UX tips to gear up for the 2021 Google search ranking!
Google announced just two months back that the user experience of your website will affect google rankings, expecting to start from next year.
What is User Experience?
It is the process of understanding how the user thinks and feels while interacting with a product, to improve the ease of accomplishing the desired task.
With enough time in your hand to prepare for the update, here are some tips you can apply to improve the experience of your website and influence a higher ranking:
1. Buttons — make them obvious
It is important to get the CTAs (Call to actions) right as they ensure that those conversions you want on a certain page are happening. Here are some ways you can do that :
- Use the right colors to make sure they stand out from the background elements.
- Make them look clickable by emphasizing with a prominent shape, gradient, or shadows.
- Ensure that the design creates a clear distinction between the primary and secondary buttons emphasizing the most important action.
- A crisp microcopy with words to compel the users to click and also let them know what can be expected next.
- Define the normal, focused and pressed state for every button to avoid confusion on the action that is taken.
2. Optimize your load times
15 sec is the average time a user spends on a website. If the major part of that time is spent on loading the website you will fail to capture the user’s attention leading to a higher bounce rate.
Here are some ways to optimize your website loading time :
- Use smaller image sizes without compromising with the quality. Image compressors like TinyPNG can help you achieve this.
- Remove unnecessary features that take longer to load.
- Use a Content Delivery Network like Stackpath or Amazon and cache website resources.
- Enable browser caching.
- Minify script and stylesheets.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. If you wish to get a deeper look into the methods of optimization, click here.
Don’t forget to use a loader where the content might take a bit longer to load.
Using creative loaders keeps the users engaged, skeleton loaders also help in indicating that the content is still loading.
Use skeleton loaders to indicate that the content is still loading in a certain section.
3. Navigation
If users are having a hard time to navigate across your site, then they might not choose to return, some tips to keep in mind while working on your navigation are :
- Don’t be afraid to use conventions like the logo placement, the header structure, the footer, etc as familiarity is always appreciated.
- The one primary rule of navigation is consistency, the users should not have to wonder if words, actions, or situations mean the same thing.
- On pages with longer scroll, consider using sticky menus to help the user to have access to the main navigation at any point.
- Create a well-functioning search, which is helpful in making your website more usable.
- It is always important to give context to the users on where they are and breadcrumbs can help you achieve that.
- Design better 404 pages by making sure to define the cause of the errors. Also, make sure to redirect the users to any of the main pages and provide a search if necessary.
- You can also consider adding a little humor to convert the user frustration into laughter.
4. Visual Fixes
Small visual changes go a long way in giving your website a more lasting impression and improving the overall experience.
- Create margins and white spaces that help elements like the text and images to stand out more.
- Use font hierarchies and highlight the elements you wish to draw the user’s attention to with a different color or style.
- Avoid using excessive animations and popups, simplicity is the key.
5. Content
- Make your content visible by using proper contrasts, line spacing, and hierarchies.
- As users generally scan through the page, use catchy and meaningful headings to deliver the concept at a glance.
- Avoid using long paragraphs and use bulleted lists wherever possible.
- Omit unnecessary text that does not directly affect the user’s decision making.
- Remember that people are more visual, so having a good balance of text and visuals ( images, infographics, videos) will help in user retention.
6. Responsive
- To ensure that your website is truly responsive, consider taking a mobile-first approach. This helps to enable the users to quickly find what they are looking for on your website by browsing through their mobile.
- Use a responsive grid system to make sure your website looks great on all devices.
To know more about the responsive grid system, click here.
- Use SVG image formats to scale up to any device sizes without losing their quality.
- For mobile devices, design for the thumbs, making sure all the main navigation elements are easier to tap.
- Consider changing the navigation style for mobile web screens to make them more mobile-friendly.
- Also, as the network is the main factor in deciding your mobile experience, strip down your website of all the unnecessary elements to make it low-network friendly.
Measure your core web vitals
The changes made so far with all the mentioned tips won’t mean much unless you understand how the users are using your website. Apart from keeping an eye on Google analytics, you have to watch out for the Core Web Vitals.
Core web vitals are a set of metrics announced by Google to measure the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of your website which in turn determines your user experience.
Some of the tools that are available to measure these core web vitals are :
- Page speed insights
- Chrome User experience report
- Search Console
To read on this topic further, visit to measure core web vitals blog
Understanding that businesses are still responding to the effects of COVID 19, Google has promised six months prior notice for this update. Make sure to keep iterating and measuring your performance with the provided tools to fare better in the search ranking.
