User experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO) go hand-in-hand. You can have good UX and bad SEO, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a solid SEO strategy with bad UX.
Does User Experience (UX) Make a Difference to SEO?
SEO is often incorrectly perceived as some kind of magic trick that those in the know use to get sites to the top of Google’s search rankings.
They pull a few tricks, do their thing, and the site flies up the rankings.
In reality, it’s all about providing the best user experience. Google doesn’t want to give priority to the content created with the most keywords or the highest budget.
It doesn’t want to reward the strategists that acquire backlinks by harm or foul and do everything they can to game the system.
It wants to direct users with queries to sites with answers—the clearer those answers are and the better they are presented, the more they should be rewarded.
Google content always prevails, and if that content is framed with excellent UX, the user is happier, Google is happier, and the website gets the results they seek—at least in theory.
How Can a Good UX Improve SEO?
Good content should be well-written, relevant, original, and informative. It should be as long as it needs to be to address the topic, and, if possible, it should be written by an expert in their field.
UX doesn’t help directly with this, but it does facilitate a user’s enjoyment of the content and the site, so it’s always factored into the rankings. The main considerations are:
Speed
We’ve come a long way since the chaotic days of dial-up modems, and the average internet user doesn’t have the patience they once had.
Research suggests that people spend an average of just 15 seconds on a website and will leave after 3 seconds if the site is slow to load.
Everything has to be instant, whether it’s the initial site loading time, the additional media on the page, or the scroll speed.
Page speed has long been a consideration for page rankings, but as user patience drops and Google focuses more on UX, it’s becoming even more vital.
Some of the considerations for improving page speed include:
- Image Optimization: Blog articles don’t need to have highly detailed images. They should be reduced to the point where they maintain clarity without adding too much data to the page.
- Code: It’s best not to have too much code on a page, as all that HTML, JavaScript, and CSS need time to load.
- Lazy Loading: A speed-optimization method that only loads content as it is needed, such as when the user scrolls down the page. If it’s all loaded at once, they may give up long before they see that pre-loaded content.
A Mobile-Focused Approach
A growing percentage of the population only uses mobile phones to access the web, and many others prefer to browse on their smartphones and tablets than desktops and laptops.
Google prioritizes these uses by focusing on mobile versions over desktop ones.
Creating an optimized mobile site isn’t that different from creating an optimized desktop site. It should be clean and fast—devoid of superfluous banners and content that hinder performance.
Buttons should be large, clickable, and not too close together. Content should be easy to find and read. Navigation is key—the easier it is for the user, the better it will look in Google’s eyes.
Simple, Clean, and Helpful Content
Helpful content doesn’t just give the user the information they’re looking for; it also facilitates a smoother browsing experience.
That applies to articles and blogs, as well as everything from FAQs that answer questions about the site and its products/services to clear menus and CTAs that direct users where they want to go.
Long-form content should be easy to understand and written in plain English.
You’re not writing essays to impress your professor. You’re writing helpful content for curious users, many of whom will have a simple question and will only spare a few moments of their time to find the answer.
Some of the tricks that writers use to create helpful content include:
- Lots of relevant internal links
- Plain English that is easy to read and understand
- Short sentences
- Bullet points and lists to break up the content and make it easier to find specific points
- Minimal jargon, with clear and concise explanations of abbreviations and concepts that not everyone will know
User Engagement
Internal links help users find other relevant content, while video embeds and images keep them engaged for longer.
These are just a couple of things that encourage user engagement.
The more a user is engaged with a site, the longer they will stick around and the more pages they will visit.
It all feeds into something known as the bounce rate, which is one of the ways that Google determines the value of a website.
If users are clicking your links, visiting your site, and then leaving without viewing another page, it suggests that they didn’t find what they were looking for or struggled with the site’s navigation.
It could also mean that they found what they needed and left, which would be indicated in other metrics, such as longer page time and more pages viewed per session on average.
If you can keep users interested enough to read the full article before clicking internal links and consuming other content—whether it’s a video page, product, or another blog—the bounce rate will drop, and those rankings should get a boost.
Summary: UX vs SEO
A good website should consider both UX and SEO. They are often managed by different departments, but there is a lot of crossover, with well-designed UX facilitating a more enjoyable content experience.
In both cases, webmasters and content specialists should always put the user first, thinking about how they will engage with the site and trying to keep them interested, rather than being all consumed by keyword densities and backlinks.
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