UX is key in any SEO strategy since user experience design can directly affect your SEO rankings via user engagement metrics. Thus, enhancing your UX design will boost your SEO rankings, improve the credibility of your brand, and better retention of your customers.
How User Experience Affects SEO
There are plenty of ways that UX can affect SEO; some are more direct than orders. For instance, elements like mobile friendliness and speed are key to good SEO and UX, which lead to better loading times and mobile experience.
Meanwhile, other factors, such as how users interact with your site and your content quality, indirectly affect your SEO by providing Google signals that your site can rank well.
In other words, excellent user experience is vital to the success of any website. That’s because happy users will likely stay on your site, interact with it, and return for more.
All of these are signals that allow search engines to rank a site. That’s why improving a site’s user experience also positively affects SEO.
So now that you know the basics, here are some of the crucial factors that improve SEO:
1. Mobile-first design
Data shows that 59.5% of site traffic comes from mobile devices. This is precisely why you lose traffic if you don’t have a responsive site.
That’s why you must build a site that allows visitors to access the data they need from their mobile devices easily. This makes it likely for them to stay on your page longer and do their desired actions.
2. Architecture and navigation
Architecture is how pages are placed on your site and interlinked. Regarding SEO, a good site architecture makes it easy for Google to find and scan your page.
At Sytian Productions, (web developer philippines) we always tell clients that a great site architecture lets users quickly find what they need. They also are determined by click depth or click distance. The number of clicks characterizes this to go for a specific page from your site’s home page.
Usually, users want to go to subpages with as few clicks as possible. Every page needs to be at least four clicks away from your home page.
Here are other rules of architecture and navigation optimization that you need to take into consideration as well:
- A website’s transparent structure and grouping of these pages into categories.
- A straightforward menu that describes the topics and subtopics of a website. Mastering the art of UX writing can help here as well.
- A link structure that’s well-optimized even for link juice distribution. You can analyze website link structure using the Link Extractor tool.
3. URL structures
The URL structure of your site is vital for a good user experience. That’s because it orients users where they currently are on your site.
Like humans, search engines use keywords in the URL to know what the page is about before indexing it. If keywords need to be added, this can help your SEO rankings.
So, make sure you use URL structures that allow users and search engines to decipher.
4. Page dwell time
Another important metric that Google considers is the user’s time on a particular page. This is also known as the ‘dwell time.’
Now, when users spend a lot of time on your website, this translates to Google as a positive indication. Meanwhile, when users spend little time on your site, then this indicates that your page wasn’t beneficial for a search query.
When you focus on providing valuable and relevant content, users become engaged, which causes them to spend more time on your site. Engaging users helps improve your metrics, which in turn, improves your rankings on search engines.
5. Engaging content
Writing engaging content grabs the reader’s attention which, in turn, persuades them to take action. Providing this type of content improves users’ chances of returning to your site since they’re interested in what you offer.
On the other hand, if your content is generic and boring, it pushes them away. So, make sure you make good use of headings, paragraphs, lists, visual illustrations, and links, as they make your texts more readable, if not more understandable, to your readers.
Formatting allows readers to navigate information easily and find what matters to them. For instance, headings allow users what to expect from the text they’re reading. Meanwhile, linking various content sections lets users move from one page to the next easily.
6. Page load time
Page loading time is a crucial aspect of SEO. According to a report by Google, if your site takes more than seconds to load, your bounce rate increases by 32% and, without a doubt, affects your search rankings.
Fortunately, a couple of ways can help you with your loading times. You can pick a reliable hosting, use high-quality images and videos, remove the auto-play option, and use lazy loading. Other ways to improve loading times are leveraging cache memory and publishing high-quality content.
7. Website Accessibility
Although accessibility has become a buzzword in the tech industry, many practitioners still don’t know how to use it. It has become merely an afterthought instead of a requirement when creating new products.
Even if you leave out the responsibility factor aside (which you shouldn’t do), making your site accessible allows you to:
- Gain more traffic
- Lower your bounce rates
- Improve your SEO (since Google favors sites that are highly accessible)
It’s also a great opportunity to dominate your industry since most competitors are not yet there.
Over to You
So there you have it. These are some of the important factors on how user experience can affect your website’s SEO performance. Keep in mind that both SEO and UX are intertwined, and you should consider both when designing and optimizing your site. SEO focuses on optimizing your website to meet the needs of both users and search engines. Meanwhile, UX focuses on easy and highly enjoyable user experiences.
Focusing on both can enhance your site’s search rankings, boost your visitor engagement, and drive more conversions in the long run. Good luck!
