How User Experience Affects SEO

If you have spent any time learn­ing about SEO and the lat­est opti­miza­tion trends, you prob­a­bly know that Google has done a lot to pri­or­i­tize UX or user expe­ri­ence in the past. For instance, this behe­moth of a search engine won’t rank direct­ly any­more; these sim­ple pages with a few links that lead to oth­er sta­t­ic pages with more links are sim­ply poor UX.

That said, web­site own­ers should focus more on user expe­ri­ence opti­miza­tion as it can help them improve their rat­ings in the SERPs, align­ing with the lat­est rank­ing trends of Google. 

In this arti­cle, the experts here at Rosy Strate­gies have list­ed a few UX SEO best prac­tices that will help you improve your site’s per­for­mance and oth­er essen­tial fac­tors such as web design and con­tent cre­ation, and more.

NLP or Natural Language Processing

Thanks to Google’s advance­ments, such as BERT and RankBrain, the search engine has become much bet­ter at under­stand­ing what peo­ple want to see when enter­ing a search query. Also, these tech­nolo­gies help Google bet­ter under­stand what web pages are about.

Google uses these machine learn­ing tech­nolo­gies to give users bet­ter answers and results based on what web pages are about. Need­less to say, this is a mas­sive step from send­ing users to sites con­tain­ing key­words typed in the search query. 

What this means for UX and SEO is that the search engine strives to under­stand web pages and tries to match con­tent with the ques­tions users want to get answers for. 

Because of this, web­site own­ers should­n’t focus only on key­words but should also strive to answer user ques­tions since Google has start­ed match­ing ques­tions to answers.

User Experience Optimization With Content

To improve the UX of your web­site, you are encour­aged to omit the approach of focus­ing on con­tent cre­ation that only revolves around key­words. Instead, your pri­ma­ry focus should be cre­at­ing con­tent for users. 

So, how can you improve user expe­ri­ence with con­tent? Ask your­self: What do your vis­i­tors want from your pages? What’s their goal when vis­it­ing your site? What do they aspire to do on the site?

More or less, the answers to these ques­tions can be the bread and but­ter of your future con­tent. This won’t only help your users get what they are look­ing for, but you will also help Google under­stand your pages and over­all site bet­ter, which, in turn, will help you with your rank­ings as well.

Still, it’s essen­tial to do your research and look at the first few pages in the SERPs and read the con­tent to help you cre­ate bet­ter and more engag­ing answers in your content. 

Don’t over­do the research. If you extract the mean­ing from the first two pages of the search results, you may get too many search intents which might harm your UX and SEO opti­miza­tion process. Instead, take a clos­er look at the top five to ten results to under­stand what your users mean when they type their ques­tions in the search box.

Last­ly, don’t try to mim­ic the words you’ve found in the results. Google will rank those pages that sat­is­fy the search query. If you copy the key­words used in the best-rank­ing web pages, you might miss out on oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties to meet search intent and rank higher.

So, to sum it up, you can improve user expe­ri­ence through con­tent if you try to under­stand the latent ques­tions your users are ask­ing instead of try­ing to rank with the help of top-rank­ing key­words only. 

How Can You Give a Better Answer? 

What exact­ly are the UX SEO best prac­tices you can imple­ment into your con­tent strategy? 

First, you can take a loos­er approach to answer the ques­tions. Cus­tom images, graphs, and oth­er visu­al aids can com­mu­ni­cate the right message. 

Of course, video and oth­er inter­ac­tive online gad­gets, cal­cu­la­tors, and quizzes may also help you improve your UX. Still, if you want every­thing to count, you need to opti­mize all your con­tent so that Google can inter­pret it and get the right idea.

Overall Web Page Experience

Google has intro­duced CWV, or Core Web Vitals, as a way to mea­sure a vis­i­tor’s expe­ri­ence on a web­site. These vitals are a list of cri­te­ria that assess­es how well a web­site per­forms and how sat­is­fied users are with said performance.

Web­site speed is one of the UX and SEO cor­ner­stones among these web vitals. Ide­al­ly, every web­site own­er wants a fast-load­ing plat­form, but in real­i­ty, this isn’t always the case.

Speed takes cen­ter stage when it comes to UX SEO best prac­tices. The prob­lem is that a fast-load­ing web­site will usu­al­ly require more than a reli­able serv­er. Most issues arise when vis­i­tors down­load your pages on mobile with lim­it­ed band­width and 4G networks. 

Hav­ing a fast site is cru­cial for more page views, improved con­ver­sions, and a bet­ter bot­tom line over­all. So, how can site own­ers avoid these speed bot­tle­necks and intro­duce bet­ter SEO and user expe­ri­ence through speed? 

Here are only a few ways site own­ers can improve site per­for­mance and user experience: 

• Break­ing up the con­tent on the pages into small­er paragraphs
• Using bul­let points and lists
• Using mean­ing­ful head­ing tags
• Using com­pressed images to illus­trate what the arti­cle is about
• Opti­miz­ing your images
• Using lazy load and sim­i­lar features
• Replac­ing images that can’t be com­pressed with pic­tures small­er than 100 kb
• Using graphs
• Pro­duc­ing con­tent with valu­able answers
• Test­ing your web­site for respon­sive­ness (mobile friendliness)
• Recon­sid­er­ing slid­er use if you can
• Using fonts already avail­able on most devices or updat­ing every­thing on the site to sans-serif
• Min­i­miz­ing third-par­ty CSS and Javascript
• Remov­ing JavaScript and CSS that pro­vide a con­tact form and slid­er func­tion­al­i­ty on pages that don’t use those features
• Opti­miz­ing your URLs

Cater To Your Visitors

Last­ly, ensure that you mir­ror your vis­i­tor and cus­tomer base in the images you use on your site. Still, aim to be diverse when it comes to choos­ing your images. If most of your vis­i­tors are old­er, select pic­tures that reflect those users but strive to make your site wel­com­ing to every seg­ment who may land on your platform.

SEO and User Experience

As we’ve said before, Google aims to rank those sites bet­ter that hold rel­e­vant info to search queries.

Cre­at­ing a fast-load­ing site that works excel­lent­ly on every device and pro­vides enjoy­able and valu­able con­tent is the basis of cre­at­ing a mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ship with your users. When peo­ple talk about a web­site, they most­ly talk about their expe­ri­ence with that web address.

Sites that rank nat­u­ral­ly are those that have man­aged to engage with the user, cap­tur­ing their atten­tion and mak­ing them enthu­si­as­tic enough to rec­om­mend them to others.

Cre­at­ing a web­site with great UX and, thus, improv­ing search per­for­mance isn’t a fly-by-night process. It takes time, patience, knowl­edge, and expe­ri­ence. For­tu­nate­ly, with the right type of expert help, site own­ers can cre­ate the kind of seam­less UX that will help them attract more users, decrease bounce rates, and improve SEO simultaneously. 

We are a team of experts who can help in all those areas.