Improving user experience for your website will also help with how well your website performs SEO-wise. If you’re interested in achieving that, read this article to find actionable tips you can apply today.
The importance of user experience for search engine
User Experience (UX) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are both digital world buzzwords that anyone in the digital world is aware of, but what do they have to do with one another anyway? Why do search engines care about UX?
According to Sytian Productions Web Design Philippines, user experience is one of the factors that search engines look at to determine whether they should be boosting your website higher in their search results.
Even with Google’s November 2023 Core Update changes, user experience is still a critical part of what affects website ranking factors. Search engines consistently deem prioritizing UX necessary because when users have a better experience, they’ll stay on your website longer.
The more comfortable they stay on your website, the more it communicates to search engines that you are a reputable website that provides users with what they want. That’s why UX is a critical website element that search engines consider in their rankings.
Understanding user experience
After knowing why search engines prioritize UX, it pays to know better about UX.
The most basic explanation of UX would be how web users interact with your website. At first, UX was used to apply to physical products, but it’s become co-opted for many digital products such as websites and apps.
Your goal is always to improve UX so users find your website easy to use and users can find what they need from the website. Improving UX isn’t just about finding things to enhance and not worsening their website experience.
For example, you should make your website navigation menu easy to find. That usually means not being too creative with placement. Otherwise, if users don’t see it quickly, they might leave your page out of frustration.
So, when talking about improving user experience or UX, it’s all about getting feedback from your users about how easy it is to use your website. That way, you know exactly what aspects of your site improve or degrade UX.
Now that you know more about UX, let’s get to the UX improvement tips to improve your website’s searchability.
1. Prioritizing SEO-friendly designs
When choosing the themes or designs you want for your website, consider looking into some SEO-friendly designs. But what exactly counts as SEO-friendly design?
It simply means that your website’s contents should be easy to use for anyone searching up the key terms you want your site to appear as a search result. The people who click on your website should find what they need from your site immediately and prominently. Thus, that means that your web design and format should reflect that.
That can also mean prioritizing design elements most relevant to your target audience, even if you aren’t adding the aesthetic design elements you want.
2. Streamlining website architecture
Speaking of how you design your website to improve navigation, one approach that can achieve that would be streamlining your website architecture as much as possible.
You want to plan how a user would flow through your website based on different contexts. But most of the time, considering the content in your website, the user you’re targeting, and the context of how they’re using your website would help with planning your website flow and architecture.
As you plan it out, it’s a good idea to simplify the website architecture as much as possible. You can do that by lessening the web pages users must click through to find what they need. These are just a few ways to streamline your website’s architecture.
3. Optimizing website performance
Focusing on your website’s overall performance can also affect its UX. There are several elements of your website performance that you should prioritize in this aspect, such as the following:
- Website loading speed
- Usability
- Image optimization
- Technical SEO
- Web Accessibility
- Redirect reductions
By applying these web performance changes, your website loads faster, web elements move together smoothly, and your target website users won’t feel frustrated and leave after using your website.
Also, search engines always acknowledge high-performing websites by ranking them higher since they know that the better your website operates, the better UX it provides. You should ensure that your website works and runs smoothly from the start.
4. Creating easy-to-navigate web spaces
There’s a reason why we’ve repeatedly emphasized the need to have an easily navigable website. That’s because a poorly planned website architecture is one of the fastest ways to get a user to leave your website. We’ve all experienced a website like that in the first place.
Please think of the website you’ve encountered that looks amazing, but the web designers have gone too far the other way to the point where their website is so high art that you can’t find the navigation menu. So, poor navigation doesn’t just happen to low-performing websites.
The key to easy-to-navigate websites is to ensure your navigation menu is reliable and always there. Not only that, but how you link your web pages with one another should make sense to everyone.
By creating a website with an interconnectivity that makes sense, your target users won’t have a hard time finding what they need in the website.
5. Developing user-centered content
Creating user-centric content is another underrated way to improve UX that boosts your SEO.
It can manifest in different ways, but with blog content on your website in particular, you should ensure that you’re writing content relevant to your target audience and not just to you. For example, too many websites are used to write about what happened during an internal event that they held, but that’s irrelevant to your audience.
Instead, create blog content centered around frequently asked questions or preemptively communicating the benefits of your product or business. These are the types of content most relevant to your target users that you should make on your website.
6. Crafting clear and actionable calls to action (CTAs)
Your calls to action or CTAs should be present and clear on your web pages.
Also, try to focus on only one kind of conversion or CTA for each website. That way, it won’t confuse your web users on what action they should take after consuming your website content and are already on board with whatever you offer.
7. Ensuring mobile optimization
We’ve mentioned a frustrating website experience for users. One of the most common ways people encounter a terrible website UX despite the many high-performing websites these days would be because they browse the site through their phone.
You should also optimize your web design for mobile screens to avoid that. That way, you aren’t alienating your target users who primarily browse the Internet using their phones.
8. Enhancing website accessibility
Speaking of not alienating a portion of your target users, you should also enhance your website’s accessibility.
By accommodating the needs of different kinds of people, you make your website easier to use for everyone. Therefore, your website will be welcoming to all while also, in turn, improving your searchability.
Conclusion
These tips are all easy to apply to your website so that you can enjoy the experience of users while also making your website easy to navigate for search engines. Therefore, if you want to pay more attention to your website, consider applying these changes to make it more discoverable and user-friendly.
About the Author
Magnus Iñaqui Gael excels in the field of digital marketing, focusing on enhancing businesses’ online presence and improving their search engine rankings. His expertise lies in keeping abreast of the most recent trends and best practices in SEO. He is devoted to achieving tangible results for his clients by designing innovative and efficient link-building strategies.
Shabita says
Brilliant insights on enhancing UX for seamless SEO performance! Each of the 8 tips is not only actionable but also explained in a way that makes it easy for anyone to grasp. The synergy between user experience and SEO is crystal clear, thanks to this well-crafted article. Kudos to the author for sharing practical strategies that can be implemented right away. Looking forward to seeing the positive impact on my website!
Elaina M says
Thanks for appreciating! Feel free to browse our blog for more posts like this.