Search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience (UX) are both important factors when it comes to website design. When your site is easy to use and search engines can easily crawl through it, you’ll see an increase in hits for relevant keywords.
This article explores the importance of UX and SEO as well as their impact on the success of a website. You will learn about their similarities, differences, and how they work together to create a seamless user experience.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization or SEO is a method of improving your website’s visibility in search engine results. The primary goal of SEO is to push your site up in the page rankings so more people will find you, click on your link, and visit your site.
A secondary goal is that those people will stay on your site and engage with your content for a longer period of time. SEO involves lots of different components:
- Keyword research: What are your users searching for? How can you optimize your site for these keywords?
- Content: What type of content should you be producing? Is it valuable to your users?
- URL structure: How can you make your URLs easily crawlable and readable?
- Design: What are the best practices for design? How can design affect your SEO?
- Structure: How can you optimize your site structure for SEO? – Links: How can you get other websites to link to your content?
What is User Experience?
User experience or UX is the way a user interacts with a website, software application or product. UX is the process of designing a user’s journey through your website and making their experience as seamless and intuitive as possible.
You want users to have a positive experience when they navigate through your website using a variety of UX best practices across the board.
UX is important for many reasons, but mainly because it can help boost your SEO.
Since Google’s algorithm focuses on user experience, having a seamless, easy-to-use website can help your site rank higher. Other benefits of great UX include increased conversion rates, reduced bounce rates, and improved customer satisfaction.
When users like your website and find it easy to navigate, they’re more likely to stay on the site for longer and act on your call-to-action.
Difference SEO & UX
While SEO and UX are both important for a successful website, the two terms are not synonymous. While SEO focuses on the content of your site, UX focuses on the design and layout of your site.
While SEO is all about keywords, UX is about creating an easy-to-use interface. While SEO is about getting users to click on a link, UX is about getting them to stay on the site.Remember, SEO and UX are both important factors in website design.
You want a website that’s easy to use and has great content. You want a website that’s optimized for search engines and easy for those engines to crawl through. You want a website that’s successful and will help you reach your business goals
How do SEO and UX work together?
SEO and UX are both important parts of web design, but they don’t always work together as seamlessly as they could. SEO and UX designers have different job functions, so they don’t always communicate with one another.
However, they should be working together to create the best possible website. Your SEO designer should be aware of your site’s goals, your target audience, and the types of language your users are searching for.
Your UX designer should be aware of the best practices for UX best practices. When these two departments work together to create the best website, you’ll see an increase in your website traffic and conversions.
When you’re deciding on your website’s design and layout, you want to make sure it’s user-friendly. You want to make sure everything on the page is easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to use. You also want to make sure your content is optimized for search engines so they can easily crawl through it.
As reported by Forrester report, every dollar spent on UX value results in $100 of ROI. In another report by IBM, researchers creating a better design could increase total ROI by 300%.
In another, research reveals that 88% of users are to less likely to return to a site after they have a bad experience.
According to Conductor.com on the UX blog, in the UX world, UX metric framework is called the UX Honeycomb. The questions are:
| Target | Motivation |
| Is my site useful | Can users find what they are looking for after landing on my site? |
| Is my site accessible | Can users access my site from different screens without issues? |
| Is my site usable | Can users easily navigate my website, increasing the chances of them coming back? |
| Is my site desirable | Are users aesthetically pleased with the design of my website? |
| Is my site findable | Can users navigate my site with 3 clicks or less to find what they’re looking for? |
| Is my site credible | Is the information provided in my website from trusted sources, forming stronger brand trust ties with my users? |
For the best user experience, SEO and UX should merge as SEO is related with search engines & UX targets website’s visitors. Some of the factors are discussed below:
Headings
As the heading of any content refers to the information inside, the same works for website heading and its content in a form of information offering. The user should feel easy while navigating thru the webpage and the same with search engine crawlers.
Accordingly, various headers H1, H2…should be arranged properly with paragraphs or hierarchy. Its important here to have only 1 Header(<h1>). This helps both users and google / search engines to understand about the content.
Only use one h1 tag on a page — that lets search engines and users know the page’s primary focus. H1s are normally the first piece of content on apage, placed near the top(think of h1s as the chapter title of a book). Adding keywords toward the front of a heading can also help with rankings.
It’s logical to use other headers in escalation/drop-down manner according to their importance.
Easy site structure
Site structure is simply a roadmap for search engines. This is because users may not navigate thru your home page ie they can visit other pages and may land on your homepage. So this is again important for users and Search engines. Google’s algorithm decides which sites get sitelinks, it’s largely based on a site’s structure:
User signals
User experience could be a prominent factor as users are asked to rate their experience in some way or the other eg smileys or grading or points or review ratings. These touchpoints are again looked upon by Google and will increasingly become an important factor in search engine rankings. This will google understand how much users are engaged with content on the website.
Site speed
For google search site speed is another prominent factor. It has increasingly be considered for mobile searches rather than desktop. So, loading should be fast on the mobile.
Even for small delay(measured in milliseconds), the user may lose interest and get away from the website.
Mobile experience
After the site speed on mobile, usability – the look and feel, text images , alignment of content is in itself a Mobile Experience — thus making a good mobile experience all the more crucial and affects SEO as well. In the Search Engine Journal, Roger Martini gives tips on How to Create a Better Web Page Experience.
- Make content into smaller paragraphs.
- Should have meaningful header describing the content.
- Use bullet points and ordered lists.
- Use more images that illustrate what you’re trying to say.
- Use images that are lightweight and optimize it too.
- Write useful content that helps users
- Use graphs.
- Mobile optimization is must. How the page looks on different mobiles.
- Minimize CSS and JavaScript, especially third-party scripts.
- Remove CSS and JavaScript that provide functionality for things like
- sliders and contact forms when those features are not on the page.
- If possible, reconsider the use of sliders.
- Update your font to sans-serif.
- Run your URLs through the PageSpeed Insights tool for improvements.
SEO and UX: A winning combination
Hopefully, you can see how SEO and UX go hand-in-hand in creating a successful website experience for both your human visitors and the search engines.
But what do you think? Do you think of your site’s users when you are creating content? How do you work with your design team to ensure that your site makes for a great mobile experience for your users? What is your balance between SEO factors and UX factors? We’d love to know!
Final Words: Wrapping up
Successful websites are ones that combine SEO and UX. When you’re designing a website, remember that both are important. You want to make sure your website is easy to use and that it’s optimized for search engines.
When you integrate SEO and UX into your design, you’re creating a seamless, easy-to-use website that’s going to help you meet your goals. You want to make sure your users are getting the best experience possible from your site. By designing with SEO and UX in mind, you’re creating a successful website.