SEO clearly doesn’t stop at rankings and leads. Because attention is money, and if your website isn’t easy and quick to navigate, no one will stick around.
This is why user experience is critical while performing SEO. Imagine planning to buy a new pair of shoes. You see a result on the SERP and land on an e-commerce website.
But the moment you click on a shoe design you like, you experience slow page loading, poor-quality shoe images, an unclear size selection guide, etc.
So when UX merges with SEO, magic happens. A good user experience isn’t about pretty websites or HQ images. It’s about holding the visitors on your page and keeping them engaged.
In this blog, let’s understand everything in SEO and UX.
What’s The Relationship Between UX and SEO?
Think of SEO as an invitation, and UX as the experience.
This summarizes the relationship between UX and SEO, as discussed in a recent Search Off The Record podcast published by Google Search Central and featuring Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes, and Lizzi Sassman.
The synergy between SEO and user experience is critical to ensuring that visitors have an excellent time navigating your website and that you keep them coming back.
Considering multiple ranking factors accidentally leaked via the March 2024 Google Search Document, this relationship holds immense value and negates treating UX and SEO as separate silos.
This is because search intent must meet usability, as great content must also be easily consumable. Now, check out the list of key user experience factors affecting your SEO efforts:
What UX Factors Affect SEO Performance?
While talking about UX, the importance of web design cannot be underscored, as it plays an equal role in fueling an excellent user experience.
Continuing on it, a good UX impacts a range of SEO-relevant elements.
Let’s explore the most critical ones:
1. Page speed & core web vitals
You don’t like slow websites, right? Well, neither do your target customers.
As per Google, around 53% of mobile visitors quickly abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
This is a broader issue because page speed isn’t merely a UX factor, but a much bigger ranking factor.
And this is where Core Web Vitals act as the epicenter. Check out how:
- Largest Contentful Paint [LCP] – Slow loading of the largest visible content, which could include your images, banners, or even sometimes, headlines.
- First Input Delay [FID] – Delay in responding to the first user interaction. This tells you how responsive your website and its pages are to user input.
- Cumulative Layout Shift [CLS] – Unstructured or unexpected page & elements movement during loading.
2. Mobile-responsiveness
By adopting the mobile-first indexing framework, Google now strictly evaluates mobile versions of your website before moving to the desktop one.
What it simply means – If your site isn’t mobile-optimized, you are directly risking both a bad user experience and lower rankings.
For an uninterrupted experience, a good responsive web design is important to ensure content adjusts itself smoothly to multiple screen sizes simultaneously.
3. Website architecture and user navigation
Whenever users visit your website, they should find what they’re searching for as quickly as possible, that too, within a few clicks.
That’s the importance of logical navigation, where your site is systematically structured with consistent menus, elements, and internal links that help users and search engines—and not confuse them.
A poorly structured website will severely impact UX, thus leading to higher bounce rates and lower crawling efficiency.
Whereas a good UX optimization will result in better crawlability and help explore new ways to boost website conversion rates.
4. Content Layout and Readability
Even the most SEO-optimized and user-friendly content may fail if it isn’t structured and hard to read.
Pushy ads, cluttered layouts, inconsistent font styles, poor internal linkings, unclear headings, and walls of text only add up to the reader’s frustration.
This affects user experience, impacts SEO performance, and discourages engagement instead of convincing readers to stay.
5. User engagement metrics/signals
While these might not be direct ranking factors, metrics like bounce rate, dwell time, and click-through rates [CTR] do communicate to search engines how visitors consider your content.
If they keep on scrolling without holding on to a page or a section, it demonstrates bad dwell time and signals that visitors didn’t find any value.
Or if they quickly exit your website or its pages, it raises your bounce rate, which again, is not a good UX and SEO signal.
How to Optimize UX Factors for SEO Performance
For offering an intuitive experience to visitors, your website must be smooth, fast, and easily navigable via multiple interactions.
Google rewards websites that users enjoy interacting with and spending time on, thus making UX an integral part of any SEO strategy.
Check out a few ways of user experience optimization elements:
1. Page speed & core web vitals
Identifying what’s working and what’s broken is important before making changes.
By performing a complete UX audit, you can uncover roadblocks that might be hurting both your user experience and SEO.
Here are a few tools you can use:
- Google Analytics – Track demographics, bounce rates, session rates, pages with high exits, and multi-device user behavior.
- Semrush & Google Search Console – Perform technical audits for broken links, slow-loading pages, indexing issues, crawl errors, etc.
- Hotjar & Microsoft Clarity – Visualize your site visitors’ behavior through heatmaps, scroll depth, button interactions, navigations, and session recordings.
2. Improve core web vitals performance
Core web vitals are not just performance metrics. They’re an integral part of ranking signals as they throw light on how fast your site loads and the experience that it offers.
By using tools like GTMetrix, PageSpeedInsights, and Chrome Dev Tools to optimize your Core Web Vitals, you can implement the following steps:
- Improve LCP [Load Speed] – Look out for images and media files that are relatively bigger. Compress them, eliminate render-blocking resources, and enable lazy loading.
- Enhance FID [Responsiveness] – Reducing third-party scripts and minimizing JavaScript execution will help improve responsiveness, thus offering smooth usability.
- Fix CLS [Layout Shifts] – Determine size attributes for media and avoid injecting content above the fold.
3. Simplify Website Structure and Navigation
If your visitors can’t find what they have come searching for in a few seconds, they’ll surely drop, and so will your rankings.
This is why a clear site structure is mandatory. So while discussing details with your UI/UX services agency, remember these best practices:
A) Flat Site Architecture – At all costs, stay miles away from click depth. This means—your most important pages must be reachable within 2-3 clicks at max.
B) Breadcrumb Navigation – Implement breadcrumbs to enhance user experience and improve SEO.
As a result, it will help users with a clear navigational path, reduce unnecessary clicks, and help search engines understand your site’s structure.
C) Attractive CTAs – Guide visitors with appealing and consistent CTAs placed across the website at strategic spots to encourage action and help maximize the desired ROI from SEO activities.
D) Logical Menus – The best idea here is to club multiple similar pages under one header and reduce the number of top-level links.
Less clutter in the menu section will offer users quick decision-making and engagement.
4. Improve content quality
Web visitors tend to skim and not read online content. Skimming means a quick yet systematic scan of textual content published alongside infographics, banners, etc.
Structuring your paragraphs, headings, and overall text will allow them to quickly consume your content, thus boosting engagement and lead generation opportunities.
The more quickly they skim, the higher the chances of Google parsing your content more efficiently.
So if you’re a services company, an e-commerce store, a D2C brand, or even someone executing programmatic SEO at scale, here are a few UX SEO best practices:
- Hierarchy: Ensure proper, context-driven usage of H1-H4 tags complemented by short paragraphs and a table of contents.
- Bullets and Lists: Ditch lengthy walls of text by breaking them down into bullet points, lists, tables, etc. This will help make scanning easier and also emphasize key points.
- Visual Elements: Use catchy infographics, icons, and images to support your content. Doing so will not only improve user experience but also help boost session rates on your site.
- Mobile-first formatting: As a thumb rule, ensure your content carries the correct font size, line spacing, and layout as necessary for mobile devices.
Conclusion
If you’re keen on improving your SEO performance, good UX is necessary.
By providing visitors with an excellent user experience and SEO, you can persuade them to stay longer, engage better, and complete the desired lead generation actions.
Now that you know the what, why, and how of UX SEO, it’s time for action.
Contact us today to get your SEO and user experience fixed.
