The horizon of SEO is expanding every day, and new optimization techniques are enriching it with the assurance of better user experience. User experience or UX is blended into SEO practices and plays a critical role in bettering SEO performance. Many marketers often miss the point because of the misconception that including relevant keywords and focusing on link building is more than enough for doing good SEO. These are indeed the cornerstones of SEO, but search engines consider many things beyond it when ranking websites.
According to the experts at Golden Advantage SEO Company it is imperative to ensure that visitors derive immense pleasure in viewing and navigating the website, that is friendly to mobile devices and opens pages very fast. Quality content is the other element that impacts user experience, which in turn determines the time spent on the website.
Search engines attach a lot of importance to the user experience when determining the worth of websites to decide how to rank it. Therefore, there is no way that you can pay less attention to user experience and get the most from it. It is vital to understand how user experience fits into the SEO frame.
The importance of UX in the context of SEO
Providing the best results to users is the goal of search engines, and Google keeps working on it continuously to ensure that users get something better tomorrow. The numerous updates that Google releases aim at refining SEO to plug the gaps to make it more effective and deliver superior user experience. All algorithmic updates aim at providing better results, and Google never rests on what it has achieved so far. It keeps raising the performance bar, which is a way to ensure that users get something better than before. If you compare the Google search results page of yesteryears with the current, you will realize the massive improvements that it has gone through in presenting more user-focused and thereby more user-friendly results. The introduction of rich snippets, knowledge panel and other updates shows how much critical user experience has become for Google.
Common goals of SEO and UX
SEO and UX co-exist because it shares common goals. The developments over the past few years clearly show the shift undergone by SEO as it sheds its vision of focusing only on ranking for search terms. Looking beyond the search term, Google tries to answer queries that lie under it. Thereby it broadens the scope of search engines to provide more comprehensive information that answers their queries. And this marks the point where the interaction between UX and SEO begins. The common goal is to help users to complete their tasks by providing them with the most relevant information. SEO shows the way to the content and UX ensures that users spend more time on the page in seeking the answers that users are looking for.
The influence of SEO on UX
Apparently, SEO and UX might appear as separate enclosures, but there is an interconnection between the two that becomes evident by looking at some content practices.
Creating long content ensures that users find in-depth answers to queries which exemplifies how SEO works for providing a better user experience. Similarly, headings and image tags enhance user experience. In case the image does not load properly, users will still derive its value by reading the description that accompanies it. Taking a mobile-friendly approach bears evidence about the efforts in meeting user expectations that are integral to user experience. Creating fast loading websites not only helps to improve ranking, but it keeps users happy. They love to see pages open immediately on clicking and stay engaged to the site longer.
How to get the UX right
On discovering the interdependence of SEO and UX, you should be able to identify the starting point from where you can begin the work of improving the user experience of your website that has a positive impact on the ranking prospects. Here are some things that you must start doing straight away.
Align your SEO and UX strategies – Integrating your SEO and UX strategies is the first thing to do for maximizing the benefits. To generate more leads and conversions from the traffic that reaches your website, you must make SEO and UX work hand in hand instead of allowing it to work parallelly.
Responsive web design is must – Optimizing your website across all platforms, including mobile devices, is an essential requirement today to reach out to the largest section of the audience. At the same time, displaying websites with the same ease on mobile devices enhances its accessibility. It offers more pleasure to users who are more comfortable in using mobile devices for accessing websites. Having mobile-friendly sites will give your search ranking a boost. Mobile-friendliness equates with a better user experience that sends positive signals to search engines which in turn improves ranking.
Choose SEO friendly designs – The website design should improve user experience, and you must use SEO friendly designs. Define the navigation path clearly so that visitors can move across the website intuitively. You must optimize functionalities and menu names, provide focused product names and descriptions and maximize H1 and H2 title tags. Lastly, create content that strikes a chord with users and search engines alike.
Navigation must be simple –If users face difficulty in navigating the website, it affects their experience adversely, and consequently, your ranking would suffer. Your home page should have clear and structured navigation so that users can move from one topic or page to another intuitively without waiting to think what the next step should be. Including an XML sitemap on the home page is easy to do. WordPress can help to achieve the goal of improving the user experience that also enhances viewer engagement. Overall quality must reflect in all aspects of SEO from page layout to content relevance and from internal link structure to content originality and page speed. Interestingly, all these contribute to the user experience, which shows how UX rests within SEO.