Search engines have placed more and more consideration to the overall experience of visitors when calculating site rankings. A lot of factors come into play when considering the user experience; things like - content quality, ease of navigation, page speed, mobile-friendliness, and site security, and hundreds of considerations on the user experience have been rolled into the SEO best practices. Gone are the days when keyword stuffing into your content was sufficient to hit high rankings.
Let’s break down the most common elements where SEO and UX coincide.
Content Quality
A high-quality content, will by itself keep visitors hooked and engaged in more ways than one. They will keep coming back for more quality reads. Chances are they will subscribe to your email updates, engage in discussions and even share your content on social media. This means, your site can get organic without much effort, and increase traffic to your site. That being said, a good content serves both the search engine ranking and your visitors. A good content worth sharing will also translate to user signals that tell Google your users are interested in your site and are engaging with you.
Ease of Navigation
Ease of navigation is very important. Visitors will not always start from your homepage. Some visitors will reach your site through keyword search. Considering the hundreds of result offered by search engines, it’s very easy to move on to another site if their first-hand experience does not allow them to navigate around the site glitch-free. The sections of the site being easily accessible, buttons working, a sitemap, the clear relationships of the pages, and the time it takes for pages to load on your site all tell something about the ease of navigation.
Headings
Headings are like road signs in that they point you in a direction. It tells you what you are up for; it signals if you will be getting information that is highly relevant to your search. A good heading will show users what the sections or content is all about. They should depict a logical organization or hierarchy of your content and should make it easier for visitors and search engine to analyze or parse your content.
Site Speed
Like we have earlier mentioned, site speed is an element in site navigation. This is an age-old ranking factor for Google search and a very important gauge of user experience as well. Other things will change with ranking factors and site speed itself, but one thing is for sure, it will remain criteria in calculating your site’s ranking.
How Will Mobile-First Index Change the Game for Website Ranking?
Currently, Google uses ranking signals based on desktop web pages; but were counting only months from now since Google announced that they would be rolling out the mobile-first index.use This means that what you have been taking into consideration for your desktop to hit the ranks, you will need to pay attention to your mobile site version because your mobile site will be the priority of Google’s algorithm when calculating rankings. If your web pages are loading fast and your mobile site is not, working towards a better mobile experience, this early is a smart decision to capitalise on the excellent experience of both human users and search engine. Google is working toward representing their index and results based on the majority of searches - which happens on mobile.
Some sites tend to be heavy with content. For example, various sites with journalistic and educational content expect to be viewed mostly on mobile for portability and convenience. Thus, owners of these sites will be obliged to look into improving the speed and rate of loading on their mobile pages.
When it comes to ease of navigating mobile sites, it is imperative that users can mirror the same experience with web pages, only within a smaller footprint. For site owners, this means that they have to fit in all functionality, even up to the smallest button and make use of each bit of the mobile page count.
Overall, site owners will have to put the experience of users on top when coming up with SEO strategies. After all, the site is meant for human use and the search engines establishes checks and measure site performance all in the name of user experience.
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