UX and SEO: How the User Experience Impacts Organic Search
UX and SEO: How the User Experience Impacts Organic Search
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A robust user experience coupled with SEO best practices can help improve your website’s performance — accessibility also plays a key role in improving the performance, experience, and reach of your site. Below, we’ll cover key strategies for using these fields to boost user satisfaction and search visibility.
UX and SEO Explained
Understanding the connection between UX and SEO starts with understanding the differences between the two.
SEO includes the strategies and practices designed to improve where a web page ranks on search engine results pages (SERPs). The approach involves optimizing your content, content strategy, meta tags, keywords, and building backlinks to signal to search engines and your target audience that your website is relevant, authoritative, and credible.
UX, on the other hand, is all about designing and optimizing the interactions user have with your digital content (e.g., your website, web applications, and mobile apps). The purpose of a UX strategy is to ensure your content is intuitive, enjoyable, and efficient — from the way content is laid out to the speed and accessibility of the site.
How User Experience Design Affects SEO and Ranking
The intersection between SEO and UX is critical because search engines — especially Google — are prioritizing the quality of user experience as a key ranking factor. For example, Google has incorporated Core Web Values into its ranking criteria, a number of which focus directly on creating a good user experience. These include:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading speed and performance by tracking how long it takes for the largest content element (like an image or a block of text) to load.
- Interaction To Next Paint (INP): Measures website responsiveness by measuring how quickly a page responds to user interaction. High-quality websites have an INP of no less than 200 milliseconds.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Evaluates the visual stability of your digital content by tracking how much the layout shifts during the page load process.
Using the Core Web Values as a basis, the search engine algorithms then look at various UX/UI elements and use the quality of these to determine where a page should rank. Below are just a few of the elements Google takes into consideration:
Page Speed
Slow-loading pages typically have higher bounce rates, where a user leaves the page before it fully loads. Because faster pages provide a better user experience, Google considers it as a ranking factor. If you have good site speed, it’s more likely to rank higher in search results as it’s perceived as more reliable and user-friendly. Techniques like image optimization, caching, and minimizing HTTP requests can help you improve page load time and, consequently, SEO.
Quality Web Design
Images and videos likely make up a huge part of your online content. But if they're not optimized properly, they can negatively impact your page speed. Proper image optimization, such as compressing files and using appropriate formats (like WebP for images), ensures your visuals load quickly without compromising quality. Similarly, video content should be embedded efficiently, as large file sizes can slow down the page.
Be sure to include descriptive alt text (alternative text) for images and accurate video captions and transcripts. Both give you an opportunity to work in more keywords and help search engines better understand your content. Plus, it helps you create a more accessible, user-friendly online experience for individuals with disabilities (both permanent and situational), which also contributes positively to SEO.
Navigation, Layout, and Crawling
Effective navigation and layout are both essential for user experience and search engine crawling. A clear website structure (or site architecture) with easy-to-use menus and descriptive breadcrumbs helps your users quickly find what they’re looking for. This also helps search engines understand and index your site better and rank it higher in search queries.
Organizing your site content logically and using clear internal links also helps search engines more easily explore and understand your site, which further improves SEO rankings. If your site is messy, confusing, or has complicated navigation, it makes it difficult for both users and search engines to navigate easily, impacting both user satisfaction and search engine performance.
Functionality and Aesthetics
Aesthetically pleasing designs with functional elements — like easily clickable buttons and intuitive forms — contribute to more positive user interactions. When your site doesn’t just look good but functions well, it’s more likely to have a lower bounce rate and higher engagement, which can improve your organic traffic.
High-Quality Web Content and Copy
Engaging, relevant, and well-structured content keeps your users interested and encourages them to spend more time exploring your site. Google rewards this by ranking your site higher in search results. Plus, well-written, quality content that includes relevant keywords can naturally improve your visibility while simultaneously enhancing the user experience by providing clear, informative information. Consider regularly updating content to ensure it meets changing user needs and further supports better SEO outcomes.
Accessibility: The Link Between SEO and UX
Digital accessibility is, for most people, a surprising link between SEO and UX. Essentially, the three work together to enhance the quality and reach of your website and contribute to a positive user experience, albeit from different angles. Accessibility ensures that all users, including those with disabilities, can navigate and interact with your digital content. UX focuses on creating a seamless, enjoyable experience for your users, while SEO strives to improve your site’s visibility and search engine ranking.
Think about it this way: making your website accessible to all users not only ensures that everyone, including those with disabilities, can navigate and interact with it but also significantly enhances your site’s usability, the user journey, and search engine visibility.
Additionally, accessibility best practices — like adding alt text to images, improving color contrast, and ensuring compatibility with assistive technologies — aren’t just making your site more inclusive; they’re creating a smoother, more engaging experience for all users.
From an SEO perspective, enhancing the accessibility of your site makes it much easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. For example, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) recommends using headers in a hierarchical order (e.g., H1, H2, H3) to improve readability and navigation for assistive technologies. Not only does using headings in this way help individuals with disabilities, but it also helps search engines better understand what each section of a page is about, which can lead to better SEO outcomes.
Put simply, focusing on accessibility can enhance UX designand SEO. If your website is well-designed and accessible, you’ll likely increase user dwell times and increase user engagement — both of which are positive signals for search engines. Plus, the better your user experience, the more likely you are to increase your conversion rates which can create more revenue opportunities.
Optimize SEO and UX Through Accessibility Powered by AudioEye
If you’re looking to expand the reach of your brand via SEO and UX optimization, enhancing the accessibility of your website is a great place to get started.
With AudioEye, getting started (or enhancing) the accessibility of your existing content is easy. Our free Website Accessibility Checker scans your web copy for common accessibility errors (including missing alt text or lack of keyboard accessibility) and highlights where improvements are needed. These common errors are automatically fixed by our software, getting you one step closer to a more engaging, user-friendly, and SEO-optimized website. AudioEye also offers additional tools, including Developer Tools and a free Color Contrast Checker to help you integrate accessibility into every stage of the content creation process.
Ready to see how AudioEye can boost your UX and SEO? Get started with a free accessibility scan. Or schedule a demo to see our Accessibility Platform in action.
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