Imagine working hard on your website, creating content, optimizing keywords, and still, there’s nothing. No traffic or engagement, just an empty digital space. Now, what if I told you that other businesses have also found themselves in a similar place? And that these businesses have transformed their online presence. They haven’t done so by working harder. They’ve done it by working smarter.
Take Flyhomes, for example. All this real estate platform did was improve its UX SEO strategy. It focused on user intent, easy navigation, and added more pages. The result? A 10,737% increase in organic traffic and more than 1.1 million monthly visitors.
Sounds like magic, doesn’t it? But it’s just because of a powerful UX SEO strategy. We know you want to learn the same for your business, too. This is why we’ve written this blog to show you the wonders a UX SEO strategy can do!
What is UX?
Have you ever used a product or device that was hard to figure out? Figuring out how to use it was a real challenge. Chances are, you never used it again. The same goes for a website; sometimes, it’s so hard to navigate that we leave the site, never to go back again. All of these aspects make up a User Experience (UX). In this case, it’s a bad user experience.
Now, think of a site with an intuitive layout and design. This website was easy to use, and you spent more than a few minutes there. This was a good user experience (UX). So, UX is your experience with a product.
What are the elements of UX?
Many elements affect the user experience. It’s a combination of all these elements that make up the complete user experience. Let’s see what these elements are:
- Usability: Your website’s usability shows how easy or difficult it is for users to interact with it. It includes text, buttons, and accessibility. When the usability of a site or software is easy, it automatically increases the UX.
- Design and layout: The layout and design of a site has a lot to do with UX. Why would someone use a website that doesn’t make sense? The content should be arranged properly and easy to read. Clear designs make the UX more enjoyable.
- Performance: You’ve probably come across those desktop websites on your mobile phone. This happens when the owners don’t make the website mobile responsive. These websites raise user frustration. When you pair it with slow load times, Performance fails.
- Mobile experience: In recent years, mobiles have become increasingly popular. Even Google prefers mobile-first indexing. When users don’t get a good user experience (UX) on their phones, they leave that site.
- Navigability: Your site’s navigation has a lot to do with UX. When users visit your website, they’re most probably looking for something. For this, they navigate your site. What would they do if your website’s system confuses them? Leave!
When aiming to deliver a good User Experience (UX) to your users, it’s essential to make sure all these elements are correct.
Why is UX important?
Do you remember when you bought your mobile phone? How was your experience trying to figure it out? To this day, it might influence how you feel. This is why UX is important. It was true when they said, “The first impression is the last impression.” Because in UX, it really is. It takes users a 0.05 millisecond to leave your website when they don’t like it.
70% of businesses fail because of bad UX. Often, the users who get a bad experience go to a competitor instead. This is why UX is so important. Now that we’ve learned about User Experience (UX), let’s move on to Search engine optimization (SEO).
What is SEO?
When you search for something on the internet, you get lots of results from many web pages. That’s probably how you came here, too. Now, the process of optimizing your website to rank it at the top of your search results is SEO. Companies work day and night to optimize their page for SEO. Few know about the secrets of UX SEO.
You could be working on your SEO a lot, and your page may not even be in the top 30 SERP results. What mistake is your business making? It isn’t balancing the UX with the SEO.
What are the elements of SEO?
SEO has many elements. Altogether, they help a website rank high on a search engine. Let’s explore a few of these elements:
- On-page SEO: On-page SEO involves everything you can control on your website. This includes the content quality, keyword usage, and crawlability. A balance of these results in good on-page SEO.
- Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO involves everything you cannot entirely control about your website. This includes backlinks, SMO, Guest blogging, etc. Some experts believe that off-page SEO is crucial to ranking a website.
- Keywords: These are specific words or phrases. On a website, we add them within the content to help it rank. They are used all over the website in headings, content, and descriptions.
- Technical SEO: Technical SEO involves all the technical aspects of SEO. It means improving the code, structure, and performance to help search engines understand a page better.
