Garry Grant March 18, 2021 User Experience (UX) is being touted as one of the most critical factors for effective SEO in 2021. With the average attention span of internet users seemingly decreasing by the day, and a generation that expects instant results, the speed and ease of navigation of a website are of utmost importance.
In this post, we’ll be taking a look at UX, what it is, Search Engine Optimization, how to improve it, and why it’s so essential for every website owner.
What Is User Experience?
The phrase is relatively self-explanatory as it’s all about the experience a website visitor receives when they view and navigate your site. A positive UX is made up of several factors including, but not limited to, the following:
- Website loading and page loading speed
- Easy and logical site navigation
- Minimal ads and pop-ups
- Quality content
- Text with plenty of white space and broken up into subheadings
- Content that can be quickly scanned
- A website that’s easy on the eye and pleasant to view
- Keeping it simple
- Having a page of frequently asked questions (FAQ)
- A clear call to action (CTA)
- And more
In essence, the goal for the visitor to have an excellent visual experience and navigate your site easily. It sounds easy, but it’s not that simple as there are other criteria needed to produce the maximum experience, results, and conversions.
How To Achieve Passing Scores for Web Core Vitals?
The numbers below are SEO Inc’s current Scores for Web Core Vitals. The scores encompass the elements of Page Experience. If you have issues reaching numbers like ours, you are not alone.
Who Really Cares About User Experience?
Visitors care about excellent UX, so basically everybody. Dwell time will be improved on a website that offers a positive user experience. Present them with a page loaded up with flashing ads, loud colors, massive blocks of text, and the visitor is likely to click away and go somewhere else.
Site Speed also is a part of tweaking your UX, as long load times need to be a focused effort to fix regarding SEO, and it is an ever more critical aspect in 2021. True, this will also be dependent on the visitor’s internet speed, but even a fast website load time won’t make that much difference if a site has errors, long load time, slow TTFB, and is sluggish when navigating. The aim is to make sure each page on the website opens quickly and seamlessly. It’ll keep visitors on your site and also reduce your bounce rate, which is a good thing for your Google rankings.
Besides Google, Bing also cares about the UX of websites, and we’ll take a closer look at that now.
Does a Poor UX Lead To Lower Search Engine Rankings?
Google especially is placing more and more emphasis on website owners providing a positive user experience for visitors, and it can affect your rankings, positively or negatively. At SEO Inc, we confidently state UX will affect your rankings, conversion rates, and bounce rates. And that adds up to gaining or losing traffic, rankings and new clients
One area Google and Bing are focusing on is site speed. We talked about it earlier, and it’s worth mentioning again. Sites that are slow to load will be disadvantaged when it comes to getting higher placements in the SERP results. It’s not something that will bring a manual penalty or lead to your site being deindexed, but it can lower your rankings and increase your bounce rates.
Google aims to deliver the very best results for a search query. There are many factors involved in how Google arrives at these results. Quality content is always vital, as are natural backlinks. UX ranks right up there as well, as quality overall is becoming the big thing in the search engine world.
If people are visiting a website and immediately bouncing out of it, this is an indicator to the search engines that the site is not offering a good user experience in some form or other. It could be something as simple as the content not being what the visitor expected to find, the site looking like a jumbled mess, to being far too slow to open.
Every website owner needs to look at their website from a visitor’s point of view to tweak, test, and make design changes or adjustments that will improve the UX.
Why Is Technical SEO and UX Also Important?
Technical SEO and UX help with your site’s overall SEO and ranking performance, but it also adds to the user experience in the sense that the website functions technically correct, and delivers the promised content discovered in search results.
- Technical SEO can cover things like:
- The site’s initial interaction with the SERPs
- Overall quality and relevance of the landing page
- Page loading speed
- JavaScript frameworks
- And so much more
The user experience can even go one step further, by providing ways to interact with your site and your brand even after a visitor has left. This could involve inviting them your join your email list, re-marketing, drip campaigns, a social media presence for your brand, and so on.
How To Improve Your Website’s User Experience
In the modern world, every website owner should at least get familiar with the very basics of white hat SEO and UX to really remain competitive moving forward.
We mentioned earlier that one of the best ways to improve the user experience for your website is to view it from the angle of your visitor’s personas:
- What are they hoping to find when they get there?
- Is the content useful and easy to read or scan through?
- If you were a visitor, would you like to spend time on your site?
- Are the pages filled with too many distractions?
- Is the menu and navigation logical, making it easy to locate information, products, or resources?
It’s questions like the above that site owners need to be asking themselves about their own sites, as only then can they hope to improve their website and offer the best UX possible.
Enlisting the help of industry experts who fully understand the mechanics of SEO and high-quality user experience will also help no end. Not all webmasters and online business owners will have the time, knowledge, or inclination to improve the UX of their sites effectively, so you must call on someone who does.
The Takeaway
Moving forward, search engine giants like Google will be factoring in indicators of a positive user experience more and more every time they do an algorithm update. If you want your website to stay ahead of the curve and competition instead of lagging behind, then focusing on providing an exceptional UX for all your visitors is of paramount importance.
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