How Does UX Design Affect Your SEO?

As Google keeps evolving and progressing each day, so does UX design.

User experience (UX) design nowadays is very much related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and some might say it is an important ranking factor as well through user engagement metric. Keywords targeting and building backlinks still play a vital role in SEO, but there are more key players in the SEO game.

What is User-Experience?

UX design is the process of designing your website or product page in a way that is useful, easy to use, and fun to interact with, in the eyes of your customers. It optimizes how your users interact with your website and offer high usability.

What is Usability?

It is defined by how easy it is for people to interact with your website and find what they are looking for and it also refers to the technical effectiveness of your website meaning how many errors it has, how easy it is to learn, and so on.

What are the user engagement metrics that matter in SEO?

There are a few metrics that are extremely essential for SEO improvement. These metrics tell google how much engaging your web page is to the user, as following:

Bounce rate:

Bounce rate is the percentage of how many users leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate hurts your rankings as it means that your users did not find what they are looking for.

Dwell time:

Dwell time is the amount of time that a user spends on a certain page. If users spend a lot of time in your website that will make google register the dwell time as a positive indicator for your website which improves its ranking.

What are UX design factors that affect your SEO rankings?

There are many factors that come into play when we talk about UX design. These factors are what determines whether your users will stay on your page or just hit the close button and leave.

Load time:

It means the amount of time that your page takes to load, and if the users choose to exit before your page loads then Google would register that as a negative indicator marking your page as too slow for the users. Websites need to be optimized to be loaded as fast as possible, the thing that also affects your dwell time rate.

Mobile-friendliness:

Making your website mobile-friendly is a determining factor for google, according to data, over 50% of all data comes from mobile devices, and that means that websites that are not mobile-friendly will lose the majority of their traffic.

Create a user-friendly URL structure:

The UX plays a major role in the web design, especially when it comes to the URLs or Uniform Resource Locators, sometimes the URL structure is determined by the UX and vise versa.

The URLs should not confuse users or search engines, as users should know where they are in your website, while search engines look for keywords in the URLs to better understand your page and index it. If a search engine fails to understand your page, that would severely damage your SEO rankings.

What are the Best Strategies that Enhances Your website’s UX and SEO?

1. Calculate the average session duration:
   The more engaging your website’s content is, the more time people would spend exploring it.There are 3 things that affect the search results: direct website visits, time on site, and pages per session. You should use the data that you get from google analytics to know what kind of content that is working in your website and what is not and exclude it or try to rewrite it.
2. Use proper headings:
   Heading works more like a sitemap for your visitors to understand your content or article. They are also useful for search crawlers to help them recognize your website’s content which makes it easier for search engines and visitors to understand your website.
3. Improve site navigation:
   You should aim towards making your website easy and fun to browse through, with that being said; you should avoid using complex menus, make sure your mobile site’s navigation is easy to use.You should include a navigation menu as well as a search bar in all your pages.Be descriptive and clear to where each item leads your site visitors.
4. Relevant content:
   You should always consider the relevancy of your content to your target and always think of using keywords properly and not use black hat SEO methods such as keyword stuffing.
   You may also use unique selling points to point out why and how your products benefit people instead of just focusing on the features.

A final word

Speak with the audience visually! The UX design goes hand in hand with content; 93% of communication is non-verbal because people tend to interpret images easier than they do words.

If you’re looking to create a great user-experience, then you need to consider the factors we talked about and do NOT forget that your content is your main recipe to achieve SEO greatness!