How are SEO and UX Connected?

In this day and age, businesses can lag behind if they approach search engine optimization (SEO) and user experience (UX) as separate from one another. Columnist Sherry Bonelli of Search Engine Land explains that SEO is not just about keywords and backlinks anymore. When Google and other search engines determine which pages should rank higher on the results, they now pay attention to user interests and experiences too.

This makes it critical for businesses to integrate the elements of UX into their SEO practices. To put it simply, SEO attracts site visitors by showing up on search rankings; UX engages these visitors to convert them into customers. In order to audit your website, you can use an SEO Checker. This will help you improve your site for the search engines and most importantly the users.

Both SEO and UX, therefore, share a common goal of delivering the best customer experience. As previously discussed in an article on ‘Ways to Improve Customer Experience’, businesses that focus on the experience can create lifetime value and outperform their competitors.But how exactly can SEO and UX be integrated to improve the customer experience as well as a business’ bottom line? Read on to find out the areas where SEO and UX intersect, and how you can invest in them.
‍

Content strategy

No matter how relevant your content is to your target audience, they will have no interest in reading it if it’s not presented in an engaging way. A good content strategy thus achieves its goal of increasing conversion rates when you think about SEO and UX hand-in-hand. SEO tells you what kind of content to create and how much; UX directs you on how to put it on your website.
Search Engine Journal’s guide to using headers provides a way to structure your content and maintain readability while still allowing search engines to assess your page’s relevance. It is advisable to use one H1 tag for the main theme, then follow the logical hierarchy for your subheadings by using H2 and H3 tags.

‍‍

Quality score

It is a known fact by now that keywords are a huge part of SEO. The words and phrases you use in your web content enable users to discover your site/business via search engines. But as mentioned earlier, on top of keywords, Google takes into account factors related to UX when deciding where to place web pages in the search results.

To do this, Google gives each keyword a ‘quality score’. A quality score as explained by Ayima is calculated from your site’s historical performance, your keywords’ relevance to the search term, and your landing page’s ability to deliver a good user experience. A viable way to tie in your UX with your SEO and thus achieve a high-quality score is to speed up your page loading time. A quick and responsive website with efficient hosting options convinces users to continue using your site and engage with your content.

Mobile optimization‍

Mobile devices have been driving more than half of all global web traffic since 2017, based on data from Statista. There is a reason, then, why Google has been prioritizing mobile user experience for its ranking system. To align your website with Google’s mobile-first indexing and get a ranking advantage, a Forbes article advises you to maintain content consistency across multiple devices and screen resolutions.

This means ensuring information is neither hidden nor cluttered on mobile devices, which you can achieve by using an accordion composed of vertically stacked headers. You can also improve loading times for mobile users by disabling auto-play media formats and enabling image compression.

‍

Website navigation

It’s also important to focus on how seamlessly users can navigate your website and visit multiple sections/pages. A simple and intuitive website architecture means search engines can easily find and index your pages, which is good for SEO. Meanwhile, properly arranging your menus and options and labeling them with catchy call-to-action can increase user satisfaction and time spent on the website.

With all this in mind, you can now hopefully see how SEO and UX work in tandem to generate high organic traffic, enhance conversions, and generally cater to the needs of your target audience. Suppose you want to learn more about how to balance SEO strategies and UX elements to achieve these goals. In that case, our design learning platform has a range of Courses and workshop offerings depending on your skill level and experience.

Check out UI/UX course on PlayStore.

Check out UI/UX course on AppStore.