- Content: All the content you find on Google is search engine optimized. This includes videos, images, and text.
When aiming to rank high with SEO, balancing all these aspects is vital.
Why is SEO important?
Sometimes, users leave without finding the right answers to their searches. Even though your page provides what they’re looking for, it doesn’t rank high enough. This is why it’s essential to prioritize SEO. 90.6% of content gets zero traffic from Google because it lacks proper SEO. We don’t want your business to be in that 90%.
75% of users never go past the first page of Google. This means that most businesses are invisible to people. This is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is so important.
What’s the Relationship Between UX and SEO?
At first glance, it isn’t obvious, but UX and SEO work closely together. They complement each other. The true success behind high sales and rankings is UX SEO. Good UX can boost user conversions by up to 400%. Meanwhile, good SEO can help significantly improve a website’s visibility.
Imagine spending months paying a UX designer to improve your site’s UX. But it doesn’t get noticed because your page lacks SEO. On the other hand, you could spend months on your SEO. However, users would still leave because they don’t get a good user experience. If only there were a way to combine both.
What is SXO?
SXO is a unique UX SEO combination approach. This concept first came out in 2015. It stands for Search Experience Optimization. Integrating UX and SEO together can increase visibility and deliver a good user experience in a single approach. 46% of users judge a website’s credibility on the basis of its design. So, why would they buy from you if they don’t like the design?
Our blog revolves around this UX SEO approach. SXO will allow you to balance both UX and SEO and take a new approach to ranking high.
What are the Key Principles of combining User Experience (UX) and SEO?
There are a few SEO and UX strategies that you need to follow for an effective UX SEO approach. Here are the key principles for a powerful UX SEO strategy:
Focus on creating a mobile-friendly design
In the 2020s, almost everyone owns a mobile phone. Due to this, 60% of searches are from a mobile device. Nearly every day, people Google things in the most random situations. Due to this, you should work on making your website as accessible and mobile-responsive as possible.
Recently, Google has also prioritized mobile-first websites. So, it’s vital to make your site mobile-friendly. Your site should have a responsive design. This will help it adjust to any screen size accordingly. Your goal should be simplicity and clarity, it’s one of the strongest UX strategies.
Improve the page loading time
Improving the page speed is one of the most important aspects. Users want to find info quickly. More than 50% of users leave a website when it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This causes high bounce rates. These high rates directly damage search rankings.
To deliver a good user experience, businesses often invest in heavy UX designs. This compromises the load time and even slows down performance. Google also sees a page’s speed as a ranking factor.
Make page navigation easy
Everybody loves an easy-to-navigate website. There, it’s easy for them to find whatever they need quickly. Since most buttons lead to another page, it boosts overall website engagement. Also, remember that users don’t always land on your homepage. They can land on other pages, too. This means you have to make every site easily navigable.
Easy and structured content complements your UX SEO. The easy-to-read content allows for smooth SEO structure and keyword placements. The structure looks appealing to users, improving the UX.
Simplify the layout and UI
We emphasize the need for clear navigation because it’s that important. Clear navigation will automatically result in a good layout and UI. It’s the User Interface of your website. These are the visual elements on a website or app that users interact with.
When you make a UI that balances creativity and simplicity, it will appeal to users. This creates an easy design layout. The more straightforward your navigation is, the easier it is to understand your page.
Make the content easy and readable
Your company might be technical, but the people searching are often from multiple age groups. Google prioritizes that. This is why it’s vital to make your content as readable as possible. This is by adding words used in everyday language. Making shorter sentences and paragraphs helps, too.
79% of users skim through your content. They don’t read every word. This is why adding bullet points is very helpful too. The person on your website could be a teenager or a business owner in his 60s. You need to write your content according to that.
What should you avoid when balancing UX SEO?
