SEO and UX: How User eXperience Can Benefit Your SEO
User experience (UX) is being interpreted as one of the most critical factors for effective SEO in 2022. With the average attention span of internet users seemingly decreasing day by day and a generation that always expects instant results, the speed and ease of navigation of a website are crucial to success online.
In this post, we will look at UX, what it is, search engine optimization, how to improve it, and why it is so essential for every website owner.
UX and SEO
What is User Experience?
The phrase is relatively self-explanatory as it refers to the experience a visitor to your website perceives when viewing and navigating your site. A positive UX is made up of several factors including the following:
- Website Loading and Page Loading Speed
- Page Experience – Web Core Vitals our past scores
- Easy and logical site navigation
- Minimal ads and pop-ups
- Quality content
- Text with lots of white space and broken down into subheadings
- Content that can be scanned quickly
- A site that is easy to see and enjoyable to look at
- Keep it simple
- Have a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page
- A clear call to action (CTA)
Essentially, the goal is for the visitor to have a great visual experience and navigate your site easily. It sounds easy, but it is not that simple as other strategies are needed to build the best experience, results and conversions.
Who really cares about user experience?
Visitors care about a great user experience, so virtually all of us expect to consume content online as smoothly as possible. Dwell time will be improved on a website that offers a positive user experience.
Press your visitors with a page loaded with flashing ads, loud colors, huge blocks of text and the visitor is likely to click away and go somewhere else.
Site speed is also part of fine-tuning your UX, as long loading times need to be a focused SEO effort to address, and it is increasingly critical in 2022. True, this will also depend on the visitor’s internet speed, but even a fast website loading time won’t make much of a difference if a site has errors, long loading times, slow TTFB, and is slow to navigate.
The goal is to make sure that every page on your website opens quickly and without interruptions. It will keep visitors on your site and reduce bounce rates, which is a good thing for your Google rankings.
Does Poor User Experience Lead to Lower Search Engine Rankings?
UX and SEO
In particular, Google is placing more and more emphasis on website owners providing a positive user experience for visitors and it can impact your rankings, either positively or negatively. UX will impact your rankings, conversion rates, and bounce rates. And that adds up to whether you gain or lose traffic, rankings, and new customers.
One area that Google and Bing are focusing on is site speed. We’ve talked about this before, and it’s worth mentioning again. Sites that are slow to load will be at a disadvantage when it comes to getting higher rankings in SERP results. This isn’t something that will result in a manual penalty or cause your site to be de-indexed, but it can lower your rankings and increase your bounce rates.
Google aims to provide the best results for a search query. There are many factors involved in how Google arrives at these results. Quality content is always vital, as are natural backlinks. UX ranks right up there, as overall quality is becoming the most important factor in the search engine world.
Let’s say people visit a website and immediately leave. If that happens, this is an indicator to search engines that the site is not providing a good user experience in one form or another. It could be something as simple as the content not being what the visitor expected to find, the site looking like a confusing mess and too slow to open.
Every website owner needs to look at their website from a visitor’s perspective to tweak, test, and make changes or adjustments to the design that will improve the user experience.
Why are Technical SEO and UX also important?
Technical SEO and UX help with the overall SEO and ranking performance of your site. It also adds to the user experience because the website functions properly and delivers the promised content discovered in the search results.
- Technical SEO can cover things like:
- The initial interaction of the site with the SERPs
- Overall quality and relevance of the landing page
- Page load speed
- JavaScript framework
User experience can also go a step further by providing ways to interact with your site and brand even after a visitor has left. This could involve inviting them to join your email list, remarketing, a social media presence for your brand, and so on.
How to Improve Your Website User Experience
In today’s world, every website owner should at least familiarize themselves with the basics of white hat SEO and UX to stay competitive in the future.
We mentioned earlier that one of the best ways to improve your website’s user experience is to put yourself in your visitors’ shoes:
What are they hoping to find when they arrive?
- Is the content useful and easy to read or scan?
- If you were a visitor, would you want to spend time on your site?
- Are the pages filled with too many distractions?
Are the menus and navigation logical, making it easy to find information, products, or resources?
These are questions like the ones above that site owners need to ask themselves about their sites, as only then can they hope to improve their website and provide the best UX possible.
Even hiring industry experts who fully understand SEO and high-quality user experience won’t cut it. Unfortunately, not all webmasters and online business owners will have the time, knowledge, or inclination to effectively improve their site’s UX, so you need to hire someone who does.
Conclusion
Search engine giants like Google will increasingly take positive user experience indicators into account whenever they make an algorithm update. So if you want your website to stay ahead of the curve and ahead of the competition instead of falling behind, focusing on providing a great user experience for all your visitors is of paramount importance.
