User Experience & SEO: Improve Your UX And Search Engine Rank
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UX and SEO have separate and distinct identities. UX seeks to optimize how users interact with your website. SEO utilizes strategies to help your web pages rank well on search engines. While one targets users, the other is about serving search engine algorithms to generate the highest relevant rank.
User experience and search engine optimization, for all their differences, also have a relationship. The search engine, or SEO, is what brings users to your site. If the right SEO has been used, the users are relevant leads. As a user arrives, UX takes over and is what keeps them on the site as they pass further towards a conversion.
As SEO experts, All The Way Up Media knows the value in optimizing UX and SEO so that they’re not unaligned or competing. SEO can inform how the user experience is delivered and vice versa, seamlessly transitioning users from ‘lead’ to ‘converted’.
To deliver for your website strong numbers, user experience and search engine optimization must work together.
What Is UX?
SEO is widely talked about in web design and digital marketing circles but UX does not always get its fair acknowledgement.
UX is often referred to when speaking of how a website is designed. It’s about how enjoyable a website is to use and navigate.
How UX Relates To SEO
SEO positions a website to suit the more than 200 ranking factors that search engines use to rank a website. SEO uses keywords and strategies to optimize pages so that they can be easily crawled.
Just because a website is optimized for algorithms, however, it does not mean a website cannot be optimized for human users as well. In fact, search engines like Google consider UX to be a major indicator as to the quality of a website.
As SEO algorithms have advanced, they have come to search out indicators to better understand what a page is about, whether it is useful to its users, and whether it has a strong, positive user experience attached.
In the past, bad strategies like keyword-stuffing could work to rank a page higher but would negatively impact UX. No user wants to read a difficult-to-read website of poor English and stuffed to the brim with unnatural keywords.
These days, bad UX equates to bad SEO and, with each year that passes, algorithms are getting better at detecting the quality of the user experience which directly affects search engine rank.
UX Is Just As Important As SEO And Here’s Why
Bad UX can unfortunately sabotage an excellent SEO strategy. Imagine pouring time, effort, and money into search engine optimization and generating all types of search engine traffic to see your bounce rate extremely high.
That is a sign that when users land on your website, they are leaving because the user experience is not up to snuff.
A website should appear credible, be fast to load, be easy to interact with, have a layout that is not all over the place, have the content on it that was promised by the search engine, and should not have design features that put off a user or that creates. All of this is in the hands of a UX designer and a lack of UX management can easily mean leads from SEO amounting to very little.
Furthermore, if users are clicking to get to your website and leaving quickly after they arrive, that’s a sign to search engines that your website is low quality and your excellent SEO ranking will begin to slip slowly but surely.
This is why UX is as important as SEO and why crafting a UX or SEO strategy should involve the other as well.
How User Experience Impacts The Quality Of A Website
User experience focuses on user behaviour. It is a glimpse into how a user is supposed to interact with your website, creating the most meaningful and intuitive setup possible that ensures a new user follows the correct path towards conversion.
For some who have never engaged in user experience design or UX, some websites have reported improving conversion rates by as much as 400% after engaging in a UX audit and making the recommended changes.
Many elements of UX design exist. In fact, there are hundreds. Of the most important are as follows.
Website Branding
Your website should be branded with the logo, graphics, and color palette that suits your company and audience.
Site Map/Navigation
How a user clicks through a website is based entirely on UX design. A UX expert insists on a natural flow of information, interrelating pages and making content easy to find. The simpler the journey and the fewer pages in the structure, the better. However, this varies by the website.
Text, Images, And Media
While defining a content strategy is more in line with SEO, UX ensures text-based content, images and video, and all media elements are rendered correctly and, ideally, optimized for search engines to pick up on them and classify them where appropriate.
Headers/Menus
The menu design should be clear, providing the right layout and navigation for a user to get the information they want. The use of categories and subcategories can be key to simplifying the navigation menu and avoiding creating something so complex that it’s a turn-off for users to try to use.
Content Readability
How quickly and effectively can content be read on a website is extremely important. This involves choosing the correct typography, font size, color of the font, and background for what the font is designed over. Readability is an indicator of UX quality.
CTA Placement
A user should know what you expect of them when they visit a page. The call-to-action, or CTA placement, tells a user what to do next.
Ad Placement
If your website has ads, it is key that they are integrated with the user experience in mind. No one wants irrelevant advertisements spread across pages that should otherwise be simple and direct.
Optimizing User Experience
The job of a UX designer is never necessarily done. A UX strategy involves analyzing customer behavior, auditing and mapping web pages, possibly doing some competitor analysis, and completing A/B testing analyzing variations on elements like button placement, text layout, and more.
Just like with handling SEO analytics, a UX designer’s goal should be to refine a website over time to further optimize the conversion rate. They may also dig into the analytics of a website to learn more about users, discovering what features are connecting and which aren’t.
At All The Way Up Media, we are committed to these efforts, ensuring you reach your maximum conversions.
How We Use User Experience To Net Clients The Best In SEO
UX Creates Positive User Signals
When the user experience is optimal, it creates a lot of positive user signals that search engine algorithms pick up on.
- The length of time a user stays on your site is longer
- The navigation is easier to use and more intuitive
- Content is easier to find and better defined within the layout of a page
Search engines want to provide useful content. Prioritize UX and, in turn, a search engine like Google picks up on what such design work delivers.
UX Increase Page Speed Which Is A Ranking Factor
Every 4 in 5 users expect your website to load in 3 seconds or less. That’s UX best practice.
To make sure a web page is loading as fast as possible, a web designer prioritizing the user experience will examine factors such as how to minimize file sizes, optimization of photos, and evaluate the coding to ensure the website is making as few server requests as possible.
If you’re wondering how fast your website pages are loading, you can evaluate page speed for free at GTmetrix.
Coincidentally, page speed is also an SEO consideration. Google ranks websites better if they have faster page speeds because it signifies an efficiently run website and delivers content faster to the end-user.
UX Prioritizes Mobile-Responsiveness On All Devices
X should adapt to the size of the screen a website is being featured. This is mobile responsiveness.
What this can do is resize elements, adjust font size, and ensure a user does not have to zoom in or zoom out to navigate. Subsequently, like page speed, mobile responsiveness is highly valued by search engines, and so much so that Google has been using mobile-first indexing for all new websites since 2019.
Consider that over 58% of global web traffic comes from mobile devices. UX therefore should be mobile-first by design rather than approaching it from the perspective of how a page looks on a desktop.
UX Invites More Backlinks To Your Site
As more users like your website because of the quality of the user experience, you’re going to see more websites linking back to you and recommending your web pages to their audience.
These backlinks are a major SEO ranking factor and can significantly improve page rank.
All The Way Up Media Utilizes UX To Optimize SEO And Turn Clicks Into Long-Term Users
When you partner with All The Way Up Media, the user experience is what we are working for.
To ensure target users brought to you from search engines and SEO are provided the most easy, intuitive experience on your website. That is the objective. This is what converts users who can very easily be lost through web design that does not have UX in mind.
When we get the UX right, search engines like Google take notice. In addition to the technical factors that SEO strategies incorporate in design, UX covers the side of human behaviour. We utilize data-backed UX strategies to ensure your site is quality-made and optimized for the user.
Do you want to learn how you can improve your website’s UX? Reach out to an expert at All The Way Up Media today.