Balancing UX SEO can be a critical practice. When done correctly, it can boost your rankings. However, if not, it can actually cause rankings and visibility to fall. Let’s see what to avoid to present UX SEO properly:
Don’t over-stuff keywords
Keywords seem like an easy way to rank content. It also is, once you conduct proper keyword research. The real deal is placing them. Many people tend to over-stuff keywords. This damages both your UX and your SEO.
Adding too many keywords in SEO is called keyword stuffing. This is a direct violation of Google’s guidelines. Moreover, it hurts your user experience because people don’t want to read sentences with repeating words.
Don’t fill up your page with too many UX elements
Wanting to deliver a good user experience may make you create too many UX elements. Some interactive elements on your website are cool. However, too many will redirect your user’s attention from the main content.
Additionally, optimizing pages with too many UX elements can be a real challenge. They can slow down the performance speed. Just choose two to three contrasting colors to represent your brand and use them throughout your site.
Don’t add too many pop-ups and ads
We’ve all been there, on those pages that bomb you with ads and pop-ups. It was probably the reason why you left the page. It annoys users in seconds. 73% leave when they see too many pop-ups and ads and never return.
This aspect affects your UX SEO a lot. If users keep leaving your page, it will result in shorter sessions. This will cause your website’s SEO to fall. Moreover, it will affect a user’s overall experience.
Don’t attempt to hide text for better SEO
It sounds like an easy solution to simply hide text. You wouldn’t have to worry about adding keywords and creating proper layouts. But of course, it wouldn’t be that easy. If it were, many pages would be ranking on top secretly.
However, doing so is a violation of Google’s policies. You can’t hide white text on a white background in an attempt to add more keywords. This will cause your domain authority to fall and damage your website.
Don’t add too many links
Adding links is very beneficial for your SEO. It helps you redirect users to other pages easily. It helps raise your website’s domain authority. However, they also need to be a part of your UX strategies. Adding completely irrelevant links isn’t a good solution.
A big red flag is adding too many links. Too many links make a website look overwhelming and make the SEO score fall. Your links should be natural and relevant. Always add high-quality links to improve your UX SEO.
How to Measure the Success of Your UX SEO Strategies
So, let’s suppose you’ve already applied these UX SEO strategies. How will you know how to measure the success of these strategies? Let’s see:
For UX:
These are the essential rates you’ll review to ensure your UX strategies are doing well:
Bounce rate
Bounce rate measures the rate at which users visit your website and leave. How early or late do they leave? This results in the bounce rate. If you have high bounce rates, it means your website is boring and users don’t like it.
Click-Through Rate
Click-through rate measures the amount of times users click on an ad or advertisement. This helps you calculate how useful a link’s placement was. This also helps calculate how appealing an ad is and how many users it’s converting.
Average Session Duration
We calculate the average session duration by how many minutes a user spends during their first session on your website. On average, this is around 2-4 minutes. If it’s lower than this, your website may not engage users enough.
For SEO:
These are the essential rates you’ll review to ensure your UX strategies are doing well:
Keyword rankings
Through the help of some tools, you can check which keywords are helping your website rank well. If it isn’t ranking well on some specific keywords, it’s time to change them.
Organic traffic
You can invest in paid ads or other paid methods. However, the real authority of a website comes from its organic traffic. A decent amount of organic traffic monthly means your website is doing good.
Backlinks and Domain Authority
Every backlink that points toward your website improves its domain authority. It isn’t an official Google ranking factor but it does impact you position in top SERPs.
If all of these metrics are good enough, it means your UX SEO strategies are powerful.
Conclusion
A website is the complete online representation of any brand. It doesn’t matter what you deal with; having a website is essential nowadays. However, nowadays, having only a website isn’t enough. It requires optimal time and effort. A strong UX SEO strategy can help your website rank high and gain more recognition.
At Linkitsoft, we understand the struggles of finding a good UX designer. It also means that designing a website’s UX isn’t easy. This is why we are here to help you improve your UX SEO strategy! Contact Linkitsoft and allow your website to shine. Your months of effort deserve to shine at the top of SERPs. Don’t wait around; your competitors aren’t.
