A decade ago, the site was ranked based on keywords and backlinks. Nowadays, user engagement variables such as time on site, bounce rate, and visited pages have become the critical ranking factors. Google can recognize real-human behaviour that comes with determining quality-worthy sites to the top search ranking.
Talking about UX design and usability, it has become an integral component of SEO. Any site needs on-page SEO with simple UX design considerations that go a long way to support ranking and engagement. Many reasons explain how user experience design affects your SEO; let’s understand in-depth about its strategies, search engines, and a lot more.
What is UX (User Experience)?
It’s critical to understand the core aspect of UX, as user experience is associated with the design aspects of your website. UX is related to how user-friendly the website is and how easily a user can navigate the website.
If the website consists of dynamic visuals, quality content with keeping in mind the user’s emotions, it’s an excellent UX. User experience simplifies the pain points of your website by offering the user the best web design. Moreover, UX helps to convey to users the actual picture of how engaging your website would look.
Top reasons for how user experience affects SEO
To implement important SEO aspects are needed to rank your site on the top. But in today’s time, having an excellent user-friendly design is crucial as one needs to look at different factors such as search engine and web pages ranking. Nearly 90% of marketers agree that UX has become a critical aspect of SEO. Also, UX plays a significant impact on SEO strategy. UX affects SEO as they both share the same goals.
As Google updates its algorithm to ensure that they only have the best quality content, search engines have changed how the website ranks. In short, SEO and UX both cater the same way to help the user by offering them relevant solutions to their queries. UX is mainly considered an integral part of SEO and dramatically impacts the way the search engine works. SEO leads a person to the webpage where UX can make their journey comfortable throughout the webpage.
Let’s understand the user engagement metrics that matter
There are important metrics that help to improve SEO. Check below how the webpage engages your audience by indicating how relevant the webpage gives search queries.
- Bounce rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of the users who leave the website after viewing only one page. Whereas the high bounce rate means users do not get what they’re looking for. Also, there are several reasons users may be facing high bounce rates. The most common ones are confusing UX design, poor web design, irrelevant content, and slow page speed.
- Page dwell time
A metric where Google considers the number of time users spend on a specific page is called the page dwell time. If a visitor spends a long time on the website, Google considers this a positive indication. Whereas when users spend a short time on the website, Google decides the page relevant to the search query. One needs to focus on relevant content, how users become engaged and spend time on your website. The engaging user helps in improving metrics with booting overall search rank.
UX design factors that help to improve metrics
Page speed
With each second passing, your audience is likely to leave before accessing the page. If the visitor goes to the site before page load, it counts negatively towards bounce rate. Some of the other factors that affect page load speed, and among them, one is within your control. Also, one cannot work much if the user has a slow internet connection. One can minify the file size and combine CSS/JavaScript files to ensure the website is making the fewest server (HTTP) requests.
Mobile friendly
Mobile responsive design is a mandatory staple of modern web development as it brings 50% of web traffic driven by mobile search. The website which isn’t responsive loses over 50% of the audience from the beginning. That means you’ll see your user engagement metrics crash and burn.
Create the best user-friendly URL structure
For any website, URL structure is an essential aspect if we consider user experience. It helps to orient your users to your website. Let’s say, for example, URL structure frustrates the user and confuses search engines. Similar to humans, search engines do use keywords to understand the URL better. If the keywords are missing, it will take a massive blow to your SEO ranking.
Menus
You might have come across a website where the menu is difficult to understand. A confusing interface would frustrate users and access your website without navigating to a complex menu. There is a chance that users exit your website without reading the content. Therefore, one needs to streamline the menus and serve the primary function of guiding users to the appropriate webpage. In most cases, one needs to use important list pages and provide a drop-down menu for multiple pages in one category.
Create best UX design to improve SEO
UX design works as an integral part of any SEO strategy. It can affect your SEO ranking through various user-engagement metrics. A user experience design starts with understanding how users perceive and interact with your website. Therefore, one needs to focus on menu design, page speed, URL structure, and mobile responsiveness. For this, you can hire an experienced user design agency and get improved user-engagement metrics with increasing influence on brand credibility, search ranking, and audience retention.
Signing off
Whenever it comes to your business, you need to use best UX practices to improve your online image. Throughout the blog post, we manage to understand how crucial UX is today and use SEO strategy. UX adds value to your business, improves search ranking, and implies better visibility. Follow the above tips to improve user experience and make your website beneficial for everyone out there.
Bonus tip:
Run A/B tests frequently on your website and improve efficiency, add visuals, and make necessary improvements in the content wherever needed. Implement SEO along with UX but make sure you boost your business using the best SEO strategy.