How User Experience and SEO Interact
Your digital marketing agency helps clients build their brands online. Much of this involves search engine optimization, more commonly referred to as SEO. Using various SEO practices can help businesses of all sizes improve their Google rankings, making them more visible to potential customers. But one SEO practice that is often overlooked is user experience, also known as UX. It’s essential to understand user experience and how it impacts SEO to continue providing your clients with the best services.
What is user experience?
User experience is the overall experience a user has with something created by a company—in this case, its website. Users want to visit websites that are easy to navigate, functional, informative, and attractive and that also provide them with access to the information, products, and/or services that interest them. UX is often divided into three different categories:
- Interaction Design– This category refers to how users interact with a company’s website with actions such as clicking buttons and opening drop-down menus.
- Visual Design– This category refers to the overall look of a website, including the fonts, colors, and images.
- Information Architecture– This category refers to how users navigate a company’s website and how information should be organized to provide the best user flow.
UX also includes how users feel and what they think when browsing a website, which is why it’s important to focus on building a strong brand with a distinctive voice that users will be able to remember and recognize. Users want to know that there are real people behind the companies they support.
What is SEO?
Like everything else on the internet, SEO has evolved since its creation. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing and going bananas over backlinks. These days, search engines focus more on finding high quality content on websites that offer great user experiences. Of course, forms of these classic strategies are both still essential elements of SEO, but it is more important to focus on incorporating those elements into a high-quality website that users will be able to navigate easily.
This can help businesses increase their visibility by earning higher rankings on search engines, making users more likely to visit their websites when searching for information, products, or services. Some of the most important elements of good SEO include:
- Researching Keywords– Users typically search for specific keywords to help them find the information, products, and services that interest them. Researching the keywords people use most often to find similar businesses helps businesses discover what keywords to target in their website. It’s important to use keywords naturally and ensure they flow nicely in the content, rather than trying to stuff in as many keywords as possible.
- Building Links– When other websites link to your clients’ websites, it helps improve search engine rankings. But it’s important to have links from reputable, trustworthy sources, rather than just trying to get links anywhere on the web.
- Creating Quality Content– You can’t have a website without content! On-site copy and blogs also play important roles in maintaining good SEO. Users may be searching for specific keywords, but they want to find informative content that helps them making decisions about the products and services they want to buy and businesses they want to support.
Practicing good SEO is essential for any business that wants potential customers to be able to find them quickly and easily online.
How does user experience impact SEO?
SEO can help bring more people to a website, but good user experience is what can keep them on the website longer, making them more likely to turn into customers. UX is part of technical SEO, which refers to elements such as webpage structure and load times. When websites are hard to navigate or take too long to load, users are more likely to click away and look for another link.
Good UX includes keeping websites easy to navigate and making sure pages load quickly so that users are more likely to stay on pages for longer periods of time. Search engines take this type of user activity into account when determining site rankings, meaning good UX is helpful for improved SEO.
Businesses can maintain good SEO and UX by monitoring their websites to make sure everything is working properly and fixing any issues as soon as possible. It is also a good idea to consistently update their sites with fresh, informative content that will engage visitors so they stay on the site longer and have a better chance of turning into customers.
When you partner with Pennington Creative, our white label marketing services can help your clients improve both SEO and user experience on their websites. Let us help your agency give your clients what they need to succeed in the digital space.Schedule your discovery calltoday!