The Lowdown on the Relationship between User Experience and SEO

12 Minute Read
Written by: Branko Ilishev
Dec / 15 / 2021

A website’s content must be crystal clear when it speaks to the target buyer in order to strengthen the relationship between SEO and the user experience. Not optimized content will fail to increase the attraction of leads which will eventually convert. It is inevitable that the search engines will dive deep to evaluate this relationship and based on their scores, they will place your website on its earned positions on the search page results.

Therefore, enhancing the user experience on a website is a step that you must take in order to improve your website’s SEO positioning efforts. When you look at from a wider angle, it becomes obvious: content, UX, and SEO are tightly connected.

Consequently, during the website building process, SEO and User Experience are two critical variables that every SEO and Web agency should tackle in a coordinated and collaborative manner with the same purpose: to launch a website that will have a successful start and will be ready to fight its online competitors.

What is SEO in marketing?

Here is where we can refine a bit more and forget about all of the technical jargon and terminology, allowing us to concentrate on the role that a solid SEO strategy plays in marketing. Like with everything digital marketing, knowing your audience can be stated in one phrase: know your audience. Alternatively, in the case of SEO, achieving it.

If no one sees or knows about your website or blog, it’s pointless to have the best online store or blog as the foundation of your digital marketing campaign. What you are interested in is positioning yourself within the top ten places of search results, which you will primarily do through Google, which accounts for more than 95% of the market share. At the very least, one of the top three. And the first position – that is the ultimate goal.

However, obtaining this goal and maintaining it is dependent on a variety of factors. In fact, one of them is the experience that customers enjoy when exploring your website, which may surprise you.

What is user experience?

The purpose of user experience is to make a website easier to use by making it more straightforward, more transparent, and more coherent. In a nutshell, it aims to make navigating the website the most pleasant experience possible.

In addition to being used in a technical sense (for example, when discussing a website or app), the phrase “user experience” can refer to everyday encounters and interactions that occur in the “real world.”

Consider a memorable encounter that you have had in the past. Perhaps it was a product that was extremely simple to use, a day in which you experienced excellent customer service or a website that allowed you to find what you were looking for quickly and easily. Can’t come up with anything? For example, have you ever had an unpleasant event that caused you to become annoyed, frustrated, or impatient?

For example, a restaurant may have had you wait an hour for your dinner, or a firm may have responded to your complaint about their service with an automated response. However, user experience can be described as the sensations a person feels while engaging with an object or service, such as a product or service.

Now that you have a better understanding of what forms a pleasant user experience, you can begin to see why a positive user experience might lead to increased conversion.

User experience vs. conversion rate optimization – How do they function together?

Any CRO (conversion rate optimization) guide will tell you that you should identify hurdles, test new ideas, and optimize your site on an ongoing basis to ensure that it functions properly at all times. The outcomes of your website will be significantly improved if it is developed with the user experience in mind.

An excellent UX Design strategy is to improve the website’s design so that it is intuitive and easy for users to navigate through it.

With this strategy, your CRO efforts could benefit greatly. According to Google, “concentrate on the user and everything else will follow,” which is precisely what UX accomplishes and what your CRO needs as a result. Let’s take a closer look at how UX can help CRO:

No random experiments

In CRO, modifications are introduced to a website and subsequently tested to continually improve with alterations that have been demonstrated to be more effective. Results are usually better when the idea being tried is based on user experience research.

The CRO team’s reliance on guesswork is reduced by basing CRO tests and hypotheses on UX research findings. UX research is the only way to get the most out of tools and best practices, but it’s not always possible to get the most out of them. CRO is a good indicator of what has to be addressed, but UX research may assist in identifying where you should begin.

CRO can identify and prioritize the most critical design flaws

Conversion rates will permanently be altered if there are other design flaws. Regardless of how much you optimize, your chances of making a genuine difference are slim if you don’t improve your website’s user experience optimization as well as its conversion rates.

Designing with device capability in mind

In most cases, CROs create hypotheses with the desktop site in mind while creating them. It’s more probable that UX Designers will better handle what changes will work best for each platform because a modification that may enhance conversions on a desktop site may not work so well when it comes to a touchscreen phone. Mobile users now outnumber desktop users, making any CRO plan that relies on a desktop-only approach a bad idea. In addition to that, there are numerous reasons to switch to a mobile phone or tablet.

The number of mobile users has long overtaken the number of desktop users, making a desktop-only strategy detrimental for any CRO strategy. Aside from that, there is no shortage of good reasons to move to a mobile device. CRO ‘the UX way’ will undoubtedly open your eyes to new possibilities.

The relationship between SEO and user experience

To explain the relationship between SEO and user experience, we will give you an example. Let’s say you are searching for organic wines on the internet. When you go through the numerous results that emerge in front of you, one, in particular, gets your eye since it claims to have resolved all of your questions about which organic wines or brands are the best.

