We all know how vital SEO is for web positioning since it directly affects your rankings and organic traffic. But other strategies also impact SEO. Although ranking any website, SEO also considers if a site has relevant keywords and backlinks.
According to Sytian, a web design philippines company – “user experience directly impacts SEO as it can be correlated to user behavior and website performance. It has become one of the most significant aspects of search engine optimization”.
Here are some factors that search engines consider:
- Does your site load fast?
- Is it mobile-responsive?
- Do you post quality content for users?
- Is it easy to navigate your site?
What is user experience (UX)?
Before understanding how UX can affect SEO, you must first know UX’s core aspects. UX stands for user experience and is often related to the design aspect of your site. This involves the position of texts, fonts, theme uses, menu links, etc.
So, UX is related to how user-friendly your site can be. How easy will it be for a user to navigate your site? Having an excellent user-friendly design is vital as other factors because search engines have significantly modified their way of ranking web pages. Thus, UX has become a critical aspect of SEO.
Now that you know the basics, here are the ways how a UX design can impact your site’s SEO:
1. Site accessibility
You must ensure that your site can be accessed and navigated by people of all abilities. Doing so allows you to engage with as many people as possible, enhancing your SEO rankings in the long run.
It would help if you also took the time to ensure that differently-abled users can explore your online offerings with relative ease. This offers more opportunities for conversions.
2. Mobile-responsive design
A mobile-responsive design has now become mandatory when it comes to web development. That’s because more than 50% of all web traffic now comes from mobile.
Thus, sites that aren’t mobile-responsive will lose up to 50% of their audience from the start. Moreover, if your site isn’t responsive, you’ll soon see your user-engagement metrics “crash and burn.”
As more and more people have become primarily mobile users, you should accommodate this by tailoring your content specifically for mobile devices.
To check for your site’s mobile responsiveness, you can use Google’s Mobile Responsiveness Test.
3. Simple navigation and site structure
The thing is, your site structure is not only crucial for users. It’s your site’s roadmap for search engines as well. Remember that many visitors will enter your site via your home page.
Ideally, your site should be easy to navigate, no matter what the search engine crawler or the searcher lands on.
4. Better loading speed
There’s nothing more annoying than having to wait for a slow-loading site. As each second passes, it’s even more likely for your audience to leave before they even have time to access your page.
If an audience leaves your site before the page can load fully, this can negatively affect your bounce rate. While there isn’t much you can do for a user’s low internet connection. You can ensure that your site is optimized. That way, it will load in the shortest amount of time. You can also optimize photos, minify file sizes, and combine different CSS/JavaScript files.
Moreover, also ensure that your site makes the fewest server HTTP requests possible. All of these factors usually contribute to your page loading speed.
5. User-friendly permalink structure
Permalinks are the permanent URLs in your blog posts and pages. These are vital for your SEO since they usually give search engines an idea of your posts or your page.
Now, if you have permalinks that are too long and difficult to read, it’s also highly likely that search engines will have difficulty crawling and indexing your content. This can hurt your SEO rankings in the long run.
6. Longer session durations
Bounce rates will often indicate how many people have visited your site, only to leave within seconds. They do this because you:
- Fail to give them a first impression
- They’ve made a mistake (accidentally clicked your site on accident)
- You have used black hat tactics to lure them, which you can get penalized for
Meanwhile, long session duration is a significant search engine ranking factor. It shows that what you’re delivering is quality. In the same way, most of your visitors are qualified leads.
In other words, the session duration helps you rank well. A great UI/UX design also helps you get there in no time.
7. Use proper headings
The thing is, headlines are often overlooked regarding how UI design could affect SEO. If you’re not using relevant headings on your site, search engine bots wouldn’t understand the purpose of your site.
Thus, your site will not rank as high as with carefully thought-out headings. But when they’re used appropriately, search engine indexers will understand what your site is all about so much easier.
While it’s essential to use the correct headings, make sure you don’t use too many headings. Getting the right balance allows you to enhance your SEO rankings.
8. Streamline your menus
It would help if you also designed your menu in a way that isn’t too complex. Ensure that your audience can easily find what they’re looking for.
Similarly, you can use categories and subcategories that ensure your users can easily find what they’re looking for most efficiently.
Aside from that, it would help if you also listed the most important pages. Ideally, provide drop-down menus for multiple pages in a single category.
If your menu bar is too crowded, it’s difficult for the user to find what they’re looking for, which translates to poor user experience.
Over to You
So, there you have it. A UX design should be a crucial part of any SEO strategy. That’s because it directly affects your SEO rankings.
A good UX design usually starts with understanding how users perceive and interact with your site. You should also consider other factors like menu design, page speed, URL structure, and mobile responsiveness.