While writing down the right recipe for perfect SEO, a lot of people forget the most important ingredient – The UX of the website.
Truly, UX has a big effect on the SEO of the webpages. The UX design and SEO relationship have the power to make or break the success of the website on the search result pages. The better the UX of the site, the better chances it has of ranking higher on the SERPs.
So, how to do it? How to leverage the UX benefits to improve the SEO for a website? Well, here are 5 strategies that will help in improving the UX of the site and give a boost to the SEO strategy.
5 Strategies to Improve UX and SEO: A Brief Rundown
Now, there are plenty of advices online that will talk about how to create an SEO-friendly design. But there is simply too much information on that and frankly, it can get a little confusing. So here we are going to talk about 5 absolute best practices and strategies to improve UX design and SEO of the site.
- Strategy 1: Check Bounce Rate
How are you going to fix something if you don’t know what’s broken in the first place?
This is one of the most widely used SEO best practices by professionals. It gives us an idea of the number of people abandoning the website and why. There are plenty of reasons why the user might be abandoning the site, most common of these reasons can be- hard to understand the content, slow loading site, no recognizable structure to the details, and many more.
According to a study, the sweet spot lies somewhere between 26%-40%. However, this can vary depending on the industry. So before making any drastic changes on the site user experience SEO, check for what really needs to be fixed.
- Strategy 2: Test The Site To Increase Engagement
More often than not, in the hurry to get the site live, companies end up skipping on one of the most important parts of UX SEO best practices – testing the site.
In order to really make an engaging site the businesses need to include elements that the user would enjoy on the pages. And this cannot be done based on just user persona and empathy mapping. Whatever elements the UX designers are applying on the page needs to be approved by the users themselves. And this is where A/B testing comes in. Based on the data collected from this testing, developers can finalize the version of the webpage that will bring maximum conversion.
- Strategy 3: Improve Navigation
Site navigation has always been one of the important best practices in user experience UX design, and now it is an important part of SEO too. When the navigation of a site is perfectly designed, the site will not only get ranked higher, but the main navigation menu will be part of the result as well.
So, how to improve website structure and navigation? Well, for starters, get rid of any complicated multi-level menu system you might have on the site. Be clear on the menu content so that users know where they will land when they click on a link. There are many other ways to improve the navigation on a website. To further improve the site navigation make sure to consult with any web design agency, preferably based in a big city such as New York.
- Strategy 4: Use Engaging Content
Shakespeare wrote amazing sonnets, but we don’t read that kind of content on a regular basis. When it comes to UX design and SEO, you need to provide the users with a source of information that will be easy to comprehend and apply in real life.
Using too elegant of complicated language can baffle the users and a baffled user is more prone to abandon a website quickly. And to prevent that from happening, UX optimization of the content is important. Make the content readable so that engaging with the content is not a problem for the users anymore.
- Strategy 5: Apply Proper Headlines To The Pages
Last but not the least, let’s check out why you need proper headlines to complete this list of strategies.
We have talked about one of the most important UX website design principles – Navigation; now let’s talk about the navigation of the content. How are the users going to distinguish different types of content on the page? In the labyrinth of web page content, the proper use of heading acts as Ariadne’s string, which helps the users find the information they need without having to spend hours on the content.
Without proper headings, the content on your website might as well be a textual information dump without any end or beginning or middle. And needless to say, such user experience on your website will not encourage higher ranking on the search result page.
Wrapping Up: Improving the SEO through UX Point Of View
Ranking high in the search results page is incredibly important for businesses to gain more clients through the website. And in order to do so, they will need an SEO-friendly design. But, ignoring the UX in that strategy is now common. So in order to ensure success of the website, one cannot forget the importance of UX in SEO.
Author Bio:
Pratip Biswas is the Founder and CEO of Unified Infotech, a New York-based web design company that has been featured in Deloitte Fast 500 | Fastest growing tech companies in 2018. His company is working with Enterprises, SMB’s and Start-ups to improve their efficiency through Digital Adoption and help them discover new possibilities through constant innovations. Pratip also writes regularly on Blockchain technology and has been published in publications like “Yourstory”, “Dzone” etc.
