Effect of user experience (UX) on search engine optimization ranking
What is Usability Testing?
Usability testing is a user-centered design approach that evaluates products, applications, or websites based on feedback from people who typically have no experience with that product or application.
This test requires users in your target audience to complete a series of tasks in a controlled scenario, such as: log in or make a purchase. Observers note users’ successes or difficulties so they can later review their designs and make improvements.
Good UX design helps engage users so they can easily find what they are looking for. This has a positive impact on various user engagement metrics that Google uses to rank websites. If you focus on creating good UX design, you will often see improvements in your search rankings thanks to a trickle-down effect.
Essentially, if you can make the user happy, you will rank higher on Google.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization”. Simply put, SEO means the process of improving your website to increase its visibility on Google, Microsoft Bing, and other search engines whenever people search:
· Products you sell.
· Services You Provide.
· Information on topics in which you have extensive expertise and/or experience.
The more visible your pages are in search results, the more likely they are to be found and clicked on. Ultimately, the goal of search engine optimization is to attract website visitors who become customers or a target audience that keeps coming back.
How to engage UX and SEO?
Ten years ago, the website was ranked based on keywords and backlinks. Today, user engagement variables such as time on site, bounce rate, and pages visited have become critical ranking factors. Google can recognize the actual human behavior that plays a role in determining quality websites in the top search rankings. Google continually updates its search algorithm, placing more emphasis on user experience (UX). User experience design has become just as important as content creation, and neglecting it can lead to SEO failures. In this article, we’ll explore UX SEO best practices to get the most out of your SEO efforts.
UX and SEO are closely related because they have common metrics that contribute to each of them.
For example, a positive UX can lead to higher engagement, a lower bounce rate, and a better click-through rate, which in turn can have a positive impact on search engine optimization.
On the other hand, poor UX can negatively impact user behavior and lead to lower search rankings.
UX and On-Page SEO
Let’s take a closer look at some of the most relevant ways UX and SEO interact:
· Engagement
A positive UX can increase user engagement because users are more likely to spend more time on a website that is easy to use, visually appealing, and provides the information they are looking for. Effective content formatting, intuitive website architecture, and easy navigation help audiences find the information they’re looking for and make it easier to interact with other parts of a website. When users interact more with a website, they are also more willing to share it with others, which leads to more traffic and higher search rankings.
· Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave the website after viewing a single page. However, the high bounce rate means that users are not getting what they are looking for. Additionally, there are several reasons why users may experience high bounce rates. The most common ones are confusing UX design, poor web design, irrelevant content, and slow page speed.
· Click-through rate (CTR)
Positive UX can also improve the click-through rate (CTR), which is the ratio of users who click on a link to the total number of users who view a page.
· Page Dwell Time
This metric indicates how much time a user spends on a web page before returning to the search results page. High dwell time means that a website’s content is both engaging and relevant to user queries. It also shows that the website is easy to navigate and offers a comprehensive user experience. Low dwell time often indicates that the site’s content does not match the user’s search intent or target keywords. Low wait times can also be due to UX weaknesses such as slow loading speeds, layout issues, or invalid links.
· Pages per Session
This behavioral metric quantifies the extent of a user’s journey within your website. A high number of pages per session shows that a website’s content is valuable and easy to navigate — qualities that improve a page’s ranking in organic search results.
· Rankings
The ranking of a page on a search engine results page determines its visibility. A well-ranked, prominent page attracts more traffic: for example, the first result of a Google search attracts 34% of all organic traffic, while the number two result only attracts 17%. The percentage of inbound traffic decreases with lower rankings. Rankings are not set in stone and can change due to keyword competition, site age, or changes in search engine algorithms.
· Content optimization
High-quality, relevant content is crucial for on-page SEO, but optimizing that content for a positive user experience is essential. This includes using clear, concise language, breaking up the text with headings and images, and ensuring that the content is easy to read and navigate. Optimizing your UX content can improve engagement, reduce bounce rates, and improve your search engine rankings.
UX and Off-Page SEO
· Social media marketing
Engaged users are more likely to share your content on social media, which can lead to increased visibility and backlinks. Creating high-quality, engaging content and optimizing your website’s UX can encourage social sharing and improve your off-page SEO.
· Brand mentions
Brand mentions can impact off-page SEO even if a website doesn’t link to your site. By creating a positive user experience on your website, you can increase the likelihood that users will mention your brand on social media or other websites, which can signal to search engines that your website is valuable and relevant.
· Backlinks
Backlinks from other websites are crucial in off-page SEO because they signal to search engines that other websites see your content as valuable and relevant. UX can influence the likelihood that other websites will link to your content, as engaging, high-quality content is more likely to be shared and linked to.
