SEO and UX – Formula For Success

Is your business now frustrated that the requirements of SEO have changed yet again? Well, SEO is a moving target, and the job is never done, so change is to be expected. Continue with optimising your website including the use of appropriate keywords and tags, but now you need to do more to secure the best rank in search results. SEO experts suggest SEO and UX is the formula for success.

SEO and UX Explained

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is all about being attractive for search engines. With SEO, your website is highly optimised to attract the ‘targeted audience’. You want visitors with a genuine interest in what you do and thus are most likely to stay on your website visiting many pages and ideally become a customer. Without the right SEO, you get more visitors that have arrived at your website without a keyword match and so they will bounce off it in seconds, so SEO is fundamental to performing well in search engines.

UX (user experience) is about your website’s personal engagement with visitors. The visitor will form an emotion based on their experience on your website. Your website needs to attract, and please your targeted audience.

How SEO And UX Work Together

SEO and UX can be compared to many great partnerships albeit some are notorious like ‘Bonnie and Clyde’. Independently Theoretically, they do great work, but only together they achieve a lot more.

Simply put, SEO has all the data that UX needs to provide users with the best experience. UX has the site structure and information about content that SEO needs to improve the ranking position. One needs the other to be fully optimized.

Only when SEO and UX work together are users provided with the best experience from the initial keyword search in Google through to browsing your website and satisfying their need.

To run a successful business website, you can not just focus on SEO, which is more technical. UX is crucial, which is a little bit like pampering the visitors as soon as they land on your homepage.

Intuitive Website Design

Forget about blinding the visitor with pop-ups as soon as they land on your site. Let them ‘get in the door’ so to speak and whatever you use to encourage engagement must be targeted to that visitor for their optimum experience.

Keep the design uncluttered remember ‘less is more’. Choose colors that work with your brand. Always proofread all content.

Landing pages need extra special attention to detail to get a high engagement outcome. Often landing pages associated with marketing campaigns are rushed through and fail to impress so spend more time than usual on all pages your visitors land on frequently.

Excellent Website Speed

Page load time needs to be quick. Use free tools like Pingdom to monitor your site load time. If your website loads in 1.7 seconds it’s faster than 75% of the web says SemRush. Slow load time will end up in a higher bounce rate, which is not good for SEO and your ranking in search engines.

You need to get rid of any obsolete unoptimized apps and plugins, make sure your images or videos are not too heavy or your website is not full of advertisements. It will not only improve customer satisfaction but also make your landing page more usable.

Headings Taxonomy

Your site needs to use the correct headings in content. Use H1 for the title and H2, H3 etc. for the headings structure within the content, especially blog posts.

Make sure your keywords are in the headings, and of course this is not just for the search engines, perfect headings taxonomy works for UX too.

Summary

With AI and big data and the everchanging algorithms, you can never stop refining your website SEO strategy. Today the focus is also on UX, tomorrow it will be on something else, so watch this space.