With increasing online competition, having an impactful online presence is becoming more complex than ever. Every website strives to attract more traffic and convert these visitors to potential customers. A common issue most websites face is designing a seamless user experience that captivates the visitors.
The solution to this problem is to build a website that combines SEO and UX principles together. With these two aspects in position, you can create a website that not only attracts traffic but also converts visitors into leads. SEO and UX can work directly together. While SEO focuses on a user’s journey before and after they land at a website, UX focuses on the user’s experience when they are visiting a website. Let’s understand how UX and SEO can be incorporated together to impact the online rankings of websites.
How Does SEO Impact UX?
SEO plays a crucial role in diverting traffic toward your website. A usable website without any visitors or viewers is not of much value. Using SEO, the UX team can create a better user experience to attract more traffic and get more viewers. Using the keyword data from SEO, you can identify patterns of how people search and what are the current trending searches. SEO experts can learn and comprehend what their target audiences are searching for, their purpose and the language used for searching. This information about the potential website visitors can benefit UX designers and help them make informed decisions about the user experience.
Moreover, using this information will provide a larger sample size than previous design experience or a traditional focus group to help UX teams improve the user experience. It’s easier to make the necessary adjustments in the website design and format when you know clearly what the visitors want and how they search for it. You can incorporate changes to help visitors quickly find what they were searching for from your website.
SEO experts can analyze data to know how certain pages rank during Google searches and what pages perform better than their competition. Using this information, UX teams can determine which segments and pieces of user experience need to be improved. It also helps them fix more technical problems at a faster rate or even avoid them all at once. UX teams can know when a link is broken or a page error pops up and can use this information to address these issues immediately to improve the user experience and the SEO.
How Does UX Impact SEO?
Search engines rely on the meta information of the websites and how visitors interact with the pages and sites. Since search engines cannot view photos, read text or understand the relevance of the content to determine the value of the website, this meta information plays a critical role in the website rankings.
The outcome of a smooth and seamless user experience is that the visitor spends a long time on the website, finds meaningful information, links to the website and shares the site. These outcomes act as powerful signs for Google to understand that the website is reliable and credible. A successful user experience is the result of a great UX design, which affects its rankings.
A crucial way in which UX impacts SEO is website navigation. Using sitemaps can make the website easier to navigate and click through and make it easier for search engines to index content and understand its relevance.
UX can also impact SEO by the tagging of images. In terms of rankings, websites with at least one image can outperform those without any images. When the UX team creates web pages with pictures, the SEO team can use descriptions and alt tags in those images to improve the website rankings.
Other factors that affect the rankings include responsive design, easy-to-read texts and website speed. Website responsiveness is a popular and widely known factor that can positively affect your site rankings. UX team designers must create a responsive website design that meets Google’s ranking standards and provides a positive user experience. Your website’s rankings can significantly improve by mastering these UX factors.
Best Practices for Implementing SEO and UX
A common objective among SEO and UX is to provide their target audience with relevant content. Both aspects comply with Google’s ranking factors and ensure that your users experience a beneficial and seamless interaction with your website.
Applying SEO and UX best practices optimizes your website according to the search engine preferences and ensures that your website positions well in Google search. Some of these best practices are:
Improving Page Loading Speed
A website’s page speed is one of the most essential and prominent Google ranking signals. Slower page load speed can cost you your conversion rates and result in an overall unfavorable user experience. Even a one-second page loading delay can reduce your web page views by approximately 11%.
With high-speed internet and the latest technologies, users are now more impatient during website loading. If your website does not load in two seconds or less, almost half of the visitors will leave it, which leads to high bounce rates. Higher bounce rates signify poor user experience, which affects your SEO and website ranking on Google searches. Your page loading speed can improve when you:
- Select high-quality images but compress their size for faster loading
- Choose a reliable hosting plan
- Use lazy loading
- Eliminate autoplay multimedia formats
- Leverage browser cache
- Invest generously in a content delivery network
Mobile Friendliness
Using mobiles for internet searches is now more popular than traditional computers or laptops. The easy accessibility, speed and convenience of mobile devices contributed to the increasing mobile traffic. Around 50% of global internet traffic is from mobile devices. Making your website compatible with mobile devices is no longer an option but a necessity.
Ensuring that your website works well on mobiles and performs all its functions on time is essential for a positive user experience. The UX is directly related to how conveniently the user can view and access your website on their mobile. The mobile-friendliness of a website significantly contributes to its search engine ranking, so SEO demands a website to be compatible with both mobile and desktop users.
Focus on Website Responsiveness
Working on your website responsiveness is also an essential factor. Google’s mobile-first indexing makes it vital for websites to be responsive to score better rankings. So, working on making your website responsive and friendly for both mobile and desktop searches will benefit your website rankings. You can start by eliminating unnecessary and annoying popups, making your fonts large for easy readability, making CTA links and buttons easy to tap on and eliminating unnecessary information fields from the website forms.
Use UX Design To Build Trust
Your website is like the online ID that links you to your target audience and tells your visitors how trustworthy you are. The UX design impacts how your visitors and audience will perceive you, so you need to boost awareness and build trust among them using your UX design. For instance, using the power of storytelling on your website can evoke emotions and make your company relatable.
To show your legitimacy, you can post customer reviews and show photos of your staff members with a brief introduction about each one’s journey with your brand. Everything you do should be consistent. Creating a style guide and ensuring that all fonts, colors and visual content are used consistently improves your UX design and helps create a positive image in your viewer’s minds.
Improve SEO for Better User Experience
Poor SEO practices can potentially damage your UX. Adding numerous irrelevant links to your blog and creating self-serving or promotional blog posts can drive visitors away from your website. To design a user-friendly website, you need to keep these few things in mind:
- Create in-depth, longer (more than 1000 words), engaging and highly informative content that addresses your visitors’ concerns
- Break your content with headings and organize content into smaller chunks for easy readability
- Add internal links naturally throughout the content
- Optimize your meta descriptions, page titles, image alt tags and headings to make them more informative for the reader
- Select a short and memorable domain name that reflects the essence of your website
Simplify Your Website Architecture
The way your website pages are arranged is known as your site architecture. A good website architecture from an SEO viewpoint is the one where Google can find and index web pages seamlessly while the link juice is passed smoothly from high to low authority pages. Most visitors use the navigation tabs on your website to find the relevant page. That is why it is essential to make your website navigation simpler, add catchy CTA buttons, write informational menu labels and keep your pages less than four clicks away from the homepage.
Combining SEO and UX
From the above-mentioned information, it is clear that SEO and UX need one another to create an unparalleled website experience for users. Incorporating UX design and SEO may seem a bit daunting, but it’s essential for improving your website rankings and building a reliable brand image.
Using a user-centered and holistic approach for your online presence will help nourish stronger relationships with your users and keep them satisfied. This will help Google understand the value of your website and improve your rankings.
Whether you need help with SEO and UX design or other digital marketing processes, ChitChat Marketing can help you at every step to create an impactful online presence. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you.
