Dejan posted a Twitter poll the other day and it received almost 600 responses from within the SEO community. The question was “Good UX impacts rankings.” The responses available were “directly,” “indirectly,” or “neither.”
Only 6% of those who filled out the survey said UX, site user experience, did not have any impact on a site’s Google rankings. So 94% of SEOs believe UX is somewhat related to rankings. 40% said it was a direct ranking factor and the remaining 54% said it was an indirect factor. Direct means that Google has specific UX metrics they look at and will weight a site’s overall UX with a ranking score of some sorts. Indirect means that other signals may be boosted because Google can tell that the site performs well for users and thus should rank well, but UX specific features do not directly impact rankings.
The thing is, page speed is somewhat of a UX thing and we know that is a direct ranking factor. HTTPS is also a bit of a UX thing and impacts rankings. We know a lot of the messaging around the core updates are about UX, same with Panda. Google has a page layout penalty of some sorts, interstitial ad penalty and much more. We also know that GoogleBot renders the page almost exactly like you and I see it, espesially with the new evergreen GoogleBot.
Anyway, here is the Twitter poll:
Good UX impacts rankings.
— DEJAN (@dejanseo) July 9, 2019
Forum discussion at Twitter.