SEO & UX: A Primer for Content Creation
Building a website is an increasingly complex process in which (it sure seems like) absolutely everyone wants to be involved. It’s a little bit like playing chess across multiple departments and disciplines. Enter SEO and UX.
“We’ve got to make sure this page is SEO-optimized,” our SEO strategist reminded the team for the fifth time.
“True, but we also have to make sure that the user has an experience that would make them want to remain on the page once they arrive,” our UX Researcher added.
“Yeah, but the user experience of a page doesn’t really matter if no one ever finds the page!”
The rest of the web team snickers in the back of the room. Check from the SEO team.
“What about bounce rate? If Google sends a searcher to a webpage, and they take a brief look around and exit or immediately return to the SERP page will Google keep sending people to that site? No. Over time, Google will recognize this signal and send traffic elsewhere.”
A hush steals over the room. Checkmate from the UX team? Let’s explore how both disciplines contribute to creating useful online content.
Writing Online Content — Plain Language Favored By All
“We write for doctors. Well, we write for a very educated bunch of readers.”
Unfortunately, several user experience studies have shown that complex text simply decreases the readability of your content. Hardly the outcome we want for any content on our site!
Ultimately, “plain language” promotes an equality of understanding, making it easier for international audiences to understand, and less time for all readers to decipher. There is a definitive business value to writing clearly — according to NN Group, these organizations “are perceived to possess greater transparency and credibility than companies that don’t.”
This holds up even if your target audience is an expert in their field, including doctors and technology experts. Readable online content includes proper subheadings, writing at around a 10th-12th grade reading level and, above all, being succinct.
Not only does writing succinctly improve your user’s experience, but it also will generally make it more searchable. An old UX adage “speak the user’s language” applies to search just as easily; simply put, “write for the searchers’ language.”
Generally speaking, searchers will err on the side of using common, simple language. As much as we want to use complex terms to flex our knowledge on a subject, if search results show low volume for these words, we may be unintentionally writing for next to no one! In a similar vein, unless we are a behemoth brand name that has become synonymous with the generic word (think “Kleenex” or “Chapstick”) it’s a good idea to write using generic terms, not brand terms.
Content Audits — Quality Over Quantity
A content audit is an invaluable tool/exercise for SEOs and UX researchers alike, although both parties come at it from a different perspective. A UX professional says, “is the existing content, how it’s arranged and the quantity of it valuable to the user?” The SEO strategist says, “is the existing content written for a specific keyword(s), which makes it easy to be found in search, and is any of the content simply out of date and needs to be rewritten?”
Regardless of who takes charge of the project, both SEO & UX can examine the content with a critical eye, looking at every aspect of the content, from formatting that makes the content difficult to digest (lack of subheadings, long paragraphs, unclear learning objectives, etc.), for both humans and search engines!
Whether you use a quality scale (ranking high, moderate, low) or a Y/N grid of various aspects of an article that may need improvement, as long as all parties have a voice and can occasionally compromise, the content on your website will improve and so will your search result rankings.
Hyperlinks — Spider Crawls & User Scans
The lifeblood of any good SEO strategist are hyperlinks, and it’s for good reason — they are the #1 SEO ranking factor. Not only are spider crawls on Google looking for hyperlinks and backlinks to let them know that this particular article is a good piece of content, but users’ eyes are also drawn to links, most easily recognized by their blue text & underlines.
The anchor text for hyperlinks is critical for user AND search engine comprehension. Whenever possible, avoid vague hyperlinks like long phrases, followed by the hyperlink “click here”; Google can’t attribute this link to any particular topic and the user is forced to read the full sentence to understand where the link might lead. The anchor text for a link should be descriptive enough to immediately comprehend where the link leads to and, ideally, should include the keywords at the beginning, since users generally scan those words with more attention.
From a UX perspective, anchor text is just a piece of info that contributes to the overall “information scent” (the user’s imperfect estimate of the value that the source will deliver to the user, derived from a representation of the source) of the hyperlink. Other pieces of info that need to be considered are the content surrounding the link, like photos or descriptions, and the context in which the link appears. All of these items are important to your user intuitively understanding where a hyperlink will lead them.
Conclusion
“Over time, a poor website user experience will undo positive SEO wins. Likewise, a beautifully designed website that doesn’t take into account basic SEO principles and best practices will remain a lost piece of art. Both disciplines need to be taken into consideration and appreciated.”
Stalemate. A positive one.
Both disciplines serve a unique and equally useful purpose — to help your content get discovered and digested by the right audience. Let’s turn our attention to how SEO & UX teams can work together to create content that wins on all fronts.
