Digital marketing can no longer be siloed. Website users can and do interact with multiple touch points throughout their journey. Paid search influences traffic from both referral and direct channels. Social media also impacts traffic while driving customer service and reviews. However, no two factors are as connected as user-experience and SEO.
SEO and UX are so closely intertwined that many user-experience aspects have become key ranking factors within Google and Bing, such as readability, site structure, content quality, and descriptive content.
Let’s take a look at just some of the many user-experience factors that influence not only your SEO efforts but also your website’s performance.
Mobile-Friendly
Is your website mobile-friendly? Does your website function differently on mobile than it does on desktop? Is your content available in mobile? These are all viable questions that every developer reviews when building a new website, and your SEO team needs to examine those same questions as well.
With the introduction of Google’s Mobile First Indexing, websites need to ensure important content (product copy, banner text, etc.) can be viewed and easily read on mobile devices. Don’t force your users to a page where they need to zoom in order to read your content.
Page Speed
Page speed also plays a vital role. Few users wait more than two seconds for a page to load. Little is more frustrating than researching a potential purchase or vacation destination and not having the webpage load. Most visitors will hit the back button or simply close out the window entirely and search elsewhere.
Google has confirmed that the speed and performance of how your website loads is ranking factor. While it may not be a very large ranking signal, it is still a factor that you as a website owner can directly influence compared to, say, naturally increasing your backlink profile. Don’t overlook this opportunity!
Related Post: Improve Your Site with Google’s Web Vitals Program
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are navigational elements at the top of the page that allow a user to better navigate where they are at within the website hierarchy structure. These breadcrumbs have a benefit from a user experience standpoint, as well as an SEO benefit. Breadcrumbs simultaneously prevent users from getting lost and provide a clear path for search engines to crawl the website’s structure.
They can also help improve your click-through rate (CTR) within the search results pages! Google has been showing breadcrumbs directly in the search results. While the implementation of breadcrumbs is not a true ranking factor, they can help your website’s listing standout from your competitors and potentially lead to more user clicks and visits.
What’s the point of all your hard SEO work and driving traffic to your website if your users find your website structure unintuitive or slow? Without a solid SEO plan, you won’t have any users visiting your great, easy to use website. Make sure your team has an eye on both of SEO and UX as your website and your business continue to grow.