Out of the key components of a successful SEO campaign, a top-notch website user experience is critical. What can you do to maintain an easy, engaging and intuitive experience for your visitors?
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Why is Good User Experience Critical for a Successful SEO Campaign?
It boils down to making things easier to access for your users and providing useful information that speaks to their needs. As users spend more time on your website (signaling usability of your website for a search intent), the better your website ranks on Google’s algorithm.
In technical terms, a good user experience impacts your core web vitals that consist of the following:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – This measures your website loading speed.
- Interaction To Next Paint (INP) – This measures how responsive your website is to user interactions, such as downloads or add to carts or any other interactive features on your website.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – This measures how visually stable your website is.
These factors have an impact on your SEO success. Curious about your core web vitals? Go into your Google Search Console and look for Core Web Vitals. If you see “Not enough usage data in the last 90 days for this device type” that’s because there is not enough data available in the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) to provide you with your UX data. However, you can still use Page Speed Insights to gather enough information on your core web vitals.
Improved core web vitals, along with good, useful content mapped to users’ search intent and customer journey will ensure a good engagement rate resulting in a lower bounce rate, which is critical for high search engine ranking positions (SERPs).
Remember, a good user experience also creates the foundations for improved crawlability, indexing and eventually search positions for your website.
Let’s look at what creates a winning user experience for your website.
How to Create a Great UX for Improved SEO Performance
- Streamlined Navigation for Users –
A good navigation strategy takes its cues from expected user navigation patterns and allows for intuitive, self-segmentation of users. Start with developing user personas and user stories, know what their goals and expectations are from the website and tailor your website to speak to those goals and expectations through smart layouts and visuals, optimized navigation, explicit messages, and clear calls to action.
- Good Load Speed –
A website needs to load fast, on desktops, tablets and mobile devices. This is because a slower load speed can often lead to site abandonment, increase your bounce rate or lower engagements – all of which can be detrimental to your search engine rankings.
Check your loading speed at Page Speed Insights and work with your development team to resolve factors that might be affecting your website page load speeds.
- Mobile Friendly Site –
Is your website optimized for mobile users? In today’s times, having a website that is responsive to screen sizes, including mobile screen sizes, is critical for high rankings.
Did you know that over 60% of website traffic originates from mobile devices? And features, such as speed, rendering of user interface (UI) designs, including hover and scroll can get distorted on mobile devices unless corrective measures are taken.
Making design responsive to mobile screens is an excellent way to wow your users and subtly guide them to convert on devices that they are most likely to find you.
Ensure images and videos render well on all screen sizes as per Google’s responsive image and video guidelines.
- Use Breadcrumb Navigation –
Use of breadcrumb navigation simplifies user journey when they navigate to a page deep within a site’s hierarchy. Breadcrumb navigation allows users to navigate back to higher-level pages.
Breadcrumb navigation also improves discoverability of content, reduces bounce rate and improves engagement with the website content – all positives for improved search engine rankings.
- Original Content (Avoid Duplicate Content) –
While duplicate content on pages may not necessarily penalize you, it will confuse search bots and users equally.
This may result in unplanned URLs appearing in search results and will also dilute the value of backlinks flowing into duplicate pages.
Duplicate content will also result in undesirable user experience as visitors will lose interest in your website, resulting in low engagement rates – again detrimental to your SEO efforts.
- Fix Broken Links –
Needless to say, broken links are a complete put-off for a user looking for key information in their interactions with your organization. To ensure a good user experience, audit and fix all broken links on your website.
Use a tool such as SEMrush, Moz or Ahrefs to run a website on-page audit to uncover broken links that are triggered by 404 errors (page not found) or a 400 error (bad request).
A broken link that usually happens when you delete a page, rename a page, or restructure a website, not only disrupts a user’s navigation on your website, it also prevents search engines from crawling and indexing pages on your website efficiently, thereby hurting your SEO efforts.
- Streamlined Actions –
Ensure that you include clear calls to action with clear paths that you want the users to follow. Make sure your forms and sign-ins (if any) are simple, easy to fill in and render well on different screens.
If you are an ecommerce site, simplify and streamline your add to cart and checkout streams.
- Focus on Other Aspects of Technical SEOs
While the above UX steps will enhance your website positions, we would be remiss to not mention other technical steps you should take to improve other important website signals you provide to Google that may not be visible to your users. These include:
- Use of structured data
- Use of canonical tags
- Use of meta tags
- Use H tags
- Use of robots.txt
- Use of the https protocol
Conclusion
While optimizing for user experience and making your website rich with technical SEO best practices will lay down the foundations of a good SEO campaign, no amount of isolated conversion optimization or effective design principles will bring visitors to your website. Make sure you integrate best practices for search engine visibility, including meeting technical guidelines, content optimization, indexing, navigation, high quality backlink creation and cross-channel marketing to improve your site’s visibility.
Talk to the best digital marketing company in Naperville that offers long-term, sustainable SEO services in Chicagoland & beyond to discuss your business needs. We do SEO the solid way to make it sustainable and bring long-term revenue for your company.
