Nowadays, there is a lot of discussion and interest in SEO. High search engine rankings appear to be important to everyone, and everyone is either optimizing their websites on their own or spending money on SEO services and tools. Without a doubt, SEO is essential for any company, big or small, that wants to prosper online. The user experience, however, is frequently overlooked by webmasters and business owners as a result of this overriding concentration on search engine optimization.
User experience is the second wheel that propels a website to success. If you focus only on SEO, you’re riding a single-wheeled scooter that won’t take you far. Once you start optimizing your website by keeping human visitors in mind rather than bots, you’ll understand the relationship between SEO and User Experience (UX). If you exercise the best SEO and UX practices together, you will be offering a better web experience for your audience and making more conversions for your business.
What is UX Design?
User experience (UX), as the name suggests refers to the experience a user has when utilizing a product, device or anything else. For example, if someone is shopping from an eCommerce website and finds it complicated to buy his desired product or has a problem making payment, then his UX is certainly bad.
On the contrary, if he easily finds required products and makes hassle-free payments, then his UX will be considered good. Different users can have different scenarios and companies usually test UX designs of their websites to come up with something that perfectly serves end-users. Here are seven key components of good UX design:
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Useful
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Learnable
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Memorable
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Effective
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Efficient
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Desirable
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Delightful
There are many things that contribute to a better user experience and higher ranking. These seven components have different explanations but to keep our focus on the relation between UX Design and SEO, I want you to understand the importance of ‘usability’ of your site which plays a vital role in keeping entire user experience seamless and impressive. It’s crucial to keep in mind the fundamentals of design when working as designers in the dynamic sector of user experience.
What is the role of UX in SEO?
We do website SEO to get higher rankings in search engines and to drive more traffic to our website. But this traffic is of no use in case it leaves your site within seconds and moves to a different website. A bad user experience naturally prompts a user to move to a different website.
Most web designers prioritized building websites for search engines rather than users before UX played a significant role in SEO. Earlier, adding keywords, high-quality content and creating junk backlinks was sufficient to take your website to the top in search engine results.
Today, most search engines including search giant Google has advanced their algorithms to the next level. They not only analyze your site’s content, design and structure but also store data on how users are interacting with your website and their behavior. It helps search engines to tailor the best results for users based on their experience and intent.
The problem is, most web design companies have separate teams for SEO and UX/UI design. It’s true that both these jobs are carried out using different skills and tools but when these two teams work together they mostly end up creating a website that loads fast, easy to use on any device and provides users a satisfying experience. Here are a few primary points that will help you understand the vital role UX plays in SEO:
Dwell Time
According to research, the average time users spent on a web page across all industries is 54 seconds. It is also described as ‘dwell time’ that denotes the length of time that a user spends viewing a page after clicking a link on a search engine results page. For sites that publish news and blogs, this time can be greater than those selling services or products.
Now, how does dwell time matter in SEO? Dwell time acts as an indicator of the quality and relevancy of your website’s information. The longer users stay on your site, the better it answers all of their needs. And the better it serves users, the better position search engines provide in SERPs.
You can increase dwell time by optimizing the overall user experience. Does it load slower? Does it contain a cluttered layout with no regular color scheme? Does it have a search option? You can work on a number of factors to make your website more impressive for the users.
Clear Purpose
When designing a website, the ultimate goal should be to strike a balance between a visually appealing website for customers and a structure designed for search engine visibility. For example, if you have an insurance website and want people to fill your form, its primary focus should not be only on getting more submits but to provide valuable insights and information to customers and then you can convince them to buy from you and submit your form.
A well-structured website has a major impact on website traffic and conversion. It should also assist your entire organization in better engaging with users and offering an experience that is aligned with your business goals, product nature, and service structure. If a user comes across a poorly designed website, they will tend to avoid interacting with it again.
User Engagement
You may successfully accumulate a bunch of quality backlinks and boost domain authority to get your pages ranked for the desired keywords. But, getting people to click on your site is a half-victory unless they are engaging with your website’s content and features.
You can compare it with your social media account as well. You may have thousands of followers on Instagram but if people are not liking your posts or engaging with your videos, it makes sense to pay more attention to your content’s quality and acknowledge if it’s really worth like likes, comments and desired buzz.
Engagement is a sign of real interest and shows a willingness to consume your message. Someone can click on your website by mistake as well but when they engage with it, it’s intentional. If it has a poor user interface or have nothing that keeps users hooked, you may need to work on its UX design.
How do UX and SEO work together for better ranking?
Contrary to popular assumption, SEO and UX design are closely related. You probably wouldn’t mind finding a reliable UX design service to go along with it if you were looking for an SEO agency, don’t you think?
You could theoretically hire separate UX designing and SEO services, but by just opting for a designer who also does SEO, you’ll not only save a ton of money but also ensure that your website’s back-end coding is thoroughly optimized for search engines optimization. Here are some factors that constitute a close relation between UX design and SEO and ultimately focus on the larger purpose of getting ranked well:
RankBrain
In 2015, Google released a new algorithm update namely RankBrain that helps it refine online searches in a more mature way. It’s basically an artificial program that runs in the background to deliver the most relevant information. Now, you might be wondering, how is this related to SEO and UX?
Previously, Google utilized its basic algorithms to determine what results to show for a particular query. However, RankBrain takes into account a lot of factors like users’ location, recent search history, and keywords to learn the true intent of the user and provide tailored results.
