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We’ve come a long way since the early days of the internet when a website could hit the top of the rankings by simply listing a bunch of relevant but useless keywords. Nowadays, the algorithms at play are so sophisticated and data-driven that they can pick up on poor user experience (UX) and punish you for it.
This has forced many businesses to up their respective games, employing talented developers or outsourcing to a top UX design agency. If you’re still on the fence about whether it’s worth the investment, consider the following five ways your current UX design is impacting your SEO.
1. Formatting for UX and SEO
Some SEO companies will still advise you to create text-heavy pages stuffed full of keywords. However, both users and bots respond favorably to content that’s easier to digest. The way to make it more palatable is with your formatting. A well-designed page will feature scannable headers, helpful images, and text that’s broken into manageable chunks. Dot points can be your best friends, making content easier to read for human users while increasing your chances of earning a coveted place in Google’s featured snippets.
2. Creating paths
One of the most effective ways that Disney controls the movement of crowds in its parks is shockingly simple: they create paths. When faced with open space, humans naturally gravitate towards paths, and it’s essential to apply this physical-world understanding to your UX design.
Some of the many ways you can do this on your website include content suggestions at the end of blog posts and buttons that encourage readers to “Learn More” or otherwise navigate to relevant sections of your site.
3. Site load speed
High-quality images can add to the beauty of your site. However, if you haven’t optimized them to ensure rapid load speed, you can lose potential customers before they’ve even had a chance to see how pretty those pictures are. This is just one of many factors that can bog down your site load speed, so as part of your UX design, make sure you test your load speed and then take action to ensure it’s as snappy as possible (on web and mobile).
4. Mobile UX
Speaking of mobile, this is one of the major UX design factors businesses miss. No matter how stunning your website is, if you haven’t considered the mobile experience, you’re alienating half your audience. That’s right – mobile users account for around 50% of global web traffic. So, ensure your devs create a comfortable experience for mobile users.
5. Site navigation
If your site is a relic from the old-school approach of creating as many pages as possible, each targeting a single keyword, then the complex maze of a thing is at risk of harming your SEO. Keep in mind that “old-school” in the world of SEO can mean just one algorithm update ago.
As with all the points discussed above, it’s essential to value the user over the bots. Even if an archaic SEO practice is still working, it’s only a matter of time before an algo update blasts it down to rankings hell. So, focus on creating a site that’s easy and intuitive to navigate.
Though brilliant UX design certainly takes more work, the result will be a website that delivers on every metric that matters to your customers. And at the end of the day, it’s better to be outranked on these metrics than to be outranked by a spammy website that’s gaming the system and frustrating users. So, use the tips above, work with talented developers, and deliver the UX your customers deserve.
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