On the other hand, when you get to the specific website, it turns out that they don’t actually explain anything and are more interested in trying to sell you their line of wines. Disappointment! Consequently, you exit the page quickly and search for another result to enter in order to obtain the information you are genuinely seeking.

One other possibility is that you go to the page that has piqued your interest. While they explain everything in detail and provide links to other options, the page that you are most interested in returns a 404 error, and you are unable to view anything. You’ll have to go back out and hunt for that information on your own, unfortunately.

Listed above are two clear examples of poor user experience that Google will recognize and take notice of: The user has arrived at this URL and has stayed for less than X amount of time before leaving and returning to the previous page. There has been little interaction with anything else during their little time spent on the page (there has been a bounce). This indicates that they were unable to locate what they were looking for, and as a result, Google will not display this page again for the search that they conducted.

In other words, it penalizes your SEO ranking because you did not give a satisfactory customer experience. Because, first and foremost, what Google awards are the pages that visitors return to time and time again, which indicates that they are appealing to the search engine. In addition, Google (as well as any other search engine) wishes for the user to be able to locate what they are searching for. That’s what search engines are for: to find information. There is nothing more important to them than giving you the best service they can.

What are the advantages of improving the user experience?

According to logic, customer service should be the focal point of any user experience. All tools and techniques are intended to boost the usability of the company’s product and service while simultaneously increasing awareness of the company’s product or service. The primary goal is to enhance their level of trust and loyalty towards the organization. There are several perks to working in the user experience field that is worth knowing more about.

Data

By enhancing the online experience of visitors to the website, the company is able to gather vital information about the site and its customers.

Prediction

Having access to valuable data and information will assist the organization in determining the needs of its target market. As a result, it may devise strategies and carry out most effective actions in meeting their needs.

Satisfaction

Increased customer satisfaction needs training of the company’s personnel to improve the user experience on its website. An organization-wide commitment to a clearly customer-oriented philosophy is a precondition for success.

How Google knows if a website offers a good user experience?

To determine whether or not a website provides a good user experience, Google evaluates several different indications. The following are some of the most notable:

CTR

In the case of search engines such as Google, the Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of clicks detected when a site appears in the search results of those engines.

Average time of visit

The term “average time of visit” refers to the amount of time that consumers spend on a website on average. This is connected to the level of satisfaction they experience. It should be emphasized that Google can only request information about how much time people spend on the site if they interact with at least two pages on the site in question.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate indicates the number of users who have arrived at a website from another site and subsequently left it or put the page’s address into the address bar of their web browser after viewing it.

Natural backlinks

When a visitor visits a website from a link on another website with a different domain, this is an example of a backlink that will boost the web positioning of the website, resulting in increased traffic.

What to do to help your website provide a good user experience that will also help your SEO?

Your website must at the very least meet the following fundamental needs in order for everybody who views your page to be satisfied:

  • For example, the fact that it can be read and utilized from any device due to its responsive design is a significant benefit. That is, it is compatible with mobile, PC, tablet, and other devices. The fact that the menu adapts to the screen size may seem obvious, but I do not mean simply that the menu fits the screen size, but that the buttons can be clicked without stepping on them and that the letters of the texts can be read.
  • It also needs to be intuitive so that I don’t have to spend more than half an hour looking for a means to contact you, for example. And it’s even worse if I can’t seem to locate it.
  • It should not take three years to load a page because, although it is rare, there are pages that contain an excessive number of images or videos, which cause the page to load slowly by requiring numerous calls back and forth to the server to complete the task.
  • Of course, you must furnish your website with well-crafted content that is both informative and entertaining. That is to say, high-quality information. It’s either that, or they’ll move on to find another one that answers all of their questions.

The combination of these characteristics and numerous more will cause Google to detect a high amount of time spent on the page and a low bounce rate, leading the search engine to determine that it is worthwhile to include you in the search results. This will assist you in making a name for yourself in your sector and, as a result, improve your brand image or branding efforts.

Conclusion

SEO is all about obtaining high-quality traffic and presenting people with meaningful information in response to their search queries. User experience, on the other hand, is concerned with improving the user’s perception of a website by maximizing its usability and other pertinent elements. As you can see, the relationship between SEO and user experience is vast and significant as everything is interconnected. You can’t put all your effort into one project while neglecting the other. The best course of action is to understand all that marketing involves comprehensively. You will have covered all of your alternatives in this manner, and it will be easier for you to oversell the competition.

About the Author

Picture of Branko Ilishev

Branko Ilishev

Branko is your SEO prodigy. He manages the SEO team and finds creative solutions for your online visibility problems by thinking out-of-the-box. He also translates the collected data of analytics into understandable information that gives you concrete insights.