Overview
Businesses that rely heavily on the internet for advertising and marketing should be aware that the Digital Marketing landscape has significantly changed and is continuously changing. Unlike a decade ago when you could rank a site purely based on keywords and backlinks. Nowadays, user engagement variables like bounce rate, time on site, and pages visited have all become critical ranking factors.
Today, Google pays a lot of attention to user interest and experiences. Nowadays user experience on a website has become an integral part of website optimization. That’s why UX design is important in SEO.
Why UX design is important in SEO?
Search engines aim to provide a rich user experience, which includes connecting users with pages that deliver on user experiences too. Search algorithms user interaction with a site evaluates UX signals, which include clicks, dwell time, and more UX signals or indicates a user’s level of engagement and reflects the quality of a site’s UX design. User behavior is a powerful ranking factor. UX Design and SEO go hand-in-hand to provide the best user experience, Therefore UX design is important in SEO.
Below are some UX best practices for SEO friendly User Experience.
5 UX Best Practices for SEO
Simplify Your Site’s Navigation
Source: Dribbble
Help users find the information they’re looking for. Organize content in digestible, SEO-friendly formats that utilize bullets, lists, headers, and imagery. Ultimately, you want users to navigate your site with ease. Complicated navigation structures, although debatably more SEO-friendly, can disrupt a user’s experience, thereby causing them to leave sooner. Oftentimes, stripped-back navigation of fewer pages is SEO-friendly navigation.
You can also follow this guide to know How Artificial Intelligence is helping UX Designers: AI in UX Design
Utilize UX Design to support SEO-friendly Layouts
A well-thought-out design affects the Visitors’ behavior and is directly related to effective SEO promotion. It helps the user find the right information, digest it, and perform the target action. As for search bots, structuring allows them to better assess the page’s relevance.
There are countless cases in which layout design and how content is formatted can disrupt SEO. The simple reason is that aesthetics, like having perfectly sized headers and the right amount of text can get in the way of SEO.
Mobile-First and Responsiveness
Google strongly recommends using responsive design to ensure a positive user experience across devices, Because the majority of users currently access google via mobile search, the search engine now employs mobile-first indexing, which means that search engine crawlers predominantly analyze the mobile version of a page’s content.
Your website should be friendly to the user’s different devices and responsive to different screen resolutions. All the content should be easy to read and all the elements should be laid out correctly.
Improve Page Speed
Page speed quantifies how fast content loads on a page. Page speed is affected by theme and plugin Installations, website coding, and the volume of images, videos, and additional media files that exist on a website.
Slower page speeds correlate with higher bounce rates and less time spent on a page because page speeds affect user experience, and Google ranking algorithm page speed. Files compression, code optimization, and reduction of redirects to another page help improve pages speed
Ensure Consistent Branding
Source: Spotify
Studies have shown that users form an opinion about a website in just 50 milliseconds and that these opinions determine whether they’ll stay or leave. Good UI/UX design and consistent branding help create a positive first impression and are essential to establish credibility, winning user trust, and producing high engagement. Stable branding also improves brand recognition.
To ensure brand consistency, create content guidelines regarding tone, voice, and style, implement consistent color palates, stamp logos on all digital assets, and choose content topics wisely. Align marketing strategies across platforms to create a unified experience.
Final thoughts
Despite departmental differences between marketing and design teams, clear website objectives combined with cohesive project management have helped immensely in creating harmony between UX design and SEO strategy.
Following these UX best practices for SEO helps you in Providing a rich UX SEO that encourages users to stay on your website longer and actively interact with it. Search bots take this as a quality signal, and google rewards you with top rankings, So, it’s a win-win for everyone. This is why UX design is important for SEO.
