User experience design is becoming a more well-known term throughout the same industries as SEO. Unsurprisingly, the two strategies are important to integrate together for a strong website. UX design factors like intuitive navigation, interesting content, and responsiveness of the page collectively impact SEO. Knowing how to tune a website to the user’s needs can help put a page at the top of the SERP and draw in more viewers.
User Behavior Signals
User signals are behavior patterns of site visitors that Google uses as factors in the page’s SERP rankings. Google analyzes the actions and interactions of the users on the page, watches how they engage with it, and notes these traces of activity. If visitors tend to click on a website and immediately bounce right back to the results page, this will have an impact on where Google places the page ranking in the future. Google measures scroll depth, conversion rate of calls to action, abandonment rate of processes like checkouts, the number of pages viewed, what types of content they interact with, and the total time spent on the website. UX designers know that every move a user makes on the page will be tracked. They direct the user through a hierarchy on the page to the desired result.
Design User Flows
Users move on a path through a website, and these are trackable just like other behavior signals. A strong user flow starts with a simple landing page that is easy to navigate. Website designers walk the balance of presenting calls to action without increasing “friction” on a website. Elements that are confusing or take too long to interact with will negatively affect user experience. This then has a negative impact on search engine results. Content quality is important, but interactivity of the website can’t be neglected for SEO success.
UX Design and SEO examples
Amazon, Spotify, and Etsy are three examples of powerhouse websites that seamlessly integrate SEO and UX design. Amazon is known for their speedy, intuitive shopping experience from search to checkout. Product pages have unique content like reviews with photos and a strong internal linking structure.
Spotify‘s page has user experience at the forefront, although it’s rarely used on a website any longer. The interface is easy to navigate even for young or brand-new users, and the app updates constantly tweak it to make it even more so.
Etsy is another example of an online shop with strong user experience design. It guides visitors through the website from a landing page to search results, then product pages to checkout. Websites like these are indicators of how to convert users from visitors to the website to paying customers by integrating SEO and UX design.
2 Responses
Great post! I had heard the term user experience (UX) before, but it is so crazy to think about the fact that people are tracking and learning from how users interact with a page. It kind of feels like I am being stalked, but also I like when websites function well and give me a good experience, so I suppose that I cannot complain.
I really like how you used Amazon and Spotify as UX Design examples. Being such massive corporations I feel like the idea that their focus is on User Experience is glossed over. SEO at it’s core is just improving the user experience for a website and trying to reach as many users as possible