By Andrew Oziemblo, Founder & CEO of Chicago SEO Geeks a Chicago SEO Agency and RankOne Digital Marketing – helping businesses achieve long-term growth goals.
A lot of people mistakenly believe that SEO (search engine optimization) is just about incorporating relevant keywords into content and link building. While these are two key strategies, there are a lot of other factors that are considered by search engines when ranking a website. Areas of user experience (UX) have been incorporated into SEO.
Is your website easy to navigate and quick to load? Do you have exciting content that engages people and makes them want to stay on your site? Is your site mobile-friendly? Is it secure and fast?
These are all the factors that Google and other search engines consider when figuring out how to rank your site. So, let’s take a look at how user experience and SEO are a match made in heaven. Make sure your SEO Agency is implementing the right combinations of artistry and coding.
Why UX is vital for SEO
Over the years, Google has changed considerably. Google updates its algorithms to make sure users get the best possible results. Every update that is made by Google is geared towards ensuring the results are as user-friendly and user-focused as possible. There have been a lot of SERP changes, for example, rich snippets and the knowledge panel. This displays just how critical user experience is to search engines like Google. Looking at RankBrain helps you to understand this better.
RankBrain
Introduced in 2015, RankBrain was deemed the third most important factor in figuring out a website’s SEO value. Only content and links were deemed higher. RankBrain is driven by behavioral metrics, including organic CTR, pages per session, dwell time, and bounce rate. These metrics are going to tell Google whether your website provides an enjoyable experience for users.
If someone visits your site several times and they spend a lot of time on there, and they move through your website easily, this tells Google that you are providing people with a great user experience. This will cause your ranking to improve. On the other hand, if your website takes a long time to load, people leave as soon as they enter it, and they return back to the search result pages, this indicates that they did not find what they needed. This can cause your ranking to drop.
UX and SEO share common goals
Another reason why SEO and UX are a match made in heaven is that they share common goals. Search engines have moved away from just ranking for search terms. Today, they look to answer people’s queries. This is where UX and SEO begin interacting. They both want to provide the user with the correct information and help them to complete their tasks. SEO leads an individual to the content they require. Once they end up on a webpage, UX answers the queries.
Vital SEO practices that influence UX
It is vital to know the common SEO practices that influence UX:
- Mobile-friendliness is critical.
- Page speed is also imperative.
- Both headings and image tags are important.
- It’s advisable to craft content over 600 words, as it ensures it is in-depth and answers user questions.
How to get the user experience right
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of the relationship between UX and SEO. Below, we are going to finish by providing you with some vital tips on how to get the user experience right.
- Align your UX and SEO strategies – This is the first step that you need to take. Your strategies should not be operating on their own. They need to be integrated. After all, one of the key goals of your website should be to generate more leads and a greater number of conversions. Both SEO and UX play a vital role in achieving this objective but they must be working together in order to achieve this.
- Concentrate on web designs that fit the principles of your SEO Strategy –This includes crafting content that resonates with both search engines and visitors, maximizing H1 and H2 titles, optimizing menu names and functionalities, creating a clear navigation path, and focused product names and descriptions.
- Invest in responsive web design – Aside from the tips that have already been mentioned, it is important to make sure that your website is responsive. More people are using their mobile phones for browsing the Internet. Because of this, you need to make sure that your website works perfectly on smaller devices. It needs to be visible, easy to operate, and everything must function properly. There is nothing worse than entering a website on your mobile phone and having to scroll excessively and deal with layouts that have gone wrong.
- Simplify navigation – When it comes to user experience, website navigation is imperative, and so it is also vital when it comes to your search engine ranking. Your homepage must have easy and clear navigation. People should be able to use your website without even thinking about it. They should not even need to think about where to go next. Including a sitemap on your website is a successful technique for assisting Google when it comes to index your pages and understand your website.
- Focus on quality – Last but not least, when determining whether or not your website is of a high quality, navigation is not the only factor that is going to be considered. Other factors that will be considered included page speed, page layout, internal link structure, content relevance, and content originality.
So there you have it: everything you need to know about the relationship between SEO and UX. As you can see, it is a match made in heaven! Use the tips that have been provided above to help you to boost your ranking online. Gone are the days when your search engine ranking was purely about your keywords. Nowadays, it is the entire experience that you provide to people that enter your website, which is why UX is critical. Make sure your SEO Company is aligned with the above points for great end results.
