SEO and UX are closely intertwined. Both should be considered when optimizing your website. At first glance, you might think that search engine optimization (SEO) is all about search engines and user experience (UX) is all about people, but Google says that ranking websites organically is It says it's about providing content that benefits people. . So, while SEO is focused on getting pages visible in search engines, those pages should also be focused on the end user and provide him with the information and shopping experience he wants.
What is the difference between SEO and UX?
SEO is about ensuring that your website appears in search engines and that the pages that appear are ranked. This may include technical updates to ensure your site is crawled and indexed. Or it could be a content update that focuses on a relevant and important keyword theme and increases your page's visibility for that theme.
UX optimization, on the other hand, is the analysis of a website based on how customers use it. This mainly focuses on design, page layout, and usability. UX best practices focus on look and feel and how potential customers interact with her website.
Although SEO and UX focus on different factors, they still influence each other considerably. When making SEO recommendations, you should at least factor UX into the equation.
Need to optimize SEO, UX, or both?
SEO and UX overlap in many ways. While many of the SEO recommendations are tied to improving user experience, it's important for an SEO professional to know how their efforts could potentially impact her SEO, UX, or both. There are four optimizations.
Content optimization
Content is king. Producing quality content that answers potential customers' questions, shows people what they're buying, or provides a unique perspective on a topic is what leads and marketers love about her. That's what you want from a website. However, SEO and UX look at content differently, even though they both accomplish the same mission of creating high-quality content.
Simply put, SEO is very focused on high-quality content because low-quality content won't get indexed. If you have a lot of low-quality pages with no content, thin content, or pages that don't provide any value, search engines will ignore it. SEO professionals want high-quality content to appear in the SERPs and continue to drive crawling and indexing on the rest of your website. SEO experts also focus on on-page optimization, including making sure the page is contextually relevant to the keyword theme in metadata, headings, and body content.
UX focuses on the experience a user has after visiting a page, but many of the optimizations completed for SEO can also impact UX optimization. Some of the UX elements considered for high-quality content relate to the site's design, templates, and aesthetics. Does the font size and color look appropriate on both mobile devices and desktop? Does the page have enough white space so that the content is easily consumed? How can visitors quickly find the information they are looking for? Is it easy? Is the quality and design of your content appealing to visitors to avoid high bounce rates? These are all questions that need to be answered to ensure a good user experience, but which ones? Is it more important?
verdict: Optimize with SEO in mind, but also consider UX.
Being creative and fitting SEO best practices into the allotted space on the page is truly an art form. The content management system you use may have character limits and you may need to save your words. Getting the copy the right length so it doesn't affect the layout of the page is important for UX. However, if you don't target your pages to relevant keyword themes, your ability to create a great page experience is limited.
When considering how to integrate SEO and UX optimization of your content, considering strategically placed headers can be a good optimization method. From an SEO perspective, carefully including targeted keywords in your headlines will help your content rank. But when it comes to UX, headers make it easier to scan and help visitors find information faster. When people have a specific question they need answered, many people don't read the entire article, but scroll to see if there's a header that addresses what they're looking for.
The copy and content on the page should also be viewed from both perspectives. SEO copy tends to get a reputation for being long-winded in nature, and blog posts are the epitome of what great SEO can deliver from a traffic standpoint. However, optimizing your service and category pages for e-commerce requires different styles of copy, depending on what you want to achieve.
Site speed and key web vitals
Site speed and stability, as measured by Google's Core Web Vitals, are important for both strong SEO and strong UX. How many times have you backed out of a website when it doesn't load as quickly as you expected? The longer it takes to load, the more likely the visitor is to bounce from her website. A poor user experience impacts your bottom line.
For SEO, technical optimization involves meeting certain key web metrics in Google Search Console. Placing key web vitals where metrics can pass through will improve your site's speed and stability, but it's also a small ranking factor. Google uses good core web vitals as a tiebreaker to rank faster, more stable sites higher than slower, less stable sites, all other things being equal.
When it comes to UX, I feel that the faster your site, the better. Our patience is running thin when it comes to sites not loading quickly. Additionally, sites with lots of ads and interstitials that pop up when the page loads can negatively impact the UX. As pages load and content and links move, visitors are more likely to click on something they didn't mean or get lost on the page.
verdict: Optimize for UX, but also consider SEO metrics.
Ultimately, you want a fast website with better conversion rates and a better user experience. Plus, it helps with SEO.
mobile experience
Being mobile-friendly is also a big consideration, as more and more people use their smartphones to purchase products and services and find information. If your website doesn't look good or is difficult to use on mobile devices, your visitors will find a website that provides a better experience.
Google uses mobile-first indexing to crawl the web, so SEO takes the mobile experience into account. So when Google renders your page, it takes your mobile experience into account. Therefore, when optimizing SEO (be it content or important web elements), you should prioritize mobile over desktop.
UX focuses on the mobile experience, as a significant number of users access most sites on their mobile phones. If he cannot use the website on his mobile phone, he will visit the website that can. Too much scrolling will cause users to get frustrated and leave. Considering tap targets and the size of visuals on the page will help users read and interact with the content on the page.
verdict: Optimize both SEO and UX.
Many sites don't, but it's best to optimize for a mobile-first mindset in both SEO and UX. Google judges your site based on mobile experience, and so will your customers.
Navigation and internal links
Navigation and internal links make it easy to access the entire site. If it takes a lot of clicks to navigate your site, or if sections of your site are completely isolated, those pages won't get any traffic.
For SEO, flat site architecture passes link authority from the homepage and other important pages to every corner of the website. This is very important for e-commerce sites that have a large number of different category pages. Linking to as many categories as possible will make subcategories and products appear higher up in your site hierarchy, giving them more authority. Navigation labels are also a great place to use important keywords, but without sacrificing user experience.
Internal links outside of header and footer navigation also help pass link authority to groups of similar pages. Content hubs are a common way to organize related topics around a broader keyword theme.
When it comes to UX, the ideal main navigation tends to get you to most of your website in 2-3 clicks. A well-organized main navigation will encourage more visitors to stay, browse, and convert. You also want the navigation to be aesthetically pleasing and easy to understand at a glance so people can find what they're looking for. Internal links can also help drive someone to convert and keep customers on your site to read related content.
verdict: Optimize for UX, but also consider SEO.
How to incorporate UX into your SEO recommendations
As AI and Google's Search Generative Experience continue to make inroads into the search industry, Google continues to focus on EEAT to fight spam. But what Google really wants is to organize information and provide a positive experience for searchers. SEO is a strategy for getting your website into the SERPs, but once you bring someone to your website, you need to know how to make them want to buy your product, use your service, or read your website. The user experience must be good enough. article. For business, you should focus on both SEO and UX, even if some recommendations lean more towards SEO than his UX and vice versa.
Basically, you need to think of SEO as providing value to users, not search engines. SEO professionals who take user experience into account with regular optimization will provide the most value in the long run. Always remember: Optimization affects not only the ability to access your page via Google search, but also the user experience of those who visit your page.