When done correctly, search engine optimization (SEO) can boost your rankings on the world’s biggest search engine – Google – and drive more users to your website. However, that’s only half the battle when it comes to conversions. Many factors can affect whether they check out a product, send an inquiry or contact your business and turn into conversions.
Imagine what happens when you have an effective SEO strategy that drives users to your website. However, they’re greeted by a poorly-designed, slow and unorganized website. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they might find it easier to click out of your website and find another website rather than dig deeper. As a result, your SEO strategy’s efforts are wasted on a website that isn’t as optimized.
This is why factors such as user experience (UX) play as much of a role as SEO. To improve website performance, you need to know how user experience affects SEO and find a perfect balance between the two. In this article we’ll uncover how to best handle UX and SEO to improve customer experience and boost your goal by delving into:
• What Is SEO?
• What Is UX Design?
• How Does UX Impact SEO?
• How To Leverage the Benefits of UX and SEO Combined
What Is SEO?
In the simplest terms, search engine optimization is a digital marketing strategy that involves improving various aspects of your website for search engines. Search engines like Google and Bing consider multiple factors of your website and other websites and, through an algorithm, decide which website is the most relevant result for a specific keyword.
When a user goes on a search engine to find information or a product, these search engine algorithms determine which website is the most relevant for that user’s needs. These websites are placed at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher your website is on relevant SERPs, the higher the chance that that user will end up on your website.
Website optimization can be affected by several factors, some of which include:
• Relevant Keywords: Your website should be optimized to rank for specific keywords. In the past, this meant stuffing your website with the keyword you wanted to rank for; today, this is no longer the case. Search engines consider the specific keyword, similar keywords and latent semantic indexing to ensure that your website is relevant for that particular keyword.
• Content Writing: Your content should be SEO-friendly and contain the keywords you want to rank for. Content that also talks about your industry or the type of products and services you provide can boost your website as a topical authority figure. Hiring SEO content writing services can ensure that your content is both SEO and user-friendly.
• Technical Website Factors: SEO isn’t limited to what users see. Website optimization can also be affected by how crawlers (search engine’s method of scanning and indexing your website) navigate your website. Back-end factors such as loading speeds and optimized navigation can affect how your website competes with others on SERPs.
In short, SEO boosts your visibility on search engines and gets users to visit your website. There are additional advantages to optimizing your website and working with an SEO content writing company – such as building topical authority and convincing users on every stage of their buyer’s journey to convert – but the primary goal of an SEO strategy is to improve search results and get users to your website.
What Is UX Design?
User experience or UX is a design process that involves the aesthetics and functionality of a website and how it relates to the user navigating the website. Most assume this only covers what a web design company or service does, but UX covers more than just web design. It also covers the interface, web development, information structure and overall what a user experiences when they navigate a website.
A website might be visually pleasing, but when it comes to performance, the design could be a hassle for users. You could also have a website that has top-quality content and valuable information. Still, its design makes it hard for users to trust the website’s credibility or even find a link to the page they need. In another case, you could have a website that’s perfect both visually and navigationally. Still, its slow loading speed makes many users – increasingly impatient as internet access becomes more accessible – click away.
When done correctly, UX design can improve customer experience and boost your bottom line. A good website must have the following qualities to have good UX:
• Useful: Your website has content that fulfills your users’ needs.
• Usable: Your website should be easy to use intuitively.
• Desirable: Your website design should reflect your brand identity or the aesthetic your brand is associated with.
• Findable: Users should be able to navigate your website and find what they need with as few clicks as possible.
• Accessible: Your content and info should be easy for everyone to access, so factors such as loading speeds, font styles and font sizes can affect your website.
• Credible: Your website must look and act a certain way so that users trust your brand and content.
How Does UX Impact SEO?
Now that you know what SEO and UX design are and how they affect your digital marketing strategy, it’s crucial to understand how these two can impact each other.
“SEO strategy and UX design can sometimes clash, as certain optimization techniques may impact the user experience negatively.” This is what Thrive’s Demand Generation team members Ronnel Viloria, Ken Romero, Don Gruspe and Nanette Taripe agree on.
With the internet becoming more accessible through mobile devices and data, users expect information to fall into their hands quickly and clearly. This means that users who enter your website expect to instantly find what they’re looking for. Otherwise, they’ll decide they’re better off searching another website.
