7 ways UX impacts SEO and how to use it for higher rankings

Last Updated on 1 November 2024 by Stu Edwards

Having a well-designed and mobile-friendly website does much more than impressing potential customers. It drives conversions and improves your site’s SEO performance.

User experience (UX) consists of site design, navigation, ease of use, and other elements that collectively offer website visitors the experience they need.

This is what SEO is about. Search engines focus on how users interact and engage with your site and use these signals for ranking.

Let’s explore how UX improves SEO and how to leverage it for better search visibility.

What is user experience (UX) and why is it essential?

User experience (UX) is the way users interact and experience your product, service, or website. It covers the end-to-end experience of a user with a focus on making it relevant and simple.

UX is a core part of online marketing that relies on understanding user needs and preferences, and designing your product and website in the best way possible to ensure they meet (rather exceed) user expectations.

The idea is to make it easy for your ideal customers to find what they are looking for on your website.

If visitors have to exert effort to find desired information on your site, it leads to a poor UX which negatively impacts conversions (and other business metrics).

Good UX helps your audience solve their problem quickly and easily without any friction which helps you achieve your business goals.

The principles of UX are based on science such as Fitt’s Law that states the time needed for a user to reach a goal depends on the size and distance of the target.

Hick’s Law is another commonly used theory in UX which states that users take more time to make a decision when the choices are complex and vice versa.

Exceptional UX benefits your site’s SEO performance in multiple ways as UX is a major signal used by search engines to determine search rankings.

How does UX impact SEO?

The purpose of search engine optimisation and UX is the same which is to address and answer user needs in the most optimal, meaningful, and easy way.

Search engines, especially Google, have well-defined metrics that rank sites based on UX such as Core Web Vitals and helpful content.

SEO and UX, broadly speaking, are the two sides of the same coin, and work together. Having decent UX will improve SEO and if you are specifically working on SEO, there is little to no chance that your site has a poor UX.

Let’s dive into UX practices and how each one is linked to SEO:

1. Site speed

Website load speed is one of the most important UX variables that impact your site’s ranking significantly. Google uses Core Web Vitals (CWV) to measure UX via site load speed, site responsiveness, and layout shifts.

Sites having slow load time have poor search ranking as search engines consider these sites to have poor UX. Around 82% of people say that slow web pages impact their buying decisions and 45.4% of users are less likely to complete their purchase:

When a lot of visitors leave your site unsatisfied due to poor load speed, and re-run the same search query or visit another search result from the SERPs, it indicates to search engines that people have a poor UX.

This eventually leads to ranking loss.

Follow these best practices to improve your site load speed to offer better UX and enjoy higher search rankings:

• Use a content delivery network (CDN) as it keeps your site copy at multiple locations and serves a copy from a server that’s closest to the user. This significantly reduces load time
• Switch to a reliable and reputable hosting provider. Avoid using a shared hosting plan, rather use VPS or a dedicated server for hosting
• Compress and optimise images. Use WebP format as it’s ideal for speed optimisation and image compression
• Use browser caching and defer and minify JavaScript and CSS
• Remove unnecessary scripts and plugins from your CMS
• Use a reliable caching and speed optimisation plugin based on your CMS
• Inspect your site through PageSpeed Insights to identify elements that have the highest load speed. It is a helpful free tool by Google that makes it easy to fix speed issues on your site.

2. Mobile friendliness

Having a mobile-friendly and responsive website is essential UX as 62% of all web traffic is generated via mobile devices. Around 74% of people say that they’ll return to a site if it’s mobile-friendly.

Having a mobile-friendly site has a direct impact on your site’s search performance.

Google explicitly recommends having a responsive website design that provides a consistent experience to visitors across all devices.

It’s a part of CWV which is known as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). It tracks unexpected shifts in page layout during load.

Sites with low CLS perform poorly in SERPs.

Another way mobile-friendly sites directly impact SEO is that Google uses mobile-first indexing and recommends having a mobile version of your site.

Google crawlers prioritise the mobile version of your site for indexing as opposed to the desktop. If both versions are available, the mobile version will be used for indexing:

This is because people now prefer accessing the internet from their mobile devices and Google wants to deliver the best experience to its users.

Here’s a list of the best practices to ensure your site is mobile-friendly and ready for mobile indexing:

• Use responsive website design that scores low on CLS (less than 0.1, use PageSpeed Insights to check CLS score)
• The content, site structure, and URL structure should be the same for all versions of your site, especially desktop and mobile
• Optimise your site’s images and content and make sure they are crawlable
• Avoid using dynamic URLs that change for different versions of your site
• Verify the mobile version of your site in Search Console along with the desktop version
• Separately check and monitor the CWV of the mobile version and fix errors proactively.