It also reckons a website’s features and elements to decide where to put it in SERPs. Google uses various signals to rank web pages and since the introduction of RankBrain it has started to emphasize on certain KPIs of a web page including bounce rate, dwell time, and click-through rate.
So, when you’re performing SEO of a website, you have to keep in mind this new algorithm which largely focuses on users’ behavior metrics and emphasizes a more data-driven UX design.
User Satisfaction
We have talked about page load speed, dwell time and other metrics but one thing that needs more attention than anything else is users’ satisfaction. If you can’t satisfy your audience with your website, you’re going to fail in SEO.
User experience, user interface and SEO all should work together to make users happy about visiting your website rather than tricking and impressing search engines. When visitors feel content landing on your site, it leads search engines to recognize the credibility of your site.
You won’t have any trouble appealing to the search engines by default if you align both strategies – SEO and UX design – to focus on the user.
Internal Navigation
Website structure and navigation are crucial and developers have to work meticulously on these two things to ensure users have a seamless experience when they visit it. Internal navigation is also critical not just for visitors but also for SEO. If the pages are connected with each other in a hierarchical and logical manner then it will also reflect an enhanced user experience and better SEO score.
Online user experiences are remarkably similar to what you have when visiting a grocery shop. The grocery store’s aisles are labeled with price tags and the shelves are categorized with different products. Both offer a quick way to look through a tone of stuff. In a similar fashion, a website’s pages are also organized using content hierarchies in a way that is comprehensible to both users and search engines.
Best Practices for UX Design and SEO
When it comes to designing a user-centric digital product, there are a lot of factors that need to be analyzed carefully. The design and user experience (UX) of the product need careful thought and planning. You can’t just rush in blindly or go by your gut feeling. You need to know what works for your niche and what doesn’t.
Of course, this goes the same for every aspect of your digital marketing strategy as well. Just because you can Google something or read about it somewhere doesn’t mean that it will be successful for you. In order to get more success out of your SEO efforts, you need to have a firm grip on some best practices when it comes to UX design and SEO as well. I’ve outlined some points you should consider when optimizing UX and SEO for your website.
- Keywords and language
- Trust and user empathy
- Content is king
- Testing
- Utilizing data
What does a good user experience and SEO look like?
We all know that SEO is a huge part of digital marketing, but is it effective for your customers and users? And what does good SEO look like? To begin with, good SEO is about more than just “pretty words.” When you’re writing an article for your website, you’re trying to persuade your readers to take action. You’re trying to convince them to buy your product or take some other action. So, the articles on your site need to be written in a way that makes readers want to take action.
To do this, you need to consider a few key things. One of these is the use of keywords. Ideally, you want to use long-tail keywords that are relevant to your niche. This means that you want to target keywords that are related to your product rather than the general keywords that are used in the entire online world.
You want people to find your product because they’re looking for it and not because they’re just interested in the fact that there are tons of other products using the same keywords. Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to the UX design and SEO of your site is what we mentioned above about the use of proper language. This includes the use of proper syntax and spelling too.
Trust and user empathy
Trust and empathy go hand in hand when it comes to building a strong relationship with users. If you don’t have trust in your product or brand, then there’s no hope for you to actually build any sort of relationship with users. You need to be transparent and honest with your audience and let them know what you can do for them. This will build trust and earn users’ empathy.
Content is king
While it’s true that user experience and SEO will be negatively affected if your site has bad content on it, that doesn’t mean that you need to hire a team of writers just to create content for your site. If you don’t have the time or resources to create content for your site, you can hire someone who can write content for you.
You can also use various content marketing strategies to create content for your site. One such strategy is to create guest posts and then allow other bloggers to share your content on their sites too. This can earn you a lot of backlinks, which leads us to the next point.
Test, test and test again.
Once you’ve optimized your content and understand the best practices for UX design and SEO, you can start testing. The best way to do this is to conduct various A/B tests. This can help you in determining which version of your site works better for users.
You can also use tools like Optimizely to help you with A/B testing and segmenting your traffic. You can use tools like Google Analytics to understand how your site is performing. You can also use tools like Clicky to track your visitors’ activity. You can use tools like HotJar to understand how users are navigating through your site. These tools can help you in understanding what users want and how they’re navigating through your site.
Use real data to optimize your site
All this optimization and content creation is fine and dandy, but what good is any of it if you don’t use it? The best way to ensure that your UX design and SEO efforts are actually going to help your business is to test it out with real data.
When it comes to building a highly optimized website (both for users and search engines), there are a lot of factors that need to be analyzed carefully. These include your website design and structure, product design, and your content. Indeed, the design and UX of the website can make or break your business and the experience that your customers have while using it. When it comes to UX design and SEO, there are various best practices that you can follow.
Mgadz can help you with great UX Design and SEO
UX design and SEO go together like burger and fries. They may different definitions in terms of how they work but you can’t separate them if you want to get higher rankings in SERPs for your website. Search engine optimization focuses on getting your site ranked well, while user experience optimization is all about making user’s interaction perdurable with your website.
Mgadz is a well-reputed digital marketing company in Brampton with years of experience in designing user-friendly, SEO-optimized and evincive websites. We can help you effectively integrate UX and SEO so that your site drives more traffic and see better conversions.
We have a team of highly-competent SEO experts who have helped many websites from going nowhere to the top of the Google SERPs. Get in touch today for a powerful SEO campaign that focuses on your business’s long-term success.
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Wonderful article! I would like to appreciate the efforts you put into it. SEO and UX design are truly integral parts of any website promotion strategy. You must have to ensure that these two are well-aligned with each other.