In the first part of this “UX and SEO” series, you must have understood how they work together and why.
SEO and UX are both well-known elements in online marketing, but they are often viewed as separate entities and unrelated to each other. While SEO brings over 90% of all traffic from a search engine, UX plays an important role as 40% of visitors stop engaging if they find the website messy and cluttered.
Therefore, SEO and UX should go hand in hand. As we have told you earlier that SEO brings you traffic while UX holds them to help in conversion.
In this part, we talk about how you can combine UX with SEO. Is it easy? Or it is challenging?
Let’s check this out…
Understand Your Customers:
Do you know your customers? Do you know how your product can help them solve their problems? Or what they expect from your services and product? How will you approach them?
Knowing your customers is important to create a great digital experience to your users.
For example, you sell bone supplements for the elderly. Therefore, aged people are your target audience.
So your SEO strategies will focus on keywords like a supplement for aged person or old age bone medicines.
But the real concern starts when you get your audience to your website. Your tiny fonts can affect their visibility. They are not able to see important information. They are not able to locate the call to action buttons like “BUY NOW” amid your rhetoric slogans.
In this scenario, you need to make your fonts and typography suitable for aged adults. You can get a reference from other sites for the elderly. The “BUY NOW” button should be visible most of the time and placed on the top banner.
The navigation should be simple. This way, you can give a great UX experience to your audience. In case of having young women as a customer for your online cloth store, the font can be cursive with engaging images around.
Create High-Quality Content:
Content is the king. There are millions of blogs, websites and articles available over the Internet—only to outwit the search engines to get a lot of visitors. This solution might not work for people, and it won’t last very long.
Make sure to create original, informative content that will be valued by your target audience. After all, content plays an important role in ensuring a great user experience.
Your content should live up to the expectations in terms of both SEO and UX.
Minimize the use of common phrases and jargon, but stick to professional tone while communicating. Provide your target audience with relevant information and keep things simple.
If you create valuable and informative content regularly, the search engine will recognize your endeavour and get you into the search results. However, that doesn’t happen overnight and it requires you some great strategies to promote your content. But great and valuable content always pays off.
Apart from blogs and articles, there are many types of content you should use, from videos to infographics.
Improve the Page Load Time:
Your page load time can make or mar your user’s experience, no matter how good your website is.
A slow-loading website will kill a user’s experience and eventually make them leave your website. Keep in mind that Internet users are notorious for their short attention span. Most visitors are likely to leave the site that doesn’t open within 3-5 seconds. Therefore, the load speed of your website is basic yet important factors to consider both in terms of SEO and UX.
You can speed up your website load time by compressing your images, enabling browser caching, and reducing server response time.
Besides, ask your web host to speed up your site. This is because sharing servers can slow your website down, so asking them for a dedicated server.
There are many online tools to test the load time of your website.
Pingdom is one of the commonly used website speed test tools and shows your page load time. Plus, it reveals the overall performance grade and gives suggestions on how to improve performance.
Work Over Your Website Navigation:
Like page load time, website navigation is a pillar of UX, so you should make your interface simple and intuitive. Maybe you have everything for a great user interface but a lack of a simple search bar can affect user experience, especially if the site has a lot of content.
The site is expected to have a logical architecture and let the visitors find the desired things easily. You need to keep the design consistent across all levels of your website.
Calls to Action are an important element of your site navigation. They should accurately state what one will get when they click them.
Make sure to highlight and use headings to separate the categories. Headings should be clickable to let users visit the targeted page. And don’t forget to add a search bar to help the visitors find things quickly.
Take Care of Your Content Structure:
A logical structure is also required by your content. Make sure each post is equipped with one main heading and several subheadings (H2 or H3) to let search engine crawls the page and users to find the things easily.
Avoid putting chunks of paragraphs. Instead, divide the paragraphs into 3-4 lines. It will make content more scannable, readable and eye-pleasing, therefore enhancing the overall UX of a page.
Optimize It for Mobile:
We don’t need to tell you that over 90% of people use smartphones to access the Internet. Therefore, it requires you to make your website mobile-friendly or responsive. This is because the site looks different on mobile screens than desktop. If it is not responsive, it might look cluttered or messy on mobile phones.
Search engines also expect the website to be mobile-friendliness. While mobile responsive design is a different topic in itself, here are some things you can do:
- Minimize fill-in forms
- Highlight essential things such as CTA and shopping carts
- Use images wisely and make sure they don’t interrupt the flow of your website.
- Use little larger fonts and make it clearly visible.
- Make navigation easier for your mobile users.
Improve Metadata:
Admit it. Not all SEO pros take care of this element.
But metadata can be crucial when it comes to traffic.
Therefore, use relevant keywords and create right page titles, meta-descriptions and keyword tags. Make sure to tag images and videos to let search engines to find media formats other than just textual content.
TESTING. TESTING. TESTING
These strategies are not something that you can set and forget. Keep in mind that the digital world is dynamic, meaning that you need to constantly change your strategies. Always keep an eye on the latest trends in SEO and UX and see if they can be incorporated into your website.
Bottom Line:
So you must have understood how to incorporate SEO with UX.
However, for most readers out there, this job might seem challenging right now.
Yeah, the job is challenging. But it is also true that it is rewarding in the long run. A holistic, user-oriented approach to your web presence helps you keep visitors engaged and satisfied, leading to strong relationships and loyalty. Moreover, it tells search engines that you’re a helpful resource.
What do you think? Are you ready to incorporate these tips to integrate SEO with UX? Or you think that you have something better on your head?
Let me know by commenting below.
Started working as a digital marketing expert, Varun Sharma is now also a well-known digital marketing speaker – a speaker on performance development, and a trusted mentor to businesses in the digital world. His keynote expositions are based on the digital marketing theories, which provide a fascinating insight into the secrets of high performance.