Connecting User Experience with SEO for Improved Performance

A great SEO strategy will bring in plenty of traffic, but you also need to ask yourself how those visitors behave on your website. Your marketing objectives should align with business goals and as a result with user interactions — clicks, purchases, downloads, signups etc.

The next step after a great SEO strategy is creating an appealing user experience. If you fail to generate engagement from visitors, your conversion rates will start falling off, affecting your search rank as well. Poor engagement metrics associated with low conversions will result in Google de-ranking your pages.

UX and SEO

While SEO is an essential part of any marketing strategy, solely having a high number of visitors won’t be enough. To achieve marketing objectives, you need visitors to convert or come closer to converting.

To turn traffic into paying customers, your website should be gradually optimized for conversions. User experience (UX) design is an important factor in creating high-converting pages and enabling users to convert more easily.

The Impact of UX on Search Engine Marketing

Performance UX is an ongoing, data-driven strategy that helps you build experiences based on data collected from your users and target audiences. The expectations of your users are constantly changing, meaning you need to adapt every time a significant shift in behaviour takes place.

The optimization is done alongside your SEO marketing efforts, always collecting data and identifying new opportunities to improve conversion. Instead of making abrupt design changes, you should make incremental improvements so your UX does not throw off your existing users.

Connecting UX and SEO

The easiest way to understand the connection between UX and SEO is that with effective UX you convert into leads and customers more of the traffic that SEO brings in. At the same time, the link between UX and SEO is much more complex, when you consider the number of usability factors that directly affect your search ranking.

Here are some of the UX essentials Google’s search algorithm looks at:

• Navigation
• Behavioural metrics; bounce, average time on site, page views
• Mobile-friendliness
• Site speed
• Popups
• Content accessibility
• Content formatting
• Content readability

These are underlying UX metrics, but the search algorithm takes all of them into account to assess how well structured your website is. Google looks at user signals that generate a picture of how usable your website is.

Websites that score poorly across UX metrics will start receiving lower traffic as it does not align with a favourable experience for Google’s users.