UX And SEO: Balancing Design & Content

SEO is essential to getting people to your site. But to grow sales and leads it’s vital that your website engages users. Your site must encourage users to perform the actions you desire. This is where user experience design comes in. Improving your site from a visual, navigational and clarity perspective will secure customers when they land on your website. Excellent UX is intrinsically linked to quality SEO. This guide will seek to explain what UX is, why it matters and how it impacts SEO. Furthermore, it will show SEO best practices in relation to UX, so you can make necessary adjustments to your site. After all, there is no point in gaining web traffic if the user never follows through on a sale.

UX & SEO: An Explanation

This section will explain the fundamentals of UX and how it affects SEO, site engagement and revenue growth.

What is UX?

User experience (UX for short) design is the process designers use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring, utilising and after-sales care of the product. This includes the branding, design, usability and function of a product.

UX is a broad practice and encompasses many different sub-topics. It is often used interchangeably with User Interface (UI) and the term usability but these are both elements of UX. In the context of this guide, we’ll be discussing UX in relation to websites. As well as UX’s impact on the web interface, usability and SEO.

Why does UX Matter?

So, why does UX matter when it comes to your website? A high-quality user experience on a website can:

Create an emotional connection between your brand and the consumer

By ensuring your brand image is presented consistently across your site, you will build trust and be easily recognised. Depending on the design it can also present your brand as having particular characteristics. You may be conveying your company as having professionalism, out-of-the-box drive or friendliness.

Saves users time by making things happen faster

An essential part of good UX is providing information quickly. Everyone hates to see the spinning loader of doom. By decreasing loading times and providing information front and centre, you’ll reduce consumer frustration. This in turn leads to higher conversion rates.

Provide the right information allowing clients to make a decision

UX is as concerned with the content of your text and images as well as their positioning on a site. Images provide visual cues for users. The correct wording can encourage readers to click a button. The right kind of information can help customers make a choice quicker. UX is as important.

Increases the time spent on the website

By improving the usability and engagement of your site, users will naturally spend longer on it. The more time a user spends on the site, the more engaged they are. This is directly correlated with a higher number of leads and sales for companies.

Does UX affect SEO?

Website design, development and all aspects of marketing should work together to boost a business’s sales. User experience is all about the design and functionality of a website. These are fundamentally connected to SEO for the same reason, to deliver the right information to users so they can make a purchasing decision. These are two main aspects in which UX supports SEO; speed and engagement.

Site Speed Affects SEO

Improved site speed has been recommended by Google for years. But, it was not until the May 2021 core update that site speed was confirmed as a direct ranking fact. The Core Web Vitals update covers three metrics; Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Your website has a time score in each of these aspects. Improvements to reduce the load time will improve your site’s ranking with search engines(SEs). This is especially true for mobile viewing which is at an all-time high.

Rankbrain ranks engagement

RankBrain is a machine learning-based search engine algorithm that Google has utilised since 2015. It automatically measures users’ engagement with search engine results and the websites that are shown on it. It looks specifically at website performance indicators to quickly modify rankings. The better a site performs in performance areas, the better their chances to rank higher on SEs. This includes indicators such as dwell time, bounce rate and actions taken on a site.

UX SEO Best Practices

The two core elements of UX led SEO, speed and engagement, are two of the top-ranking factors nowadays. When these best practices are implemented, website owners will make users happy as well as the robots crawling their site.

Speed Improvements

To improve your website site speed in line with Google’s recommendations, follow the below practices for each area. While these are specific to Google, other SEs also consider site speed a ranking factor. Therefore, it will benefit your business across their platforms too.

Optimise images for faster loading

Optimise images by ensuring the file size is at the lowest size possible without reducing visual quality. They should also be sized to the correct dimensions where possible. You can also implement Google’s WebP images that are 30% smaller than typical JPG or PNG images. While they are smaller they will still maintaining the equivalent quality.

Implement lazy loading for content below the fold. This ensures that resources are only used for the current part of a screen a user is on. If the lazy load is not implemented then all resources on a page are loaded at once. This obviously takes more time than just showing the area of the screen currently being viewed.

Optimising other on-page resources

Minify your CSS and JavaScript. Minifying helps speed up a web page’s download times and reduce parse times. This simplifies how servers read and/or interpret the symbols within CSS, javascript and HTML coding on a site website. It delivers the information from point A to point B without needing to stop along the way.

Another way to optimise resource speeds is through caching. Caching static assets will improve page load for returning users as they will not have to ‘download’ the content again.

3rd Party Scripts

Limit 3rd party scripts such as plugins and extensions. The more scripts that run on a site, the slower it will become. Choose only 3rd party scripts that are vital to your business. You should also optimise dynamic content such as ads, embeds and iframes. Here is a great article from Web.Dev that explains how to optimise your site to improve CLS time.

