The constant evolution of Google’s search algorithm has changed how someone can rank a website based on keywords and backlinks. It consistently considers the user experience when ranking a website. The user engagement variables such as time on site, bounce rate, and the number of visited pages have all become key SERP ranking factors.
Google recognizes real user behavior when determining the quality of websites worthy of top search rankings. Therefore, human usability and UX design have become critical components of SEO. Not only does a website require essential on-page SEO, but simple UX design modifications can go a long way when supporting engagement and SERP rankings.
This post will highlight a few users experience best practices you can consider in 2023 to gain maximum results from your SEO program.
What is User Experience (UX)
User experience is about creating a user-centric website experience. It optimizes how users communicate with a website.
Better UX design ensures that you engage your users within your website, enabling them to locate what they are looking for easily. This positively impacts different user engagement metrics that Google uses to rank websites. If you focus on developing good UX design for your website, you’ll gradually see progress in your search rankings.
As the primary focus of Google is to provide optimum customer experience to its users, if you can make the user happy, you’ll rank higher on Google.
What is UX Design
UX or User Experience design is all about understanding the users and designing experiences to provide the best user interaction. It ensures users get optimized and positive experience every time they interact with your product, eventually resulting in brand loyalty and increased revenue.
What is the importance of a good UX Design on SEO:
- The ultimate goal of both UX design and SEO is interlinked. Good UX design and SEO makes everything user centric. They both cater to meeting the user needs in an optimized way. Therefore, better the user experience of your website, higher SERP rankings, resulting in better visibility.
- Good UX design helps to keep users engaged, which minimizes the bounce rate. This helps search engines determine a website’s importance and rank it higher during the next algorithm update.
- A better quality UX design with great content improves the chances of your content being shared more frequently. This will improve one’s SEO performance.
What Google thinks about the User Experience in SEO
Bounce and conversion rates are just some of the things that user experience impacts. It also impacts your overall search engine optimization (SEO) performance.
Google highly regards website user experience elements when ranking them in the SERPs. The better user experience you provide on your website, the more plus points you have. From 2021, Google started ranking websites according to “page experience.”
Here are some of the metrics that Google uses to measure page experience:
For a long time, Google has believed that the user must be at the center of everything. In other words, Google prioritizes user experiences and expects other websites to follow the same suit. But if they don’t, their search rankings will suffer.
Top UX Best practices in SEO to follow in 2023
Make Your Site’s Navigation Simpler
Navigation is a key contributing factor to a website’s user experience. It’s basically the road map any audience uses to browse your site’s information. Your site navigation also impacts how search engines like Google crawl your website and find a piece of information in it.
The audience enters your website from different web pages. Therefore, if you want to keep your audience hooked on your page, your navigation must be easy to use and straightforward. Your audience must be able to move to any page and jump to a different one just by using simple navigation.
If your website navigation is complex, it increases the chances of people moving away from your website. They won’t understand how to find a piece of information and will give up on finding it on your pages. To prevent this, simple navigation on your website is a must-have.
Create Mobile-friendly pages
A recent study says that over 50% of web visitors use mobile phones to access the internet. Therefore, you must pay close attention to the web layout, look, feel, images, text, and experience of your mobile website. Those who don’t have a mobile-friendly website must take the time to create one immediately.
Both search engines and users judge a website by its mobile layout. Because every element in your mobile website impacts SEO. Therefore, you must focus on developing user-friendly navigation with clear and consistent buttons. Try to keep the overall design straightforward and to the point, focusing on usability, content, and great design.
Ensure optimum site speed
A fast-loading website offers a more satisfactory user experience. Therefore, search engines regard website loading speed as a critical ranking factor. You can enhance your website’s loading time by learning clean code, compressing image files, and using a faster web-host server. Optimizing the various elements of your website will minimize loading times and boost your SEO.
Make use of clear headings
Headings are an excellent way to figure out content, use intent keywords and boost your SEO. Users see the headings first to check whether the website is offering any answer to their search. On the other hand, search engine crawlers use headings to understand your website and interpret the content.
Every web page must have only one H1 tag. The rest of the headings on a web page can utilize H2 through H6 tags multiple times to organize the page’s content. Use the heading tags as and when needed in such a way that makes sense.
Create user-friendly layouts
Content organization, layout design, and text sizes can disturb a website’s SEO efforts. A good UX design can combine the aesthetics side of a website with SEO to improve the overall usability of your site and boost traffic. You can include images and video, use a call to action throughout the website, use clear and to-the-point headers, organize, and format the content to make it easy to digest, or add backlinks to other relatable highly authoritative content. You can also use a content or image rotation script to randomly change website content with each visit.
Use a clear logo
A website ID, or a clear logo, is one of the very first elements a user sees post arriving on your website. This ID must be clear, obvious, and not mucked. The logo or tagline must share what your website is all about and connect to the user’s requirements.
Continue to Test, test, and test
One of the simplest yet more powerful ways to improve your website is constantly improving its SEO and UX. Understanding the core of how UX and SEO work together will help you make better decisions when you start optimizing your website. From there, continue to enhance these areas of your website to offer a great user experience to your users.
Final Thoughts
SEO and UX complement each other in creating a successful website experience which ultimately results in better SERP visibility. A good user experience improves user satisfaction and signals search engines that the website is high quality and relevant to users’ search queries. By prioritizing UX in SEO, website owners can create a website that not only ranks well in search engines but also provides a seamless and enjoyable experience for their visitors. By constantly evaluating and improving the UX, website owners can ensure that their website stays relevant, engaging, and effective in driving traffic and conversions.
