How User Experience (UX) Influences SEO - LaunchUX

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How User Experience (UX) Influences SEO

A great UX design means that users who visit your website will be more likely to engage with the site content. If your website is outfitted with a strong and consistent UX design, your conversion rates should be relatively high. Along with appealing to potential customers, your website’s user experience also influences search engine optimization (SEO).

Google is known to use various UX signals as key ranking factors when identifying where site pages should be listed in search results. By improving your website’s user experience, your SEO efforts should also improve. There are numerous UX factors that can directly impact SEO, which include everything from site speed and navigational elements to mobile-friendliness functionality.

What Does User Experience UX Refer To?

User experience refers to the creation of a user-focused web experience. The goal of user experience design is to optimize how users are able to interact with a website while also making sure to get rid of any issues that would worsen a user’s experience. Websites with poorly implemented user experiences will become increasingly less popular since more convenient options are just a mouse click away.

Great UX design should engage users and help these users quickly identify where they want to go next. Since Google looks at different user engagement metrics to rank websites, having a great UX design will effectively improve your search engine optimization. In turn, your search rankings should improve as well.

How User Experience UX Influences SEO

Now it’s time to look at the numerous ways in which user experience directly influences SEO.

Mobile-friendliness

Mobile-friendliness is a top ranking factor for Google since more than 60% of Google searches take place on mobile devices. Having a mobile-friendly website design is critical for your search engine optimization efforts.

The two simplest methods of making your website mobile-friendly include using a responsive design that automatically adjusts your site’s layout to creating an entirely separate mobile URL that mobile users can gain access to. Keep in mind that mobile users are around five times more likely to leave a website if it hasn’t been optimized for mobile devices.

Site Speed

Site speed is another important UX factor when taking SEO into account. Most users will leave websites that take longer than 3-5 seconds to load, which means that improving your website’s load speed makes it easier for you to keep users engaged and increase your website’s conversion rates. If current site speeds are too slow, consider:

  • Minifying the site code to ensure that less memory is used during loading
  • Using a content delivery network to distribute site pages throughout numerous servers as opposed to one large server
  • Optimizing images with height and width specifications in pixels as opposed to standard ratio dimensions

Navigational Components

Having poorly thought out website navigation ensures that visitors won’t remain on your website for too long. The headers and menus on your website are necessary components for users who interact with your site. Bad navigation results in high bounce rates, which is a metric that Google looks at when determining how to rank a website.

Your site’s click-through rate can also worsen, which refers to the total percentage of people who click a link that leads to your website after it appears in search results. Having a low CTR shows search engines that this page isn’t providing users with relevant info.

URL Structures

The URL structure on your website is an important aspect of a strong user experience. In fact, it shows users where they currently are when browsing your website. If your site’s URL structure is confusing and frustrating for users, it will also be confusing for search engines, which means that your site isn’t properly optimized for sites like Google.

Search engines are able to use keywords in an URL to determine what a page is focused on. The page is then indexed based on this info. If these keywords aren’t present, your SEO rankings can worsen significantly. The best URL structures are simple and straightforward URL structures.

The only way for your SEO efforts to be as effective as you want them to be is by first creating a fantastic user experience on your website. If you need help designing your site’s user experience, our website design services can provide you with a UX design that new visitors and existing customers will love.

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