How Does User Experience (UX) Impact SEO?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is not easy to understand and manage, especially if you are running your own business and focusing on daily operations. You cannot give up on SEO, as it offers so many excellent benefits for your website and brand. SEO boosts brand visibility, drives quality traffic to your website, and helps to boost conversions. One of the ranking factors that are often overlooked is user experience (UX).
UX is about the emotions and impressions of your audience. It includes experimental, effective, valuable, practical, and meaningful parts of human-computer interactions. It is about how easy or difficult it is for your users to navigate your website and how happy they are with the experience.
Good user experience results in happy customers who will return to your website or business, recommending it to others. Poor user experience, on the other hand, frustrates potential customers, causing them to abandon your website, increasing your bounce rate.
User experience can make or break your business, but at the same time, it still doesn't get the attention it needs.
Your website visitors are only interested in the value that you provide them with and how easy it is for them to get to what they arrived on your site for. Without user experience (UX), your efforts are all in vain.
Your audience, on the other hand, couldn’t care less. All they care about is the value that brings to them and how easy it is for them to get what they came for—and that’s UX. Some UX statistics worth noting includes:
As you can see, user experience has a major impact on SEO. Google takes UX into consideration when determining rankings, providing users with the best possible results.
UX includes page loading speed, content layout, website structure, mobile-friendliness, responsiveness, website design, navigation and more. When your website is easy to navigate with good page structure, and fast loading pages, you improve your users experience, increasing your ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).
You also want to provide users with high quality, unique, and relevant content that adds value. This helps keep your visitors on your website for longer, boosting engagement levels, and reducing bounce rates, appealing to search engines. These UX factors work together creating a good browsing experience for users, while helping you improve your ranking in SERPs.
Mobile-friendly website designs are essential to your UX these days, improving your SEO efforts. There are more than seven billion smart phone owners in the world, while close to sixty percent of website traffic comes from mobile devices:
The faster your website loads, the higher your user satisfaction. With high user satisfaction, your bounce rates decrease, helping to improve your ranking in SERPs. When your website loads on a desktop, it should be less than three seconds to load, while it can be up to eight seconds on a mobile device. Load time is essential. A faster website can lead to three times higher conversion rates when compared to websites that take five seconds to load.
It is important to note that for every extra second your website takes to load, your conversion rate can drop by twenty percent.
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