American Express Australia (Amex) recently refreshed its website. For your reading pleasure we review it so you can learn a few do’s and don’ts from a major brand’s efforts to improve its online experience.
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Overall Rating (out of 10*): 5
- Look & Feel: 7.5
- Usability: 5
- SEO 0.5
* Where 1 is Poor and 10 is Fantastic
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Amex Web’s Look & Feel
As with any top brand in the financial services sector, you’d expect American Express Australia’s website to ooze credibility, substance and style - to look every bit the fortune 500 company it is. After all, if you’re going to entrust your money to a credit card issuer, you’ll want to be sure you’re dealing with a secure, professional organisation.
It’s about selling credit cards
The good news - Amex’s new site delivers ‘credibility’ in spades. It’s slick, it’s flash (it really is Flash… of the Macromedia kind), it boasts a clear semantic layout, and it’s straight to the point. The good Amex people want you to sign up to their latest credit card offering and they want to make sure you do by placing an offer front and centre on the home page. Mission accomplished - if you’re looking for a new credit card (or charge card), American Express’ website will deliver.
Driving traffic online away from call centres
Cardmembers returning to the site to check up on their card balance will note the account login is now easier to find as it now sits prominently in the left hand column and in the upper right hand corner. (The account login was likely hiding under the ‘already registered?’ link inn the website’s previous version.) It’s a small change, but it should help American Express drive more users online and relieve some of the pressure from its much taxed call centres.
Look & Feel Rating (out of 10): 7.5
The User’s Experience
Reading vs pixel perfection
True to form Amex Australia’s website follows global style guidelines found on its other sites in the US and the UK - which means the font size is extremely small. Vision impaired users and those with less than perfect eyesight will struggle with the microscopic text in the cramped left hand column. This flaw might be forgivable if the pixel size was not fixed across the whole site - preventing users with larger browser font settings from re-adjusting the page to their specifications. Clearly we’re dealing with a fixation on pixel perfection to the detriment of usability.
Finding the credit card that’s right for you
So what if I wanted to get a Platinum Credit Card or a prestigious Platinum Charge Card or a Small Business Card? How easy is it to find the right card?
It’s relatively simple. Using a Flash presentation, Amex successfully showcases its card offerings and leads prospects to the appropriate card by highlighting each product’s most important benefits.
Where the process bogs down is on the main card page (for example on the Platinum Charge Card’s page) where contrast issues make reading difficult and where additional clicks need to be made to truly understand the card’s value. It takes a few clicks to read up on each benefit and the back and forth journey between product benefits gets tiresome.
Listing a series of attractive benefits in bullet form right then and there would likely produce a better, faster experience and lead to more sales. Unfortunately that’s not happening at present - but it can be fixed.
Usability Rating (out of 10): 5
Will Anyone Find the Site on Google?
In Australia, Google is the 800-hundred pound gorilla of search engine advertising. By its own estimates, Google accounts for 85-87% of searches online in Oz. In Australia, if you’re not Google’s front page… you’re not going to be found. Period.
SEO or SEM?
Will Amex be a player? Will it show up naturally on Google through good search engine optimisation (SEO) or will it simply rely on paid advertising (SEM or Search Engine Marketing) to show up on Google’s front page?
With a site grounded in Flash and JavaScript and not featuring the keyword credit card even once on its home page in a manner that’s readable for search engines, it’s a safe bet the marketers at Amex or the agency acting on their behalf have decided to buy their way onto Google’s front page via paid advertising.
It’s not the end of the world. Amex will still be visible in paid searches - but it will cost them and they’ll be sacrificing all organic traffic (approximately 40-60% of clicks on search engines) and relying solely on SEM to deliver sales.
So what’s so bad about Flash or JavaScript?
Used in moderation, JavaScript and Flash do not hinder SEO. However, when they replace all meaningful content a search engine could latch onto to learn what the site is about - as is the case with American Express Australia’s site - you end up with a site with very little content/meaning attached to it.
And if a search engine cannot decipher what your site is about via content, it won’t list your site. In that sense, American Express’ site is all but invisible to search engines in its present form.
Redirect at your own peril
What’s worse, the site is not based in Australia. http://www.americanexpress.com.au/ redirects you to the Australian section of Amex’s US server: http://www.americanexpress.com/australia/. And when the user is not registered or logged in (and that would usually be the case), he/she is redirected once again to an intermediate page, http://www.americanexpress.com/australia/homepage/personal_notreg.shtml., which ultimately redirects you to the homepage, https://home.americanexpress.com/home/au/home_p.shtml, also located in the US.
Confused? We are. Why so many redirects? No idea. Why a secure https homepage? No clue! A secure homepage is not needed as no one has logged into a secure area yet. Go figure…
I’m not Australian… Ignore me!
From an SEO perspective, redirecting traffic outside of Australia sends a clear message to the search engines, namely: ‘this is a US based site… Not an Australian one!’ It’s one more nail in the coffin in what is essentially a non-optimised site.
SEO Rating (out of 10): 0.5
Final Analysis: Does it sell Credit Cards?
So… does American Express Australia’s’ site do the job of selling credit cards? It’s straight forward and professional looking. It takes you to its product simply and quickly, but it’s somewhat slow at laying out product benefits and taking you to the sale - and there’s no offer to sign up or any meaningful call to action.
With regards to driving traffic to the site via search engines like Google, American Express Australia will need to rely heavily on Search Engine Marketing. In its present form the site will likely remain invisible for important keywords like ‘credit card’, although its powerful brand name, significant SEM spend and other marketing efforts will still bring in sales.
Overall Rating (out of 10): 5
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