It is a commonly held belief of marketers who aren't experienced that SEO is about link building and keywords. While these are important elements of your strategy, SEO goes far beyond these. Google evaluates a variety of elements when evaluating your site, and factors that impact user experience are among the most crucial among them.
Here's the way in which UX Design and Search Engine Optimization Service are linked and how they can be integrated strategically.
Search Engine Optimization is about the User Experience
To continuously improve user experiences, Google has rapidly evolved in the last few years. To distinguish the grain from the chaff and offer users reliable, high-quality, and relevant results Google has made several changes to the SERPs, and also introduced strict algorithm changes. One of the best examples of the importance UX can be for Google can be found in RankBrain.
The impact of RankBrain on Rankings
The RankBrain algorithm is the third most significant rank factor. Based on the behavior of users which includes the bounce rate of the website and organic CTR, the number of pages per session, as well as dwell length, Rank Brain informs Google whether visitors are happy navigating around your website.
If a visitor is able to move from one site to the next without difficulty, browses your site's links and stays long periods of time on your site, and returns to your site repeatedly indicates that your website is a resource that users can use. However the moment a user quits your website without taking further action, they return to the results page immediately after having landed on a page and then never return informing Google that your website isn't optimized well or not relevant to the users of your site.
UX is all about Making Users Happy, so is SEO
RankBrain is only one of the many examples that show UX and SEO have common goals. It is likely that you remember how optimizing and targeting exact-match keywords was among the most popular methods to get ranked high prior to. Nowadays, in order to be visible in front of the appropriate people and to rank high on the results pages, you have to think in the shoes of these users. That is you must understand the motives behind their purchases and analyze how they approach search queries.
One example of this is the voice search engine which has grown into an essential part of an SEO strategy according to the New York-based SEO agency Four Dots. Google's mission is to provide users with information that can answer questions and solves issues. So, in order to be a part of the results of voice search, you must optimize your content to include more conversational, question-based, and long-tail keywords.
The next step is to improve the design of your website. The purpose of SEO is to assist you to rank your site on Google and increase your visibility. When a person visits your site, UX is here to help them answer their queries faster, show your professionalism and increase your visibility as a brand.
Implementing SEO and UX Design: Best Practices
The examples above illustrate that increasing your SEO efforts without taking into account the user experience isn't possible. But creating your website by hand and not optimizing it to be search-engine friendly can be an error. Both aspects of your website go together and must be integrated from the beginning. In light of that, there are some important steps to follow.
Improve the Page Load Time
Although it's always been among the top ranking signals for Google Page speed has been made increasingly important since the most recent Speed Update. Statistics back me up on this. For instance, did you realize that a one-second delay in loading decreases the number of visitors to your site by 11 percent? Second, poor loading times on pages can also harm your conversion rates as well as the quality of the user experience. If your website doesn't load within 2 minutes or less more than half users will leave the site. This isn't surprising, as it will affect the retention rate of your site and also.
There are a couple of ways to increase the speed of your website, such as:
- Selecting a reliable hosting service
- Selecting images of high quality and reducing the size of them by compressing them and cropping them
- Making use of the caching capabilities of browsers
- Eliminating auto-play formats for multimedia
- Investing in a content delivery network
- Using lazy loading
Create a Website Architecture that is Simpler
Your site's architecture is the way that the pages of your website are laid out. From an SEO perspective, a good site structure means that Google can locate and index your site's pages with ease, and link juice is passed in a continuous manner from high-authority pages to low-authority websites.
Your website's architecture affects your customers, as the majority of users navigate using the navigation menu to locate the correct page. This is why it is important to make navigation on your site simple, create informative menu labels, include catchy CTAs, and ensure that your pages are not more than four clicks from your homepage.
Invest in Website Responsiveness
With the growing amount of users using mobile devices optimizing your site for mobile is never more crucial. Following the launch of Google's indexing mobile first (yep, Google is now indexing your mobile version of your website in place of your desktop version) Not having an optimized website could hurt your search engine rankings. The goal now is to make sure that your site is user-friendly for mobile and desktop users.
First, narrow your view and make your fonts big enough to make your content readable, get rid of annoying popups and remove fields that aren't needed from your forms and also ensure that your CTA button and link are simply to click.
Bad SEO Ruins User Satisfaction
As bad UX affects Content Marketing and SEO and spammy SEO practices could cause damage to your UX. For instance, making self-serving, promotional blog posts, or adding lots of links that are not relevant to your website's homepage or other content could turn people off. Here are some SEO factors to be aware of when creating your site to be user-friendly:
- Select a memorable, brand-able, short, or memorable web address like Rand Fishkin highlights in one of his blog posts.
- Write more (1000plus words) of Highly informative and entertaining content that addresses your readers' queries.
- Include internal links in order to transfer the link juice from one site to another, but be sure that they're placed naturally.
- Make your content more readable by using headings and breaking them into smaller pieces.
- Make sure you optimize your meta tags, including page titles and meta descriptions, headings, or alt tags for images to make them more informative.