User experience is considered as one of the most crucial factors in increasing or decreasing the impact of your SEO strategy, not just in this year but in the upcoming years as well.
Today, we live in a generation that seeks instant results, and as the attention span of people has been decreasing with every passing day, a super-fast website with the easiest navigation is the only thing that can save your business.
And, hence, their importance knows no bounds.
So, here in this blog, we will be discussing UX, its definition, its impact on SEO, and why is it so important for just any website owner no matter how big the website is.
Let’s get started.
User Experience: Definition
So, user experience itself is quite self-explanatory. Yes, it all refers to the experience that a person or a website visitor gets when they enter and surf through your website.
Now, when it is about UX, you would always wish to provide your users with a positive experience. To provide the same, you need to understand a few factors that are related to UX. These are,
- Loading speed of the website as well as of specific pages
- Easy website navigation which is logical
- Least advertisements and pop-ups occurring
- Quality of content
- Content that has a number of sub-headings, and a whole lot of white spaces
- Content that can be scanned easily without reading the entire piece
- Website that looks good
- Make sure there are no exaggerations, keep your website simple
- An FAQ or “Frequently Asked Questions” section is mandatory
- Clear and well-defined CTA or call to action buttons
And a lot more…
So, this list makes it pretty clear that a website is all about providing the website visitor with a splendid experience, both visually, and also overall so that the person can easily as well as freely navigate through your website.
Now, this might appear to be pretty easy for you, but in reality, it is not that simple. This is because, there are also other factors that you need to focus on, which help leveraging the best experience as well as results and successful conversions.
To Whom Is Your User Experience So Important?
Every single website visitor entering a given website, experiences to face a decent website experience. And this applies to everybody.
And that refers to the fact that the bounce rate of your website will go down noticeably once you focus on bettering your UX and start leveraging a better experience to everyone visiting your website.
However, if you make your website visitors’ experience on your website get interrupted by multiple recurring flashy advertisements, huge chunks of content, vibrant colors, then you yourself are increasing the chances of visitors just opting to get lost from your website and never come back.
Yes, that is supposed to happen when website visitors keep their faith on your website and that is the way you serve them with your website, providing them with a horrible experience.
In fact, in terms of bettering your SEO endeavours, page speed site speed is quite important a factor. Now, it is true that the loading speed of a website is also dependent on how fast the internet speed is on the user end, however, if your website loads fast enough, it won’t be a critical factor.
However, if your website has some errors to fix or if it takes ages to get loaded, has a high Time to First Byte or TTFB, and has a slothful navigation system.
So, your primary focus with SEO should be making sure that your website loads very quickly and works impeccably when surfed through.
Efforts focused on this will make sure that your website visitors stay on your website, and that occurrence will bring down the bounce rate of your website. And, undoubtedly, that is a good thing for your rankings in Google’s SERPs or relevant searches.
Now, if you are wondering if this is just for Google or is it impactful for your SEO in other search engines as well. Well, Bing too takes user experience pretty seriously.
How Below Average User Experience (UX) Can Lower Your SERP Rankings?
Google focuses mostly on providing the best user experience. And that is why it keeps on updating its algorithms so that website owners also come on the same page and start focusing on improving the user experience that they deliver through their website.
So, it is makes it clear enough that the user experience that you provide your website visitors, can majorly impact not just your rankings, but also your conversion rate as well as bounce rates.
And that will decide whether you will be gaining traffic, search engine rankings, and new clients or will end up losing it all.
So, it is pretty clear now that websites which do not load fast enough are more likely to lose their chances of getting placed at higher ranks in the SERPs.
However, you might feel relaxed getting to know that it will not make you face a manual penalty or being deindexed by Google. But it can surely bring down your rankings as your bounce rates will go up unimaginably.
As we mentioned earlier, Google’s primary focus is to come up with the best results against search queries. And these results are decided based on considering a good lot of factors.
These factors are, quality of content, quality and number of backlinks, user experience, as well as the overall quality.
So, if you notice that people are entering your website, but are bouncing away as soon as they step in, then you need to understand that your website is not providing a decent user experience.
This can be a good lot of things starting from not getting the content that the website visitor was expecting to come across, your website looking totally messed up, or maybe it takes a lot of time to open.
So, to better the user experience of your website, you need to step into the shoes of your website visitors and make changes and run tests accordingly.
What Are the Things That You Need to Take Care of To Better Your Website’s Loading Speed?
Besides, stepping into the shoes of your website visitors, there are also a good number of other elements which when not taken care of might negatively impact your overall user experience as well as your SEO.
These are,
1. Headings
When you come across the headings of a newspaper, a magazine, any other printed work, the headings serve the purpose of helping your find and understand information.
Similarly, the headings of a webpage are intended to help readers as well as search engine crawlers understand and decipher your content.
The header tags namely, <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5> and <h6>, are meant to help understanding the logical hierarchy of content on your page. And this is so effective that even if they get lost while going through the content, they can come back to the origin point.
Now, speaking of the H1 tag individually, it focuses on helping search engines understand what your content is about.
And, as they are the topmost element of your page, they serve the purpose of impacting your rankings too if you add your primary keyword here.
So, to make sure that your website visitors have a great experience on your website in terms of content, make sure that you take care of the headings appropriately.
