For any website striving for success, search engine optimization (SEO) is essential. But did you know that it’s not just about optimizing keywords and building backlinks?
Neglecting user experience (UX) can have a serious impact on your SEO efforts, leading to a drop in traffic and potential customers. By prioritizing both SEO and UX, you can create a website that not only ranks well in search engines but also provides a satisfying and engaging experience for your visitors.
In the last decade, we have seen an explosion of new websites and applications that are better than ever. But if you look at them closely, they all have one thing in common: they are user-centered. They are designed around what people want, not what designers think they should do or how developers can build them faster and cheaper.
The result has been an unprecedented increase in user satisfaction across every industry and market segment. From education to entertainment to finance, leading to increased sales conversions, customer retention and loyalty, and other business benefits such as more positive reviews and referrals from happy customers.
That’s why UX is now (one of) the most important factors regarding search engine optimization (SEO). It’s also why Google wants good UX as part of its algorithms.
Why Invest in UX
If you’re not convinced yet, then let me give you a few more reasons why UX is the future of SEO and business success.
1. UX Improves Conversion Rate
SEO is about getting more visitors to your website and converting them into paying customers. By improving the user experience, you can significantly improve the number of people who buy from your website or sign up for a service. If you want to increase your conversion rate, you must ensure that your website is easy to use and understand.
2. UX Increases Customer Satisfaction
The better your user experience, the happier your customers will be with their experience in using your company’s products or services. A satisfied customer will tell their friends about how good their experience was, and they’ll come back again to buy more products or services from the same company in the future. This leads to repeat customers, which is great for businesses as it helps them grow their revenues over time without spending more money on marketing campaigns or advertising efforts.
Website Design UX
According to the content marketer at SE Ranking, KseniiaKyslova, 17 UX design elements impact your website’s SEO success:
- Text formatting
- Images and illustrations
- Above the folder and footer
- Navigation menu
- CTA buttons
- Language switcher
- Breadcrumbs
- Left/right sidebars
- Faceted navigation
- Related or featured items
- Social proof elements
- Social share buttons
- User input elements
- Free online tools
- Comments and reviews
- iFrames for video, ads, maps
Kneniia recommends
“To build a great website, you should decide what types of pages you’ll need and what structural elements they should have.
First, consider what’s common for your industry so you can be sure to include all the page elements people expect to see.
Then think about what you can add or change to become different, without breaking SEO rules.”
Bounce Rate UX
According to Contentsquare, your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who enter a site and exit without viewing a second page.
To calculate bounce rate, “divide the total number of one-page visits by the total number of entries to your website.”
Moreover, “a high bounce rate on your site indicates your landing experience is not meeting your visitor’s expectations.”
There are many reasons that people close the tab on your website, but by looking at your bounce rate, you’ll be able to find and fix them quickly:
- You’re targeting the wrong audience or pain points.
- Your visitors can’t find what they are looking for.
- Your on-site experience is confusing, and visitors don’t know what to do next.
- Your on-page content isn’t addressing their needs/it’s irrelevant.
- Your calls to action are not performing.
- Your page loads too slow or gives (technical) errors.
Mobile First Strategy UX
According to Jes Scholz, CMO at Ringier, there are 11 breadcrumb SEO best practices for a mobile-first strategy; she says: “Typically, breadcrumbs navigation is a line of contextual links that indicate where the user is on a website. They are a form of secondary navigation, allowing users to trace their path in the site hierarchy.”
Further, Jes mentions 3 SEO benefits of breadcrumb navigation and structured data:
- More crawling
- Better indexing
- Higher ranking, SERP clicks, and organic sessions
Font Types UX
Brand Creative Director, Fernando José Pérez, gives insights into choosing the right fonts for your website:
“The fonts that you use on your website go a long way towards establishing the feel of your brand. Is it professional, quirky, serious, fun, etc.? They also play an important role in providing an excellent experience for visitors, including those with vision impairments.”
Quick Tips:
- Consider legibilitThink about brand identity
- Stick to just a couple of fonts
- Choose the right font size
- Consider accessibility
- Avoid all caps in paragraphs
Google Fonts has a huge library of free fonts. It’s easy to see how they would be perfect for your branding, and they’re also great for personal use. You can also preview them with their handy tools.
Use a plugin; if you have a theme that doesn’t include fonts, or these fonts don’t suit your needs, the best option is to use a free plugin like WP Google Fonts or Custom Fonts.
Page Dwell Time UX
CEO @ Exploding Topics, Brian Dean, explains:
“Dwell Time is the amount of time that a Google searcher spends on a page from the search results before returning to the SERPs. Many SEO professionals consider Dwell Time an important Google ranking signal.”
Brian argues that embedding videos can significantly boost your page’s Dwell Time and can prove this with some statistics:
“the Wistia blog increased their Dwell Time by 260% simply by adding a video to their content.”
Menu Design UX
Kathryn Whitenton– UX Designer at Power Takeoff – says that…
“Helping users navigate should be a high priority for almost every website and application. After all, even the coolest feature or the most compelling content is useless if people can’t find it. And even if you have a search function, you usually shouldn’t rely on search as the only way to navigate. Most designers recognize this and include some form of navigation menu in their designs.”
Kathryn advises avoiding common mistakes by following these guidelines for usable navigation menus:
- Don’t use tiny menus (or icons) on large screens.
- Put menus in familiar locations.
- Make menu links look interactive.
- Ensure that your menus have enough visual weight.
- Use link text colors that contrast with the background color.
- Tell users ‘where’ the currently visible screen is located within the menu options.
- Use understandable link labels.
- Make link labels easy to scan.
- For large websites, use menus to let users preview lower-level content.
- Provide local navigation menus for closely related content.
- Leverage visual communication.
- Make menu links big enough to be easily tapped or clicked.
- Ensure that drop-downs are not too small or too big.
- Consider ‘sticky’ menus for long pages.
- Optimize for easy physical access to frequently used commands.
Page Speed UX
Want to improve page load time on your website?
According to Josh Hinds, SEO & organic traffic specialist, “page speed matters!
If your page load time is slow, it affects user experience, bounce rate, search performance, and revenue. Site speed has long been a Google ranking factor.
How to Improve Page Load Time?
Here’s a list of twelve different website speed optimization tips that can improve your user experience and SEO.
- Configure a fast infrastructure or use a fast host.
- Use a CDN.
- Use Gzip for file compression.
- Reduce the number of HTTP requests.
- Minify CSS and JavaScript.
- Streamline your HTML.
- Optimize images for faster page load time.
- Clean up your media library.
- Clean up your database.
- Remove render-blocking JavaScript.
- Use Expires Headers.
- Avoid URL redirects.
Closing Thoughts
SEO and UX go hand in hand, with UX being a vital component of any successful SEO strategy. By focusing on user-centered design and improving the user experience, businesses can enjoy a range of benefits, including higher conversion rates, increased customer satisfaction, and improved search engine rankings. From optimizing page load time to using the right fonts and menu design, there are many ways to improve the UX of your website and, in turn, boost your SEO efforts.
So if you want to stay ahead of the competition and attract more customers, investing in UX design should be a top priority. By partnering with a professional web design and SEO agency that understands the importance of UX, you can create a website that not only looks great but also delivers a seamless user experience that drives conversions and supports your overall business goals.
Don’t miss out on potential customers due to a poorly designed website. Contact Flying V Group today to learn how we can help you build an eye-catching, conversion-optimized website that emphasizes an excellent user experience, leading to higher conversion rates and improved business success.
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