Combining SEO With User Experience For Increased Rankings

Today, creating a fancy-looking website is no longer enough, especially if no one sees it. The once considered flimsy things like content and off-page SEO are now regarded as big critical players along with user experience.

Since search engine algorithms have evolved in extravagant ways over the years, their ability to understand what users like and what they do not like have also heightened, now, Google has strongly insisted that user design functionalities such as page loading speed and responsive design directly affect SEO.

For instance, if your website is performing poorly, it will result in a poor user experience, thus leading to a low ranking. Of course, keyword optimization and the like are still essential, but it’s much more about the overall online experience, whether it’s about ease of use, quality of the content, and site navigation.

And so, we are now left with the big question of how to satisfy both the user experience and SEO aspects without compromising the other?

User Paths

One of your website’s goals must be to allow users to accomplish their search intent when they enter your website. To do that, you can place planting paths and action items (i.e., call-to-action buttons) that are simple and easy to follow. If you could prove that a user’s intent is
optimized can improve your site’s efficiency, then chances are your website will show on a higher search engine results page.

Site Structure

Web crawlers function in helping define search algorithms by indexing content and returning it to search engines. If your website has a good structure, then it the easier for crawlers to access and index your content. Gone are the days where you have to use old web formats like Flash and Javascript because now modern forms such as XHTML and CSS take precedence.

URLs

Easy to navigate and flexibility qualities are essential in the user experience as much as the structure of your URLs matters to those hidden crawlers examining your website. Keywords that contain URLs are not considered as black hat tactics, so it is best to incorporate them for crawlers to recognize quickly. In general, the more detailed and accurate your URLs are, then the better.

Site Speed

Site speed is not considered as one of the criteria in calculating its ranking. When a user found your website through an organic search and then returned to search engine results pages a few moments later, it will still be picked up by search engines. Also, having a slow page
speed means search engines can’t crawl as many pages, which in turn, affecting those indexes.

Usability Testing

Maintaining and improving your SEO ranking means taking into account the usability of your website. Fortunately, it doesn’t take plenty of time to perform it, especially if you’re targeting one objective at a time. Questions like does your website works and how is it performing based on the user experience are two things that must be considered.

Poor Navigation Matters

You should also fix poor navigation or website structures as soon as you can to avoid harming your SEO ranking.

Finally, you must also avoid having outdated or broken links that could put a hamper on your SEO score, something that could most likely happen when your website has not undergone regular usability testing in a while.