There is no doubt left over the question if User Experience (UX) is important for a better audience engagement. The discussion has now shifted to the best ways of blending UX with SEO in order to improve your site’s performance. UX helps you get more audiences as it focuses on aesthetic preferences, usability, and industry trends. While on the other hand, SEO focuses on getting a better visibility on search engine. A good blend of User experience design and SEO brings a positive increase in ROI.
Google’s Webmaster Guidelines (ref : help visitors use your pages) suggests that content creators and curators should focus more on UX not SEO as users should be more important for them instead of search engine. It should be considered that SEO alone cannot work as long as UX is not in alignment. If you are in the habit of stuffing your articles with key words then you need to change as the trend has long gone. Here is how you can merge UX and SEO to get better audience engagement.
1. User Focused Content
Websites that create great content are rewarded by Google instead of those who purely focus on technical page optimization. Both the design of the content and its optimization has to play an important role in the amount of time users spend on your page. The aim should be to impress users and not engine.
2. Readable
It is important for a page to be readable and well-presented to get readers’ approval and good response. The content of a page should be relevant, clear, and informative and it should cover its topic as widely as possible, so as make the page search engine friendly. For enhanced UX, readability should give a pleasant experience and create a positive impression among readers. In order to make it SEO friendly readability has to be clear, concise and informative so to increase the page authority. Earlier there was a lot of focus on key words but there is no need for that anymore because it is not important for the page’s ranking on SERPs. In many cases keywords can affect the quality of the content and pose a challenge to readability which is not appreciated by search engines or users.
3. Visuals
Visual appeal of a page can be beneficial for both SEO and UX. While UX uses visual to make the page and content more appealing for the readers, SEO uses visual content to attract more traffic as there has been a considerable increase in visual search engines. Visual appeal can impact the browsing experience in terms of both UX and SEO. It should be taken into consideration that human brains can process visuals faster and therefore images and videos can play a big role in the overall response that a page gets.
4. Usability
Usability is concerned with the functionality of a page where easy navigation plays a vital role. Elements such as internal link structure, easy navigation and clear navigation labels make the content more pleasing and beneficial for the readers. It also enhances the chances of getting more information and being satisfied. Besides, sitemaps also prove useful as they can help the crawling of a site, navigation and indexing.
5. User Retention
The aim here is to retain the users that visit the page or site. Both UX and SEO try to either make them loyal towards site or compel them to subscribe. It is important to tell users what are they going to get in return as only that can bring them back.
@envigo Our skilled UI/UX ninjas are always focused on delivering correct and creative UX solutions to our clients in concurrence to their business objectives and help in boosting qualified leads and visitor engagement.
