SXO, or the way to conquer your users’ hearts, and Google’s

Jerome Benaud
Smile Design & Performance
7 min readJun 2, 2020

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People from UX (User eXperience) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) teams rarely work together, but this is about to change.

After taking into account the links to social networks on websites in 2010, and their mobile versions in 2015, Google algorithms that define the ranking on results pages now take into account some user experience factors. The main reason ? Google aims at being the best search engine, the one that satisfies the most its users by showing relevant websites that offer the best experience.

Feeling lost ?

We will first remind ourselves the basic principles of SEO and UX. After, we will see how the combination of both will allow you to make new friends.

SEO : be the first on results pages

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It refers to the rules and the methods used to place a website at the highest position on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), basically Google pages.

This ranking is done by “crawlers”, the robots of the search engines that poke around the web analyzing websites. They rank them on the SERPs using more than 600 ranking factors.

Here is a non exhaustive list of these criteria :

  • The page title has to be explicit and orientate users on the content of the page. Titles and subtitles can be written in an interrogative way for a better ranking on vocal requests.
  • The construction of the page is also a criteria analyzed by crawlers : the size of an article (nor too long or too short, so around 800 words), the presence of a lede under the title that introduces and resumes the topic, and a clear page structure symbolized with subtitles and paragraphs. All these elements have to be labeled with tags to allow crawlers to identify them.
  • Key words used in titles and in the body of text are very important : choose those used by your visitors. It means that you have to answer this question ‘What information do my users seek ?”. Thus, the key to success is to know them, but we will talk more about this later.
  • Content has to be qualitative. A content of quality according to search engines quotes enough sources and back links to them. The presence of images or videos is also taken into account.
  • Internal linking refers to the network of links between the pages of a website. An internal linking is considered as efficient when the user has relevant content proposed on the page he is watching.
  • The display speed of the pages is a crucial criteria checked by crawlers. A website with good performances will always be displayed higher on SERPs rather than a website which pages are displayed slower.
  • The attendance of your website has an important role in its ranking. The more people you have visiting your website, the higher you will be on SERPs, and the more people you will get. SEO is a virtuous circle.

If we have a closer look at these criteria, we realize that they are principles that we, users, appreciate on a website. What search engines have integrated in their algorithms is what people want.

To have a good ranking, you have to understand the user : what does he need ? Why ? What is the context of use ? What keywords does he use ? And actually, who is it ? And that’s called UX.

UX : offer the best experience on the website

UX, for User eXperience, helps you knowing and understanding your users in order to build the best experience for them : a simple tree structure, relevant content, a clear page organization, adapted to our cognitive abilities . . .

Building the perfect experience requires several iterative design phases according to Carine Lallemand (2015) :

  • The user research phase aims at knowing them to understand their needs and habits. Leading interviews or observations on the field, combined with surveys, allow you to gather data, both quantitative and qualitative. These data are the starting material to design the website that suits them.
  • The ideation phase starts once you have a clear vision of the users you are going to deal with. The stake is to generate design ideas for the website during workshops with the stakeholders : users, project managers, developers . . . Depending on the objectives, you will get personas (typical users representation), users journeys, drafts of the interface . . . You would find many websites with information about these workshops (if they are well referenced !).
  • The generation phase that comes next achieves the ideas coming from the previous phase. The UX designer will create the website structure. He can organize a card sorting to do this : it is a method where stakeholders group the website pages together, represented by cards. Then he will generate functional mockups (wireframes) to define the zoning of the pages and their different functionalities.
  • The evaluation of the website will face your baby to its users. The most known evaluation methodology might be the user testings (show the website to users and gather their feedback), in person or remotely. But you can use other methodologies, like eye tracking (detect the visual scan of a page), A/B testing (analyze the KPI of 2 versions of a same page) or expert audit using heuristics. Evaluating and optimizing an existing page is a big piece of work to improve the user experience.

You know SEO requirements to appear at the top of the SERPs, and UX methods to know your users and create a website that suits their needs. Now let’s see how to merge them to create an awesome website.

SEO + UX = SXO

SXO combines UX and SEO to achieve a double objective : satisfy both users and search engines algorithms. To do so, SXO draws in SEO and UX methodologies to offer the best experience all the way.

The users interviews, led by the UX designers during the user research phase, can also be reused by the SEO team to lead lexical analysis. These analyses give us the keywords that matter for the users. If it matters for them, it should matter for you and you should use them in your titles and all the textual content. For lexical analysis, you can use the free tool https://alyze.info/, which is both in French and English.

To sum up, after users interviews and a lexical analysis, you will have enough information to create the content of your website : the users’ needs and expectations, the editorial planning (the regularity of you posts), and the keywords to use.

Another tool in SXO : personas. They are used in UX design to precisely define the users and to federate the project team : we don’t design a website for seniors, we design a website for Margaret, who has thoughts, needs, constraints . . . Thus, personas can also be used to adapt the content to your different users types. Instead of showing the same content to all your visitors, you can target the content for each persona, offering a personalised user experience.

SXO can also help improving the website tree structure, in 2 different ways :

  • Lead an open card sort (participants group the pages of the website and name these groups) to create a consistent tree structure, and combine it with the creation of a semantic cocoon that will allow you to create a relevant internal linking between pages within a single category.
  • The other solution is to benchmark the semantic cocoon of your competitors, and organize a close card sort (participants put the pages of the website within a defined set of groups) to optimize your website tree structure.

Once the website is developed and launched, it is mandatory to look after it. During the first months of the run phase, you must make regular optimization on the form and content. Data from users testing or A/B testing can be combined with analytics data (quantitative data on the users’ behavior). Thus, you could fine-tune your interface and improve your KPI identifying users’ pain points.

SXO is a new way to work on both natural referencing and usability issues. Then, it is warmly recommended to work on both the content and on the form of your website ;)

Thanks to Thibault Duval for the precious information on SEO

Thanks to Bruno Canton for the illustration

References

Bibliography

C. Lallemand (2015). Méthodes de design UX, Paris : Eyrolles

Webography

La recherche vocale au centre de votre stratégie SEO : https://leseodedemain.home.blog/2019/05/29/la-recherche-vocale-au-centre-de-votre-strategie-seo/

Le SEO ne se résume pas qu’à l’optimisation de mots-clés : https://leseodedemain.home.blog/2019/05/29/le-seo-ne-se-resume-pas-qua-loptimisation-de-mots-cles/

Comprendre et créer la liste de mots-clés parfaite en SEO avec les outils : https://www.seoquantum.com/billet/recherche-mots-cles

SXO : les étapes à instaurer sur son site : https://medium.com/@brandtvalentin/sxo-search-experience-optimization-d69db47d316c

SXO : les 3 bonnes pratiques : https://www.bolero.fr/article-chaine-expert/sxo-les-3-bonnes-pratiques/

7 Search Experience Optimization tips : https://medium.com/@Jimbousa/7-search-experience-optimization-sxo-tips-153605cecc78

Google explique comment gérer ses “Core Updates” ou mises à jour du coeur de son algorithme : https://www.abondance.com/20190802-40196-google-explique-comment-gerer-ses-core-updates-ou-mises-a-jour-du-coeur-de-son-algorithme.html

Card Sorting : Uncover User’ Mental Models for Better Information Architecture : https://www.nngroup.com/articles/card-sorting-definition/

User Testing : Why and How (Jakob Nielsen) : https://www.nngroup.com/videos/user-testing-jakob-nielsen/

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