Understanding the link between UX design and SEO

There is a common misconception among inexperienced marketers that SEO is all about keywords and link building. Even though these are key aspects of your strategy, SEO goes far beyond them. Google considers a plethora of factors when ranking your site and elements of user experience are the most important among them.

Here is how UX design and SEO are connected and how to integrate them strategically.

SEO is all about User Experience

With an aim to constantly improve its users’ experience, Google has rapidly evolved over the past few years. To separate the wheat from the chaff and provide searchers with high-quality, trustworthy, and relevant results, the search engine introduced numerous changes to the SEPRs and introduced strict algorithm updates. A perfect example of how important UX is to Google is RankBrain.

The Impact of RankBrain on your Rankings

RankBrain is the third most important ranking factor. Focused on behavior metrics, such as the site’s bounce rate, organic CTR, pages per session, and dwell time, Rank Brain informs Google whether the visitors enjoy navigating through your site. The fact that a user moves from one page to another effortlessly, clicks on your links, spends a big chunk of time on your pages, and comes back to your site again indicates that your site is a user-friendly resource. On the other hand, if a user leaves your site without taking any additional action, go back to the search results right after landing on a page, and never comes back again tells Google that your site is either poorly optimized or irrelevant to your users.

UX is all about Making Users Happy, so is SEO

RankBrain is just one of the numerous examples proving that UX and SEO have shared goals. You probably remember that targeting and optimizing for exact-match keywords was one of the most common ways to rank high in the past. Today, to show up in front of the right searchers and get ranked high in the SERPs, you need to put yourself in their shoes. In other words, you need to understand their buying intent and analyze how they conduct search queries.

One such example is voice search optimization that has become a vital aspect of your SEO strategy, according to the New York-based SEO agency Four Dots. Google’s goal is to provide searchers with the information that answers their questions and solves their problems. Therefore, to appear in voice search result, you need to optimize your content for more conversational, question-based, long-tail keywords.

The next stop is your website design. The aim of SEO is to help you position yourself high on Google and become more visible. But, when a user lands on your site, UX is here to find the answers to their questions faster, highlight your professionalism, and boost brand awareness.

Implementing SEO and UX Design: Best Practices

The examples mentioned above clearly show that boosting your SEO efforts without considering user experience is not possible. On the other hand, designing your site from scratch and not optimizing it for search engines is also a huge mistake. These two aspects of your site go hand in hand and they need to be integrated from the very beginning. Precisely because of that, here are a few critical steps you need to take.

Improve the Page Load Time

Even though it has always been one of Google’s most prominent ranking signals, page speed has become even more important with the latest Speed Update. And, the statistics back me up on that. For example, did you know that just 1-second delay in page load reduces your page views by 11%? Second, poor page load times also hurt your conversion rates and the overall user experience. If your site doesn’t load in 2 seconds or less, nearly half of your visitors will leave it. Unsurprisingly, this would affect your retention rates, as well.

Now, there are a few ways to improve your website speed, including:

• Selecting a reliable hosting plan
• Choosing high-quality images, but lowering their size by compressing and cropping them
• Leveraging browser caching
• Eliminating auto-play multimedia formats
• Investing in a content delivery network
• Using lazy loading

Make your Website Architecture Simpler

Your site architecture is how the pages on your site are arranged. From the SEO viewpoint, good website architecture means Google will be able to find and index your pages easily, while the link juice will be passed uninterruptedly from high- to low-authority pages. Your site architecture influences your visitors, as most of them use the navigation menu to find the right page. This is why you need to make your website navigation simpler, write informational menu labels, add catchy CTAs, ensure that your pages are no more than 4 clicks away from the homepage.

Invest in Website Responsiveness

With the rising number of mobile users, optimizing your site for mobile has never been more important. After the introduction of Google’s mobile-first indexing (yep, Google is now indexing your mobile version of the site instead of the desktop one), not having a responsive site would hurt your rankings. Now, your goal is to make your site friendly to both desktop and mobile searchers. For starters, narrow the viewpoint, make your fonts large enough and your content easily readable, eliminate annoying popups, eliminate unnecessary fields from your forms, and make your CTA buttons and links easy to tap on.

Bad SEO Ruins User Satisfaction

Just as poor UX hurts SEO, spammy SEO practices can ruin your UX. For example, creating promotional, self-serving blog posts or adding lots of irrelevant links to your homepage or content may drive people away. Here are a few SEO elements you need to keep in mind when designing a user-friendly site:

• Choose a brandable, short, and memorable domain name, as Rand Fishkin highlights in one of his blog posts.
• Write longer (1000+ word), highly informative, and engaging content that answers your readers’ questions.
• Add internal links to pass link juice from one page to another, but make sure they’re added naturally.
• Make your content readable by adding headings and breaking the text into smaller chunks.
• Optimize your meta tags, including page titles, meta descriptions, headings, or image alt tags to make them highly informative.

UX Design Impacts how Visitors will Perceive You

Your site is the first link between you and your target audience. It’s like your online ID that tells your visitors how reliable and authoritative you are. Precisely because of this, you need to use your UX design to built trust and boost awareness among them. For example, create a culture page and use the power of storytelling to evoke emotions in your target audience and make your brand relatable. You should also post the photos of your staff, as well as share customer reviews and testimonials to show you’re a legitimate brand. Most importantly, make our design consistent. Create a style guide and make sure that everything, from colors and fonts to visual content on your site is used consistently.

Over to You

Implementing SEO and UX design may seem daunting right now, but it’s critical for boosting rankings and building a solid brand. Such a holistic, user-centric approach to your online presence will help you keep users satisfied, nourish strong relationships and, consequently, tell Google that you’re a valuable online resource.

These are just a few initial steps you should take. Is there anything you would like to add?