Google is still by far the most popular search engine and user experience is now the focus of any SEO and Digital Marketing Activity. This is because Google looks not only at how much traffic comes to your website, but at what happens thereon after. How many pages they visit, how much time they spend on your website and which pages are the most popular and useful for people.
In the early days of SEO and websites, it was enough to have poorly written pages on your site provided you place certain keywords in the right places.
We then saw a move towards better quality content, the use of images and video to create more interesting pages. Pages that people would want to spend time on.
But now, Google looks at much more than that:
- How your website is constructed
- Speed at which your pages load
- How visitors can navigate around the site
- The time people spend on a page
- And where they go next
- The number of people that bounce straight away
- Action taken on the page
- Quality of your content and relevance to search queries
All this and much more can be measure and improved upon. But where do you start when there are so many tasks to do?
Improving User Experience for Website Visitors Helps SEO
Site Speed
How quickly your website loads can make the difference between someone becoming a customer or getting so fed up waiting for a page to appear, that they click off somewhere else. Improving the speed at which your pages load is vitally important. Google Page Speed Insights will give a url a score and also highlight areas that you can work on to make your website run quicker. Speed is a critical SEO ranking factor.
Content Relevance
If someone has searched for “property insurance” and they land on a page that doesn’t make it instantly clear that it is also about property insurance, you will likely find that visitor leaves pretty quickly. You have a matter of seconds to convince someone that they have come to a page that answers their search query.
Content Quality
Once a visitor is confident that they have landed in the right place, the next step is in making sure that they get the information they need. If a page is badly written, too technical or very text heavy then visitors are likely to become dis-engaged and leave your website. You need to weigh this up against the need for SEO content with the aim of being ranked well. Writing a page to satisfy all can be tricky but is worth the investment.
Call To Actions
Your website might be perfect from an SEO point of view. It’s not quite that easy though. When a visitor comes to your website and having scanned your content they decide they now want to do something else. Whether they want to know more or take some kind of action it needs to be easy for them to do so. Call to Actions make it simple for people to either call, email, fill out a form, buy a product or navigate to another related page. If it’s too difficult for visitors to find out what to do next, then they may not take any action at all.
Not Ready Yet
Not every visitor will take action the first time they visit your website. It may be that your product or service is something that takes consideration, they may be information gathering in order to make a purchase at a later date. So, don’t be disheartened if conversion rates aren’t as high as you would like. Typically, they will fall between the 2% – 5% bracket.
Or Ever
You will of course get visitors to your website that have no intention of every becoming a customer of yours. Bots, competitors, information gatherers, suppliers and many more. It doesn’t matter how optimised your website is, how SEO friendly your content is. If someone doesn’t want to buy from you then they won’t and it’s important to recognise this when looking at traffic numbers.
With anything like this, it’s tempting to look for quick wins, ways of cheating the system to get higher ranking results. But with more demanding and sophisticated internet users you will find that these older strategies aren’t enough anymore. The better you treat the visitors to your website, the more chance you have of ranking for relevant phrases.
A ‘white hat’ approach to improving user experience on your website is the only sustainable way to go for SEO.