· User reviews
User reviews and ratings can impact off-page SEO, especially for local businesses. By providing a positive user experience and encouraging users to leave reviews, you can improve your off-page SEO and increase your business’s visibility in search results.
UX SEO Best Practices
The relationship between UX and SEO can make or break your SEO. Let’s explore the elements of UX and SEO that contribute to higher rankings on Google and provide positive user experiences.
1. Page Speed
The faster your website loads, the better the user experience and the greater the likelihood that more users will visit your website.
1. Activate browser caching.
2. Optimize media files.
3. Minimize HTTP requests
4. Enable image compression
5. Minify resources
6. Combine various CSS/JavaScript files
7. Implement a content delivery network (CDN)
8. Use the right web host
All of these factors contribute to your page speed.
To check current speed, you can use Google’s Pagespeed Insights or run a technical audit to discover all technical issues with your website.
Waiting for a page to load can be frustrating for users, especially when using mobile devices. It’s important to optimize your website for mobile search. Because mobile site performance is now part of what search engines use to determine search rankings.
Ideally, the page load time should not exceed (2.5 seconds). If the website or its elements do not load during this period, users can return to the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and select one of the competitors instead. In addition, the conversion rate may decrease.
Additionally, Core Web Vitals (CWV) takes into account first screen load time, ease of interaction, and visual stability. Poor CWV performance causes more users to abandon your site, resulting in lower SEO rankings and missed conversion opportunities. Google has currently confirmed that it is transitioning from its previous page speed estimation algorithms to a page speed rating based on Core Web Vitals. Core Web Vitals now play a key role in evaluating website experience and should receive special attention.
2. Mobile Friendly
Mobile optimization is crucial for improving UX and SEO as more and more users access websites via their mobile devices since more than 50% of all web traffic is now driven by mobile search. Websites that are not mobile-friendly lose more than 50% of their audience straight away. Use tools like Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test (in Google Search Console) to ensure your site is optimized for mobile devices. More and more people are becoming primarily mobile users. You should accommodate this evolving preference by adapting your website content for mobile devices.
To create a better mobile user experience, you need to eliminate complex navigation paths, reduce loading times, and optimize menu design. Focus on important information and remove any extra content.
Google strongly recommends using responsive design to ensure a positive user experience across all devices.
You can use tools like the Mobile-Friendly Test to assess whether your site meets Google’s criteria for mobile usability.
3. Website navigation
Website navigation is the way and design your website is organized. In other words, it’s the structure that helps visitors move around your site or the flow of the page through a series of links. Navigation is one of the important SEO components that includes interactive features to make it easier to find and use information on a website. These are often UX elements such as drop-down menus and links within content. Therefore, make sure you optimize the usability of your website through the following practices:
- Breadcrumbs give the user an idea of their current position in the site structure and show them how to navigate back to higher-level pages. They can be enhanced with filters to help users navigate directly to a specific category.
- Use internal links to direct users to related content and keep them engaged.
- Use descriptive and meaningful URLs that make it easier for users and search engines to understand your content.
- Use clear, descriptive page titles so users can easily understand what each page is about.
4. Create the best User-friendly URL structure
URL structure is an extremely important aspect of a good user experience. This helps direct your users to where they are on your website. Every page and post on your website should have a URL that accurately reflects the information it contains. You can add a few important keywords and should use hyphens and NOT underscores to separate your text. Using hyphens to divide the various components, a unique URL must be no longer than 255 characters. It’s easier for website visitors to remember your websites and easier for search engines to understand them if your URLs contain descriptive words and not just random numbers and characters.
Ex:
Bad url: www.example.com/page?id=123
Good url: www.example.com/seo-friendly-url-structure
5. Optimize website content
The content should also be the first thing that appears above the fold on your website so that users can immediately find the content they are looking for without having to scroll. Create informative and engaging content that is easy to read, using headings, images, and bullet points to break up the text and improve readability.
Incorporating UX elements other than text, such as video, audio, and images, into your website can make it more engaging and hold readers’ attention for longer. People respond better to video content and are more likely to stay engaged with your brand for longer. Understanding how a single feature can tell a larger story by giving it visual context allows you to create an engaging narrative and convey a larger point about your topic. Many blogs also use audio in the form of podcasts for marketing campaigns, allowing marketers to better engage with their audience.
Insert (internal) links to pages with more relevant content and appropriate anchor texts. Tags are a component of a page’s HTML code. These tags are listed in descending order of importance, starting with H1, H2, H3, H4, etc. These tags serve as indicators for search engines to recognize important content on your website.