You can expect this from a digital marketing strategy focusing on SEO but not UX. If you were searching for a product and landed on a slow website that made it difficult to find what you were looking for, it’s easy for users to click away and find other options than to put effort into navigating your website. When this happens, ask yourself: what’s the point of an effective SEO strategy if it leads users to a website that isn’t well-designed to help them convert?
Additionally, this issue also leads to how user experience design affects SEO. Too many users clicking away from your website could increase your bounce rate. Your website’s bounce rate is an indicator for search engines that implies users didn’t find anything relevant to their keyword on the website. This signifies to search engines that your website isn’t appropriate for that keyword, which will cause search engines to drop your website from SERPs.
This is just one example of how user experience affects SEO. So if SEO attracts more users to your website, UX converts users. Finding the perfect balance to optimize both is one of the ways to take advantage of how user experience affects SEO. Focusing on just one might affect your website’s growth, conversions and other SEO best practices you’ve implemented.
How To Leverage the Benefits of UX and SEO Combined
SEO best practices that drive traffic to your website and UX best practices that improve your website navigation are critical to making your website beneficial for your business. When working with an SEO specialist and web design company, you get to balance out what your digital marketing strategy offers.
Too much focus on SEO puts your website at risk of turning off users who have a negative experience navigating your website. On the other hand, too much emphasis on a website’s design could affect its optimization, making your website rank lower on search engines.
“While it is true that SEO is crucial for generating organic traffic, providing a seamless and user-friendly experience is more important for retaining visitors, increasing conversions and building a positive brand reputation,” the Demand Generation team added. “However, striking a balance between the two is ideal.”
Not all SEO and UX best practices are separate. In fact, with search engines like Google regularly updating their algorithm, improving certain UX aspects can boost your SEO strategy. Here are some UX and SEO best practices to consider implementing on your website.
1. Work with Full-Service Digital Marketing Agencies for SEO and UX Services
While you might find some cost-cutting benefits to ordering different services from various digital marketing professionals, this could lead to issues with conflicting strategies. For instance, the method implemented by an SEO content writing company could clash with that of a web design company.
There are more valuable benefits to sourcing your digital marketing services from one reliable source. By getting your SEO content writing services and web design services under one roof, you have multiple teams working in sync to create strategies that don’t conflict with each other. In this case, your SEO content writing company becomes a team of writers that build your SEO strategy and get relevant users to your website. Next to them, the web development team delivers services such as website hosting or web design services that optimize your website for users.
2. Optimize for Responsive Web Design
In the past, most users accessed the internet from their desktops. Today, mobile devices such as smartphones, laptops and tablets are overtaking traditional desktops. This means your website still has to look good and be easy to navigate, regardless of the size and dimensions of the device. Google recommends using responsive web design, so much so that it practices mobile-first indexing, which is believed to boost rankings on SERPs.
Responsive web design is one of the UX best practices because it adapts your website to any device without causing navigation issues. If your user has a smaller screen, it can adjust your layout to make reading more straightforward while leaving behind essential factors such as a call to action button.
3. Simplify Your Navigation Design
Sometimes, SERPs display your website’s service or product page instead of taking users to your homepage. If this is the case, it’s much easier for users to find what they want. However, when they don’t show the specific page and take them to the homepage, users must navigate your website to see what they’re looking for. Ideally, your website should be designed so that users can find what they need and head to checkout or your contact page in as few clicks as possible.
Using drop-down menus, bullets, headers and imagery to your advantage can help users find what they need. Some of the better UX practices include:
• Use meaningful heading tags to help users skim through content.
• For menus and products, use bullet points while creating logically ordered lists.
• Use sans-serif fonts, as these provide a cleaner appearance on your website and reduce the amount of clutter on each page.
• Break up your content into smaller, digestible sections. Avoid fluffy content – the better if you can share an idea with as few words as possible.
Let Thrive Combine UX and SEO to Improve Website Performance
An effective digital marketing strategy can include more than one service. In this case, it means finding the right balance between SEO and UX to maximize every user’s potential on your website.
With Thrive Internet Marketing Agency, you can work with a talented team that delivers SEO content writing services, web design services and other services needed to create a solid digital marketing strategy. We are a full-service company offering multiple services that could clash with your strategy. Instead, we have various teams that work together to cover all the bases to improve website performance and boost your website to relevant users.
Get in touch with Thrive today to receive a free proposal.
