You already know the importance of SEO, but have you ever stopped to think about how it relates to UX or User Experience?
Websites and their content are being increasingly featured by users themselves: a good digital marketing strategy must be focused on them.
Today, the material that is shared is as important as the experience that each person has when accessing it. Therefore, here we bring you all the information about SEO and UX.
What is UX, or User Experience?
The UX, or User Experience, is the set of elements that involve the interaction of a user with a device or with a certain environment. This process can have a positive or negative assessment, which will depend on the result and the perception of each individual.
In other words, the UX is focused on the user and how it relates to a business, product, or service. The goal is to provide you with a pleasant experience.
It is a concept widely used in web development and optimization, where it is linked to usability, accessibility, design, content, and much more.
The relationship between UX and SEO
Now, in what way does the User Experience affect SEO?
The secret is to think about them together. SEO and User Experience work together to make your site work at its best.
Both areas are responsible for analyzing the best way to compose and distribute the elements in the web environment, both content and design, to create a quality product.
Putting enough keywords is not enough: to position sites in search results, Google prioritizes the websites that provide the best experiences for users.
That is to say that, in addition to looking at the site itself, search engines are taking into account the behavior of users to measure the usefulness and value that a website provides them.
So, in addition to the elements that you already know how to optimize for SEO, you should consider the metrics that indicate the UX, such as the dwell time and the loading speed, among others that we will develop in this article.
The relationship between those who are in charge of adjusting the SEO of a website and those who design the User Experience must be closer than ever: here the SXO was born.
SXO: Definition
Search Experience Optimization is precisely concerned with perfecting a site to provide the best possible User Experience and at the same time improve the position on the Google results page.
In this case, it only works on this platform, unlike SEO, which can be adapted to any search engine.
The SXO tries to offer the information that the user is looking for, but at the same time tries to generate positive feelings during their stay on the site.
Benefits of Improving UX based on SEO
The first obvious benefit is, clearly, the improvement in the organic positioning of your site. A website with a good UX will be better positioned in the Google ranking, without a doubt.
Another advantage that focusing on this area will bring you is that, by improving the presentation of your page, the perception of your audience will change. When a site is designed for the user, it shows; and that has a positive impact on your brand image.
On the other hand, this strategy also has a direct impact on conversion rates: an optimized site with good usability invites and helps users to convert.
“To position sites in search results, Google looks at the websites that provide the best experiences for users”
Plus, if people find the information they’re looking for quickly, easily, and intuitively, customer service costs are significantly reduced. When a site works well, there is no need to consult any help desk.
Working on the UX will help your site adapt to any device, which will encourage more people to come to it from anywhere.
With a good UX analysis, you can collect large amounts of information about your consumers.
By knowing their behavior, you will be able to offer them more personalized solutions and, at the same time, you can even anticipate their needs.
How to Optimize UX for SEO?
We make it clear how important the User Experience is when it comes to organic search engine positioning. But in what way can we improve it?
Here we bring you some tips so that the UX of your site is optimized to the maximum.
Always think like the User
The key to designing a good UX is, precisely, keeping the user always in mind. It is essential to know what your behavior is and how you interact with the site, to identify the problems that you may be encountering.
Never lose sight of what you are designing for your target audience. Defining your buyer persona and keeping it in mind can be very useful.
When deciding the elements, layout, and content of your website, you must take into account the preferences, habits, and needs of your audience.
Simplify your site navigation
One of the main mistakes is to build a site with a highly developed architecture, which makes your journey too complex.
Not always more pages are better: many times the quantity negatively affects the UX.
Keep the navigation as simple as possible. Your goal should be accessibility, not the greatest number of keywords.
Make sure it is intuitive and natural, and that users get what they need as quickly as possible. Ideally, they can find what they are looking for in four clicks. Also, being a simpler structure, it greatly helps SEO.
The navigation bar and the use of CTAs and Pop-Ups will help improve the journey through your page. Let’s see how you can perfect these elements.
Navigation bar
The navigation bar is vital to optimizing your site. It is the place where the user should be able to go to find any element on your website.
When you have a site with many pages, this is the best way to keep it uncluttered. A drop-down menu will not only improve user navigation, it will even help search engine indexing.
CTAs and Pop-Ups
CTAs will help the user stay longer on your site and significantly improve conversion rates.
You don’t have to worry about making a big button that stands out. Better try that it is consistent with the style and that it facilitates the user’s path, which is the ultimate goal.
