We recently researched user feedback for SEEK, Australia’s leading employment web site, following an upgrade of its site.

SEEK is already one of Australia’s most visited sites, but the company constantly looks at ways of improving or enhancing the site.

It’s an example of a mature and very successful web site continuing to find better ways of doing things.

Instead of resting on its laurels, SEEK has continued to invest resources in enhancing and growing its web site, and ultimately improving the service that it provides.

Part of our research involved conducting concept-testing focus groups. These generated a number of suggestions which have since been implemented to make the web site easier to use.

However, it was a relatively minor change that has had the most impact on site traffic.

SEEK’s homepage has links to different resources that allow users to search for jobs by a number of categories. These include searching by recruitment agency or by companies looking for employees.

Previously, these links had been labelled, simply, ‘Company Profiles’ or ‘Recruiter Profiles’.
However, following testing, we suggested re-labelled these as ‘Search by Company’ or ‘Search by Recruiter’.

The improvement in click-through levels was immediate.

Traffic spiked on the day it was changed, and has steadily risen ever since.
For example, traffic to ‘Search by Company’ grew by 72%, and ‘Search by Recruiter’ grew by 26%.

While the terminology originally used was factually correct, simply turning it into a ‘call to action’ has had a big impact. It encourages people to take the next step – the important step that the company wants them to take.

By using the kind of information available to most companies– web site statistics and sales and customer relationship management data – as well as feedback from users, we were able to suggest changes to SEEK’s web site that have ultimately improved its service to both its customers and its partners.