6. Effective calls-to-action (CTA) buttons and behavioral pop-ups
CTA elements provide a way to convey your marketing message to online users. They are used to draw the user’s attention to a specific action, such as purchasing a product or subscribing to an email newsletter. Buttons help highlight where the visitor should go next. These are essential for improving conversion rates and increasing leads, be it on your homepage, product pages, or at the point of sale.
Behavioral pop-ups in the form of personalized product upsells, cross-sells, and personalized product recommendations are designed to engage users, increase their time on the page, and help brands optimize ads. conversion rate by making customers feel special.
7. Menus
You may have come across a website whose menu is difficult to understand. Users may leave your website without reading the content if use a complex menu structure. Therefore, it is necessary to streamline the menus and fulfill the primary function of guiding users to the appropriate webpage. In most cases, you should use large list pages and provide a drop-down menu for multiple pages in the same category.
From an SEO design perspective, if you want to improve the ranking of a specific group of pages on your site, it makes perfect sense to include them in your main menu. By doing this, you add internal site-wide links to these pages and direct the site’s link equity to these pages.
Large online shops often use extensive menus and navigation links in these menus are generally grouped by category. For example, e-commerce websites can be grouped by product categories like shoes, shirts, trousers, T-shirts, shorts, and magazines can be by topics like culture, sports and by content type like videos, articles, popular, etc.
Optimizing navigation menus for mobile screens is one of the problems in web design. The most common solution is to convert the horizontal menu to a dropdown or flyout menu and hide it under a hamburger menu icon in the header.
8. Header and Footer
Website headers usually contain the logo or name of the company/website as well as key features that should be accessible from each page, such as account login, search icon, and navigation on the website. Headers used to be quite large and full of information. On the desktop web, took up to ⅓ of the vertical space on the first screen. Mobile design site header areas hardly take up ⅙ of the screen, with a small logo and a single line of navigation.
Even though headers become smaller, website owners often create mega footers or large footers. These footers contain links to as many pages as possible. You will also find social media icons, contact details, and newsletter subscription forms.
In mobile screens, headers and footers often change when grouped into a single column. While headers often become clearer when the main menu is hidden under a hamburger icon, footers tend to grow enormously and make the pages appear endless.
9. Sitemap
A website’s pages, files, videos, and other components are listed in sitemaps. These are useful for websites with multiple pages, especially if none of those pages are linked to each other. When you have a sitemap, Google can identify and crawl all of your web pages so they can all be ranked. It’s simple: If Google can’t discover a website, it can’t drive organic traffic to that website.
10. Images and illustrations, image size, and alt text
Visual elements enrich your website’s user experience: pages look boring without them. You can use images to illustrate statements you make in blog posts, showcase products in your catalog, or make your sales pages more attractive and compelling. Depending on your goals, you may want to use photos, illustrations, screenshots, charts, or other types of images. Although images can complement your website, they also have disadvantages such as they slow down loading speed and increase server load if added incorrectly. For this reason, it is recommended to use an image optimizer to compress images and reduce their file size without compromising their quality.
Lazy Loading images is a technique to load images on a web page only when required. This way can improve the page’s loading time without reducing the page size. Lazy loading reduces the number of requests that need to be sent to the server. Each request takes time and causes latency. Fewer requests mean a lower overall load on the server. This is useful because most websites are full of different images and the waiting time can become unacceptably long if the user has a slow connection.
Search engine robots also understand what the image is about through alternative text. So this is a great opportunity to include a relevant keyword and increase the chances of your image being found. The other valuable benefit of Alt is that screen readers can render it for people with vision problems.
· Use <img srcset=”” src=”” alt=””> syntax with differently-sized versions of the same image to utilize responsive images that adjust to the size of the screen.
- Use descriptive image names and use hyphens, not underscores, to separate words in the file name.
- Use image file formats search engines can index (PNG, JPEG, or GIF)
- Add alt=”” and title=”” attributes to <img>
- Compress image size and quality before loading them on site.
11. Use responsive design
A responsive design ensures that your website displays and functions correctly on all devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. This can improve engagement and reduce bounce rates, resulting in better SEO performance.
Conclusion
As a conclusion, User experience is an integral part of SEO, and good UX has a positive effect on visitor behavior on the website. This directly impacts your SEO ranking through the various user engagement metrics that Google uses in its search algorithms. By focusing on enhancing the user experience, you can improve SEO rankings by creating a website that not only ranks well in search results but also satisfies users and encourages them to engage with your content.
To avoid the negative impact of poor UX on SEO, it is important to regularly monitor website performance and make necessary improvements. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track website metrics like bounce rate, time spent, and page exits.
These are some user experience best practices that can improve your website rankings. By providing a comprehensive combination of UX and SEO, you can encourage users to stay on your website longer and actively interact with its content. Search bots interpret this as a quality signal and Google rewards you with top rankings.
