SEO is an ever expanding wheelhouse, and to ensure your organic traffic graphs carry on pointing in the right direction you have to have your finger in many pies. At a minimum you need appreciation of all of the different elements that lead to an effective SEO campaign that will deliver long term results.
UX or user experience is a term that has actually been around since the 1990’s but has gained momentum in the last 5 years. Many website design engagements go through at least one phase of UX assessment and improvement, and bigger sites out there have whole teams dedicated to ongoing UX improvements.
And that is very logical, UX directly impacts conversion rate; without question, improving user experience impacts your bottom line. As well as your conversion rate, ensuring a smooth and even pleasant experience on your website will slowly and subtly help to build brand affinity and brand loyalty.
But can UX affect SEO visibility?
At first it might seem like a leap, but today we’ll examine exactly how and why UX is firmly in the SEO playbook.
SEO is UX
SEO was previously able to operate outside of the wider marketing team, with success. The SEO function was to ensure on-site technical best practices were met, content was keyword focused and that websites gained backlinks. Those elements are still the core function of most SEO initiatives, but SEO now has many more factors as play and must operate as part of the marketing team to see real, long term success.
That’s because in many regards, SEO is UX. From the moment there are eyes on your Google listing right through to a buyer action, SEO’s are trying to ensure a smooth and joined-up user experience.
If your title tag, meta description, url and schema don’t look appealing in that initial Google search, you are providing a poor user experience and will lose the click to a competitor.
Once a user does hit your site, if they don’t like the aesthetics, find the functionality difficult or even frustrating then they’ll like bounce quickly and spend very little time on site. Dissatisfied visitors pogo-sticking back to Google in a short amount of time is a strong signal to Google that users aren’t enjoying your website. Google won’t continue sending traffic to sites that don’t satisfy users intent for very long, you’ll quickly find yourself dropping down the rankings.
Because user experience is an integral part of SEO performance, if you took away the core functions of SEO and purely focused on UX it’s likely you would see organic improvements, albeit at a much slower rate than doing standard SEO as well.
Action point: Ask a friend to follow your ‘funnel’ from SERP to transaction and give their user experience from a fresh perspective. What improvements can you make?
SEO And UX In A Rankbrain And Machine Learning World
Machine learning is now part of the Google algorithm. Massive amounts of data are being processed and analyzed by machine learning every day, as a result SERPs are being constantly tweaked to serve searchers with the most satisfying results.
The fact is that because a machine self-learning element is now in the algorithmical mix, no one (even if you had insider Algorithm knowledge) can tell you exactly what Rankbrain (as Google machine-learning artificial intelligence system is affectionately known) is doing.
But Rankbrain is learning based on the data it has available, therefore Rankbrain will very likely be optimizing towards user satisfaction and trying to match the correct search results with what people want to see – not necessarily what they actually search for.
What that means is that it’s no longer about blindly optimizing towards keywords, it’s about optimizing towards keyword intent, that is done in two ways:
- Understanding what someone actually means when they are Googling a particular keyword that looks to be important to your business
- Ensuring you’re serving the correct content type that matches the search intent, that could be informational content rather than a product page
If you’re failing to optimize towards intent, rather than just keywords then you will provide a poor user experience.
And if Rankbrain has decided that a particular query should be answered with a particular type of content, even if your content is best-in-class if it’s the wrong type you won’t stand a chance of ranking well for it.
Action point: Go through 5-10 of your underperforming pages, consider if they really intent-match, and if the content is the correct format.
UX Influence On Website Architecture That Compliments Good SEO Structure
The influence that UX design and planning can have on SEO is one of the greatest things about the SEO and UX relationship. UX inherently works towards a logical website structure:
- Can a new user find the most important pages quickly and easily?
- Does each important service/product have its own distinct landing page?
- Is there enough supplementary content to support service/product expertise and answer any common questions about the service/product?
These UX philosophies align perfectly with how an SEO-led website structure would play out.
Important pages need to be as close to the homepage as possible. Each important page needs its own exhaustive ‘hub’ landing page, and those hubs should be supported with ‘spoke’ long-tail content to show both users and Google expertise in those subject areas.
The ‘spokes’ should satisfy users on-site and drive long-tail organic traffic, an SEO and UX win-win.
Action point: Check that your important pages are no more than one click away from the homepage, that every important service or product you offer has its own distinct landing page and that you have supporting content.
Hopefully we’ve demonstrated how and why UX and SEO should work hand in hand, ideally from the inception of any new website, and as an ongoing element of any successful brand today.
TL:DR; here’s 5 ways that UX directly influences long term organic performance:
- Bounce rate
- Dwell time
- Page load time
- User friendly meta title, description and schema
- Website structure