Google’s Newest UX Signals: What Really Matters for SEO in 2025?

Understanding User Experience (UX)

User experience (UX) is the experience a user has when visiting your website or app. It takes ease of use, intuitiveness, and accessibility into consideration. Great UX designs focus on the user and tier needs. Improving user experience is having a good understanding of your audience, their challenges, behaviours, needs, and preferences.

Understanding SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is focusing on increasing organic traffic and attracting qualified visitors to your site through organic search results. It requires a customised strategy, making your website attractive to your audience and search engines. It may include optimising for relevant keywords, creating high quality traffic, and acquiring backlinks. When done effectively, SEO helps to boost online visibility, increase organic traffic, and improve conversions.

SEO + UX

SEO and UX combined are essential to your online presence and success. Search engines are focusing on delivering relevant and quality information to users, providing them with value. Search engines evaluate websites based on content and keywords, along with user experience metrics, such as bounce rates. When your website is designed with UX in mind, your visitors want to stay on your site for longer, engaging with it, and exploring further. These are positive UX signals that really matter to your SEO strategy in 2025.

UX Signals

UX signals are metrics that search engines use when determining the relevance of your website to the users search query. These indicate the quality of the content, web design, site architecture, content format, and much more. They reflect aspects of user engagement, such as bounce rates, dwell time, and click through rates:

Google's Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are direct ranking factors that focus on user experience. Core Web Vitals were introduced by Google in June 2021 shifting how websites are evaluated and ranked, focusing essentially on UX. Core Web Vitals are factors that determine overall user experience and include:

• Largest Contentful Paint – loading performance and should be less than 2.5 seconds
• First Input Delay – interactivity with FID scores being 100 milliseconds or less
• Cumulative Layout Shift – visual stability and should score 0.1 or less

Dwell Time and Bounce Rates

Dwell time measures user engagement and is the amount of time a visitor spends on your page before they return to the SERP. This provides information on your website content and relevance. Good dwell times re viewed as the website providing valuable content.

Bounce rates, on the other hand, is the percentage of visitors landing on your website and leaving without any engagement. High bounce rates are seen as warning signs to search engines, suggesting your content is not relevant or engaging. To reduce bounce rates, you need to publish high quality and relevant content, improve your loading speed, and ensure your website can be navigated with ease.

Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action on your website. The desired action is based on your business goals and can be completing an online contact form to making a purchase. This is not a direct ranking factor, but it shows you user satisfaction and engagement.

Conclusion

Optimising for UX signals means your landing pages provide an excellent user experience for your website visitors. When you blend SEO and UX, you ensure you provide relevant content and a good experience, improving website engagement and dwell time. Focusing on SEO and UX boosts your website performance for search engines and users. Do you need help aligning with Google's newest UX signals? Contact Genie Crawl now to find out more.