner’s objective is to increase traffic to his website. What decides the success then? SEO or Usability?

SEO ensures a steady flow of traffic but doesn’t assure the site usage, so… the objective of bringing in visitors is not making any business sense as the growing numbers and the amount spent on marketing and advertising is not in sync with sales figures, because each conversion is way too expensive.

The success of any business or product lies in its ability to create buzz and user loyalty. Loyalty comes from satisfaction (product Usability & User Experience) that’s derived from the first interaction. The satisfied or loyal users create the positive buzz and bring in more users by referring your product or service, this way the business grows exponentially. Why your users are satisfied and creating positive buzz for you? Because they found your product or service very Usable, hence the positive buzz.

Do you think without the product being Usable, is it possible to retain the users and enjoy their patronization?

Many businesses are in a hurry to increase the visitors to their site ,it’s understandable, they hire my consultancy for increasing the numbers and are willing to spend a bomb towards marketing and advertising too. And when I point out that their site is lacking Usability and needs to be fixed before going into anything else dampens their enthusiasm.

SEO ensures visitors to the site but doesn’t assure to convert them into users and retain them.

An analogy to make the above statement more understandable:

Let’s say that you own a restaurant. You start spending money on advertising and see more and more people trickling into the restaurant each night. But you notice something peculiar. Some who come through the doors turn right around and leave. Others come and eat, but you never seem them come back a second time.
You start running the numbers and find that each night about X people are coming through your doors but only 5% stay and eat. You're selling about fifteen meals a night. You realize you have a problem. And the solution is... more advertising.
You know it's the rats and roaches that are turning people away but you feel that if you just increase your advertising you'll be able to sell more meals. It works. Each night more and more people come to your restaurant. Few stay but many more leave before they even taste your delicious cooking.

Now, the companies without finding the root cause, simply blow away their hard earned money on advertising, marketing and by hiring some self proclaimed quacks who are a mere termite to the company’s finances than being any value as such.
So… instead of fixing the Usability and User Experience of the product they just pilfer their money and energy on irrelevant things and eventually perish out of business.

Therefore, making the subjective products objectively with Usability will grow the business exponentially and create a positive brand image which helps raking in residual income.