2. Navigation and Website Structure
The most important thing that you need to keep in mind is that the website structure and the navigation is responsible for helping not just your website visitors, but also the search engines too.
Also, you need to understand that searchers and search engine crawlers do not always necessarily enter your website through your homepage. So, you need to make sure that your website is easy to navigate.
Make sure your website is free of popups, confusing options or even dead ends, these things confuse your users, and they find it hard to navigate to any of your page.
Moreover, there are websites where the menu option opens and cover entire front page, making it impossible for users to further navigate through the same.
This is something that you should make sure that does not take place on your website.
3. User Signals
If you have users interacting with your Google My Business page features, like clicking on your click-to-call features from their mobile devices or leaving five-star reviews, and if you are responding to them, then there is a chance that it will help you improve your search engine rankings.
Now, Google has not officially confirmed that these user signals are of any impact on your search engine rankings, but it is likely to become a prominent factor in the near future.
However, there are studies that tell us that they do have some correlation with your rankings.
And, as you already know that Google knows everything and sees everything, all these touch points make Google understand how engaging your content is and how interested people are in them.
4. Mobile Experience
Besides, the appearance, feel, content, navigation, as well as images present on your website, mobile experience is dependent on another factor which is the loading speed of your website.
And its importance has increased even more since Google has come up with their mobile-friendly update. This update made it clear that mobile friendliness is officially a ranking factor for websites.
And, after Google’s release of the mobile-first index, mobile website is the one that is considered as your primary website over the desktop version of the same.
And, as we talk about mobile friendliness, you also need to check how well your website’s navigation is working on mobile devices. This is because, each of the elements of your website is important and has a major impact on the experience of your users, and also matters a lot when it is about SEO.
So, make sure that you follow a simple design while building your website as this does not just make your users happy, but is also important in the eyes of Google.
5. Website’s Loading Speed
We have mentioned priorly that the loading speed of your website is an important ranking factor when it is about Google search.
In fact, Google has also declared that in the near future, the mobile page speed of your website will be of more importance, rather than your website’s loading speed on a PC.
So, it is quite evident that your website needs to load fast enough, and that has the same emphasis on your mobile experience that you cater as well.
You can simply check the loading speed of your website from the PageSpeed Insights tool from Google. This not only tells you about what you ask, but also tells you about what are the things that you need to work better on if you wish to see better results.
In fact, it tells you some more important details regarding page speed which are, time to above-the-fold load as well as time to full page load. This can really be very useful when you are working to reduce the loading speed of your website.
However, in today’s date, a good lot of important websites too have issues with the loading speed.
Although, most websites today are also looking forward to better the experience on the mobile version of their websites since they are mostly visited from mobile devices.
So, if you can do better on the above aspects, you will not only be able to deliver a better experience to your users, but you will also be able to get better results from your SEO endeavours, as these betterments will impress Google too.
Importance of Technical SEO in UX
The technical aspect of SEO is also pretty impactful when it comes it UX. This is because, without indulging much effort on the technical side of your SEO, your website would not be able to come up with the promised content expected from the search results as it would not function properly.
So, the technical aspect of SEO encompasses:
- Your website’s primary interaction with the search engine results pages
- The quality as well as the relevance of the landing pages of your website
- The loading speed of your website
- JS frameworks
…and what not.
You can easily level up the user experience of your website by making small efforts of betterment on this technical side of your SEO.
You can also make efforts like inviting your website visitors to join your email list, and that will facilitate remarketing, several drip campaigns, as well as the social media presence of your brand.
Improving the User Experience of Your Website
In today’s date, it is important for every website owner to be aware of the white hat SEO tactics as well as the basics of UX. This is because, such information can really help you tackle a good lot of challenges as well as help you moving forward.
Now, if you focus on what we just mentioned a while ago about bettering your user experience, you will get reminded that we asked you to look at and analyse your website, stepping in the shoes of your website visitors.
Let’s see how you can do that.
- What are they expecting to see once they land on your website?
- What will they actually come across when they step into your website?
- Is your content organized enough?
- Would your website visitors find it easy to scan through?
- If you were a visitor and not the owner of your own website, would you be willing to spend more time on your website and check what it has to offer?
- Are you as a website visitor, coming across any challenges or distractions while surfing through your website?
- Do you find the menu as well as the navigation of your website logical enough? Are they making it easier for you to roam around in your website in order to find out proper information, products, and resources that the website offers?
Answering to these above-mentioned questions should be on the priority list of any website owner. Yes, they should spend some time coming up with answers for these and that will be useful enough to help them understand what is wrong with their website, if there is any.
And that would lead them to better the UX of their website, manifolds.
However, it would be a really great idea if you can manage to seek help from the industry experts who have complete knowledge of SEO and how you can cater the best user experience from your website.
This is because, not all website owners will have enough time to indulge in this and gather enough knowledge to improve the user experience of their website, efficiently and effectively.
So, it is always good to rely on someone who knows it in-and-out.
What’s Your Take?
Google is focused on leveraging a better user experience every time they come up with a new algorithm update.
So, you need to focus on the same in order to make sure that you stay ahead of your competitors instead of lagging far behind.
Get started today!
