Agreed, quality backlinks and powerful keywords are still important SEO factors. But what is more important for Google is user experience. According to search engines like Google SEO is far beyond just link building and keywords. Many significant evolutions have happened since the beginning of SEO. One of the most crucial ones is UX (User Experience). The search engine giant, Google has started to rank websites that provide better user experience on top a long time ago. So, improving your site’s UX is the most important step you should take in case you haven’t worked on it yet.
Today, most businesses know how to find strong keywords and drive traffic. But taking the first page in search results is still a secret strategy for most businesses. The simple answer is improving UX. Both UX and SEO are key ranking factors that go hand in hand and focussing only on one cannot give you expected results. When SEO and UX are worked together, they deliver improved sales and conversions. So, if you have a well optimized website with not-so-good design, it’s high time to improve it. This is the same as optimizing your website for better traffic and conversions. Need help? Then we shall quickly get into effective tips to improve your UX design for SEO.
Simple Tips to Improve UX Design for SEO
Simplify Site Navigation
Let’s start with your site navigation. Although this seems quite basic, most businesses fail in nailing their navigation. A complex site navigation is a bad SEO practice and it affects your SEO results and UX very badly.
Your navigation menu should be easy and accessible from any page of your website. This will especially improve mobile users experience which is a positive ranking factor. So, when designing your site navigation, do not just do it for search engine crawlers. You should keep users in mind and simplify your navigation menu as simple as possible, because your users may get frustrated finding their destination or finding where they are and may leave your site.
Improve Load Speed
If you are in the SEO game already, you must know how fast the poor loading sites experience higher bounce rate. Most users simply leave the website if it takes more than 2 seconds to load. People are getting busy and there are multiple other websites that provide the same services or products you offer. So, you must take measuring and improving your site speed into serious consideration. Moreover, search engines reward faster loading websites with higher ranks.
Take advantage of various pagespeed testing websites to analyze what drags your website back and optimize it.
Optimize for Mobiles
From July 2019, Google started to index mobile sites first to ensure maximum convenience and better experience for mobile users. It also started to rank mobile responsive sites in top positions a couple of years back. So, you are in high time to optimize your site for mobiles if you haven’t done yet. Your upgraded UX design should offer a smooth and easy journey for mobile users. This way not only Google and your users love your site, but they get more engaged with your site. Ultimately, you may experience improved dwell time and lower bounce rate along with higher Google rankings.
Use Image Title Tags
Use image tags for every image you have on your site. Without image tags, your page looks empty or a bad white space appears there when the images don’t load. When you use image tags, the title of the image (name of the image or whatever you mention) will be displayed replacing the white space. This way your visitors will at least know what should be there. Although image tags are to help search engines to read your images or index them, you are doing it for improving user experience as well.
Optimize Images
Conversely, it is more important to compress your images for fast loading. Although you place image tags to help Google and users read what the image is, it is not a great UX design. You should not make your users wait for images to load. Because you never know they might leave your site when having a bad mood and visit your competitor. However, it is equally important to use high-quality and rich graphic designs on your website. Use appealing templates that match with your business. True, graphic designing is expensive, but you can still get vibrant graphic designs at affordable prices from graphic design websites such as Penji.
Use Header Tags Rightly
Using header tags is a basic thumb rule in SEO. However, most people miss out leveraging H1, H2, H3 tags in their site. If you are one among them, make sure you use them rightly. Ensure each page has one H1 with a rich keyword in it and organize H2, H3 tags effectively wherever necessary. Read and understand the whole content before you place these tags for better user experience.
Invest in Quality Content
Content is king. Take advantage of the importance of good quality content. Publish relevant, valuable and engaging content on your site to help readers with answers they are looking for. Also, make sure the content reaches a minimum word count of 600.
The content should be easy to digest, visually appealing with optimized images, image tags, proper headers and fonts to make the readers time more valuable. Great content offers various benefits other than improving SEO and user experience.
Use CTAs
So, finally, make it easy for users to take any actions. Provide simple and neat call to action buttons wherever necessary. This way they don’t waste time in searching for a buy button and making profits for you, not exactly. But placing clear CTAs will help users save time and sometimes the innovative CTAs may inspire users to take action.
Bottom Line
A good SEO friendly UX design makes the users scroll the website and explore it whereas websites with poor UX design chases away their visitors. If you want your website to rank well and drive huge traffic to gain more leads and conversions, your UX design should be SEO friendly. Although SEO and UX are different departments, they should fit into each other for improved website performance. Because it is SEO that drives traffic and UX that drives conversions by engaging users with its design.
