When trying to improve your website's SEO strategy, don't forget to consider how SEO and UX are connected.
Gone are the days of improving rankings with keyword stuffing and backlinks. Search engines are turning their attention to human behavior and experience. Improving your website ranking means that you need to focus on the usability of your website like any other SEO strategy, and more.
When creating an advanced website, SEO and user experience (UX) go hand in hand. Top-ranking sites follow SEO best practices combined with an intuitive UX design. Good UX design can increase engagement, website traffic, and ultimately, rankings.
Several aspects of user experience design have been integrated with SEO best practices. These include having a website that loads quickly, is mobile friendly, has clear navigation, and contains engaging content.
This is why user experience is critical to high-quality SEO in your website.
Why UX and SEO are so important
UX optimization is a branch of design that follows users after they arrive on your website. This type of UX is on-site, as opposed to off-site UX, which happens outside of your website and is mostly called customer experience. Website UX covers everything from the design and layout of a website to how users interact with it.
Before UX played an important role in SEO, most web designers focused on creating websites for search engines rather than users. Seamlessly adding keywords, quality content, and backlinks to a web page is enough for search engines to boost your site to the top.
Today, search engines—especially Google—are focusing on user behavior to provide users with the best possible search results. Search engines collect data about users and websites to better understand users. They look at how users interact with the site, and if they don't like the data, I can bet your ranking position will suffer.
One of the biggest UX signals Google can measure is pogo sticking, when a user visits a website from Google Search, doesn't find what they're looking for, and then hits back to Google just to go to another search result. The user repeats this process a few times until they finally visit a site and never click back.
Pogo persistence is a clear sign that users can't find what they're looking for on a site, and often goes hand in hand with a high bounce rate.
Sites with high bounce rates or high pogo stickiness are missing what users want. Search engines don't know what's on a website that's causing a high bounce rate. They only monitor user traffic and rank sites accordingly.
Sites with lower bounce rates generally do a better job of helping users find what they're searching for. These sites usually rank higher, usually on the first page of results.
Bounce Rate: User Experience Design
There are many reasons why users are bouncing from your website. One of the reasons is the lack of a good user experience in web design.
Clean navigation, user-friendly language, fast loading times, and a website with a clear purpose are all part of UX design. These same aspects of UX are key parts of SEO. Both UX and SEO share a common goal: to give search engine users what they are looking for.
Improve the user experience of your website and make the user's visit the absolute best experience you can offer. If users have a great experience visiting your website from Google, you will rank higher for search terms.
SEO and UX Best Practices
Because search engines can't tell you exactly why your visitors are bouncing off your site. They might have a great idea, but it's your job to find out why. The great way to start this procedure is to audit your website and then enhance its UX design Follow these SEO and UX best practices to ensure your website has high-quality SEO:
Mobile-friendly pages. More than 50% of web visitors use mobile phones. That said, you need to pay close attention to the layout, look, feel, text, images, and experience of your mobile website. Those who don't have a mobile-friendly version of the website need to take the time to create one.
Both users and search engines will judge a website by its mobile layout. Every element in a mobile website affects SEO. Keep focus on developing user-friendly navigation with clear and steady buttons. Keep the overall design simple and clear, focusing on usability and content as well as good design.
Speed. A quick loading internet site gives a better user experience. Therefore, search engines consider website load time as an important factor in rankings. You can improve your website's load time by compressing images, learning clean code, and using faster web hosting servers. Optimizing different elements of your website will reduce load times and improve SEO.
Clear site navigation. One problem with just focusing on SEO and rankings is that websites tend to have complex navigation and strong site architecture. Simple navigation makes the website easier to use. This helps users complete their tasks in less time while reducing clutter.
Having more pages isn't always best. A web page with high-quality content and user-friendly organization is usually just as good for SEO. Strong multi-page websites are still good for SEO, as long as they are easy for users to navigate.
Use Title. Titles are a great way to identify content, use keywords, and boost SEO. Users first look at the title to check if the site provides an answer to their search. Search engine crawlers use titles to understand what your website is about and interpret the content.
Per page, there should only be one H1 tag.. The rest of the headings can use H2 to H6 tags multiple times to help organize the content of the page. Use title tags in meaningful ways as needed.
User Friendly Layout. Layout design, content organization, and text size can ruin a website’s SEO. User experience design can combine the aesthetic aspects of a website with SEO to improve usability and increase traffic. You can do this by including images and videos; using calls to action throughout your site; using clear headings; organizing and formatting content so that it's easy to digest; or adding links to other relevant content. You can even utilize content or iamge rotation scripts that randomly change the site content with each visit. Following these tips along with UX design best practices will help boost your SEO.
A Clear Logo.
The logo or site ID is one of the first elements users see when they arrive at your site. This ID should be clear, obvious, and not smudged by clutter. A logo or tagline should share your website's content and connect to the user's needs.
Test, Test, Test.
One of the best ways to improve your website is to continuously improve its SEO and UX. Understanding how UX and SEO work together will help you make informed decisions when optimizing your website. From there, continue to improve these areas of your website to provide a great experience for your users.
SEO and user experience are now closely linked. If you want to provide reliable rankings for your website, you will need a positive user experience to complement your SEO. Fortunately, you don't need to be a jsx expert or anything close. There are some solid website builders that non-coders can use to build quality websites with great UX designs that are already built into the templates. Just remember to take advantage of these tips above and you should be off to a good start.