Improve Hosting Provision

Get a faster web host. Not all web hosting is created equally and most lower-cost hosting packages don’t have as many resources dedicated to them. You are often sharing the hosting with other websites. This means you may experience slower periods if other sites are maxing out on the same server. A web hosting that prioritises speed is usually more expensive. But it could be the thing you need to ensure your site is as fast a possible.

You can also employ a CDN. A CDN stands for content delivery network or content distribution network. It is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and data centres that your website utilises. The goal is to provide high availability and performance by distributing the resources of the site equally amongst users of the service. They ensure content is loaded quicker especially when a website is experiencing high traffic levels.

Engagement Improvements

Increasing engagement and improving performance metrics are necessary to improve rankings. However, it is essential that these enhancements are focused on human users. A person is the one who is going to benefit from these changes. If they like these modifications, their actions will inform SEs how good your site is. Here’s how to boost your website for better user engagement.

Reducing Clicks

Whilst a frequent goal for engagement is to increase time spent on a website, UX should be focused on getting the right information to the right people as quickly as possible. This information is focused on reducing the number of clicks a user needs to perform to make a decision. Primarily, this can be down to improved navigation and highlighting the correct route for a customer.

These are a few design elements to work on to improve the navigation throughout your site.

• A clear and concise menu at the top of the page. This should show your main pages and areas of a site. The menu should be located where users expect to find it. This is called design standards. For a primary menu, it means its location should be at the top of the page and usually centred right.
• A usable mobile menu that is also in the right location is essential. Mobile devices in many cases are used more than browsers to view a website. But many developers fail to ensure the menu works effectively on these devices.
• Utilise breadcrumbs. A Breadcrumb, or Breadcrumb Trail, is a secondary navigation that displays to the users their location on a website. When a website has a lot of pages, breadcrumb navigation can increase the usability and findability of website areas. It can also help users quickly return to a previous page. This is helpful if they do not find the correct information on the current page selected.
• Highlight links using standardised formats. Items like text hyperlinks should utilise underlining and colour differences in their design to highlight it as a link. Buttons should clearly explain what a user will find when they click the button (i.e. View Services, Contact Us).

Optimise for different devices and apps

Internet users can interact with your website in many different ways. It’s therefore important to optimise your website for these different methods. A website should work effectively on a desktop but also on a tablet or mobile device. The functionality and design should also work effectively through apps that may utilise an iframe to show your site. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and other social media platforms allow you to view a website within their app. But they frequently work less effectively because of the viewing limitations. A website should be tested on all available devices. This is the best way to find what limitations there are that need to be considered.

Clarity is Everything

Helping users understand how your website works is essential. Providing clear information on products and services is also vital. To do this your site must have clarity. Clarity encompasses many aspects of UX. Ultimately, a simplistic website will generate leads and make sales. This is because users can make a quicker more informed decision when information is presented clearly.

• Interactions should be clear. As discussed in the navigation section, clarifying to users what will happen before they click a link or interact with a page element can ensure a smooth experience. Use consistent features, clear language and standardised visuals.
• The readability of your text is vital to ensure clarity. Readability can ensure key points are understood by the reader. It should lead to them being able to make a decision based on the content.
• Images should be instructive or add to the story. Stock images are frequently poor choices if the context is not considered properly. An image should clearly relate to the content of the page.

On-page optimisation

The last point I’d like to make on engagement takes us back to the beginning of a customer’s journey. When they find your site via a search engine. A user must be enticed to click on your search engine result. If they are not, they won’t click. This means that the SEO title, meta description and URL must look good to them. But, it is also essential that these optimisations are also accurate. If a user clicks through to a page from a SERPs and discovers something completely different on the page, they will likely leave the site immediately. Optimising this metadata is essential for on-page SEO but accuracy is vital for improved user experiences.

The balance between UX and SEO

Sometimes the design of a site can conflict with the best practices of SEO. Every website will be different in terms of style and brand. However, there are many standardised elements that can ensure users can utilise the site effectively. These should always be kept in mind. SEO also has many best practices that developers and marketers can rely on to inform content and design. UX designers will frequently need to find the balance between a quality design that is optimised for SEO. The choice of which is down to the business and what is a priority.

Testing different options is one of the most effective ways of discovering what should take precedence for your customers. SEO and UX are equally non-static practices. You cannot set it and forget it. Both should be continually developed in line with the latest best practices. Modify your website to give your target audience what they want today not six months ago. Above all, focus on your users and the rest will follow.

Improve Your Website’s UX and SEO

If you would like help with your UX and SEO strategy, get in touch. I provide an honest consultative approach to getting the right balance between UX and SEO to improve your rankings and boost your business. Contact me today to find out my current availability.