To do this, choose carefully the characteristics that the CTA will have, from the size to the location in which you will place it.
For their part, Pop-Ups improve the User Experience as they serve to display relevant information without affecting the loading time of the web. They will serve you for heavy images, forms, or even YouTube videos.
Optimize your site’s loading time
Site loading time is one of the most important factors that search engines take into account. When it comes to providing the best UX, the faster a site is, the better positioned it will be.
This is even more important when it comes to visits on mobile devices. If a page takes more than 3 seconds to load, 53% of users abandon it.
Keep the navigation as simple as possible. Your goal should be accessibility »
To know the performance of your site, you can use tools like PageSpeed ​​Insights. When you enter the address of your website, this platform measures performance and gives you suggestions to improve it.
To speed up the loading time, you can consider some aspects: the number of plug-ins you have installed; the size of the images, which must be adjusted appropriately; And, as for hosting, choose one that is quality.
These factors will help your website to be better configured and more pleasant to navigate.
Responsive
On the other hand, your site must be optimized for any device; that is, that its design is responsive.
If users quit because of loading time, imagine if they won’t when they can’t see the site correctly on the device they’re using.
Responsinator is a tool with which you can see how your website looks on different electronic media.
Interaction
As we saw at the beginning, an indicator of a good UX is the time the user spends on our site. If the sessions are long, Google interprets that the content is relevant.
To get people to stay, offer them interactive and personalized experiences, through the multiple tools you have available.
Recommendations: Chatbots, forms, multimedia material, and everything that you think maybe attractive and interesting for your audience because, if it is for them, it will be for Google.
Improve the content you publish
The last tip, although not less important, is about the content.
We don’t write just for the search engine: we write for the users.
Yes, keyword density is a must for SEO, but large blocks of text can affect UX. Organize the information using headings and images.
We will talk about these elements below.
Keywords
When generating material, it is still important to include keywords, but you must be careful not to overdo it.
You already know: keywords are the way you communicate to search engines the themes of your content. For this, you must carry out appropriate keyword research and be very careful with the terms you choose.
When you have them, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the more, the better. Throughout the text, try to place them in strategic places: in the title, in the H1, in the first paragraph, and the last.
Remember that the density of keywords should not exhaust the reader, so you can use synonyms.
Tags and categories will go a long way to help you improve the UX because they help with the order of the site and make the information easy to find.
Headings
We mention them just in passing. Headings contribute to both SEO and UX as they guide the user and at the same time show the algorithm what the site is about.
Each page must have an H1 that defines its theme and includes the main keyword. The rest of the ideas must be ordered according to the hierarchy of the text, in H2, H3, and so on.
Images
Using images is another resource that will help you both for SEO and to improve the UX.
The visual component provided by the images is very important so that the user experience is more pleasant when visiting your website. Behind each of them is the Alt Text; you should not forget to add it.
Alt Text allows you to describe the image or the role it fulfills on the site. To be useful for SEO, it must be as precise and specific as possible (no more than 125 characters), and incorporate your keywords, but without exaggeration.
UX metrics
To evaluate a site’s UX, the first place you should stop is its metrics.
Analyzing the numbers will give you clues as to which areas need improvement and which are working properly.
“An indicator of a good UX is the time the user spends on our site.”
Here we bring you the three main metrics to quantify the performance of your website.
Direct Visits
Direct Visits are those made by all the users who entered your page by typing the URL in the browser. That is, those that came directly to your site, without being redirected from another location.
Time on Site
By measuring the Time on the Site, you are observing the amount of time that users remain on your website after entering it. If your site has good average minutes, it means that both your content and the experience you provide is friendly for visitors.
If the results are not good, you may need to make changes to improve them.
Pages per Session
Finally, it is important to know the number of pages that a user visits each time they enter your site.
This indicator is complemented with the previous point since it will inform you about how the different contents of your page are related to each other and about the experience that navigation provides.
Conclusion
It is no longer enough to work your site and optimize it for SEO. User experience matters too.
When it comes to interacting with a brand, the public wants complete, attractive, and relevant experiences; you want to solve your problems quickly and easily.
A user-friendly, optimized site streamlines every step of the process, making your experience simple and intuitive.
Taking the UX into account when planning your digital marketing strategy will help you greatly to improve the relationship with your audience and, therefore, to boost your reach and achieve a greater number of conversions.
What are you waiting to start?