3. Page design and intent

Search intent defines the purpose of the search query. Understanding search intent and then designing your page according to it is an essential part of UX.

For example, informational intent keywords should lead visitors to a blog post while transactional intent keywords should lead to a product page – and not vice versa.

A mismatch between page design and search intent (even if the content is highly relevant) will ruin UX as design is the first thing that grabs attention.

As much as 94% of first impressions are design-related.

The page layout and design should fully support search intent as that’s what search engines prefer. Google matches search queries to search intent and then shows relevant pages with similar page designs that have the highest engagement.

It significantly impacts search performance and organic ranking.

Here’s a list of major techniques you should follow to ensure relevance between page design and intent:

• Identify search intent for each page on your site
• Choose the correct page design and layout for each intent
• Ensure that page design supports search intent
• Keep tweaking page designs based on A/B tests
• Content should be relevant to intent.

4. Content readability

Search intent isn’t all about design and layout, content needs to be highly relevant to the intent. Importantly, the content should be easy to read and understandable.

If your content isn’t readable, it’ll negatively impact UX.

Content readability is also linked to SEO. It is both a direct and indirect ranking factor.

When your content is grammatically correct, easy to read, and properly formatted, it is more likely to reach a high position in SERPs.

Crawlers can easily understand, index, and rank content that’s well-written, formatted, and factually correct.

High content readability leads to high engagement and session duration with a low bounce rate. These behavioural signals indicate to search engines that your page is liked by readers.

There’s a lot that goes into ensuring your content is readable and loved equally by humans and web crawlers:

• Use simple, plain language without any complicated and complex words, phrases, and sentences
• Write short sentences and paragraphs
• Distribute your content into different sections by adding subheadings, bullets, and lists
• Add enough white space between paragraphs and different content sections (this is more of a part of page design, make sure it’s not skipped)
• Visuals and graphics support readership. Use appropriate media to convey complex ideas
• Ensure that your content is grammatically and factually correct
• Write content for skimmers as most people skim content on the internet. This can be done by bold text, subheadings, bullets, and pointers
• Use the correct colour scheme preferably black font on a white background as it works best for reading and comprehension.

5. Site navigation

Navigation is a critical part of UX that helps site visitors move around and find relevant content, pages, products, and information. Site navigation is the overall hierarchy and link structure of your website that looks like this:

A well-crafted site structure with proper navigation achieves two primary goals:

1. Helps visitors find relevant information easily
2. Guides web crawlers to find web pages and understand your site’s structure.

Orphan pages, for example, happen to be a big issue for large sites. Unlinked pages don’t get crawled and indexed by crawlers.

This issue can be avoided with a well-defined site navigation system where every new page has a proper place in the hierarchy.

Follow this checklist to ensure your site has proper navigation and all the pages are accessible by humans and search engines all the time:

• Create site hierarchy and structure
• Add at least one internal link to every new page, post, and URL you create
• Strategically create desktop and mobile menus that take visitors to key pages that link to subpages and so on
• Have a header and footer for all the versions of your site, especially the mobile version
• Conduct regular site audits to identify orphan pages. Use third-party tools like Ahrefs or Screaming Frog.

6. User engagement

Engagement is an outcome of UX and a metric that Google (and other search engines) track to monitor its usefulness. A site with high engagement is favoured in SERPs as search engines perceive it to be of high value that addresses queries completely.

Google Analytics has an engagement rate metric that monitors engaged vs. non-engaged users on a site.

An engaged session refers to any session that lasts more than 10 seconds, has at least 2 pageviews, or results in a key event:

Bounce rate, as defined by Google, is the opposite of engagement where a user leaves your site in under 10 seconds from a single page without performing a key event.

Engagement and bounce rate aren’t known ranking factors but research shows that the average time on site of Google first page results is 2.5 minutes.

This shows that sites with high engagement are more likely to reach the first page and vice versa:

You should aim for high engagement as it works for both users and search engines. Here’s how to increase the engagement rate and lower the bounce rate:

• Monitor engagement rate and bounce rate across your site in Google Analytics
• Identify pages with a high bounce rate and find out what’s wrong with them. This might require A/B testing
• Use heatmap and other behavioural analytics tools to monitor the exact cause of low engagement
• Compare high-engagement pages with low-engagement pages to identify problematic areas
• Replicate design and layout of high engagement pages to low engagement pages.

7. Accessibility

Web accessibility is the practice of designing websites in a way that people with disabilities can use them flawlessly. Accessibility plays a key role in UX as it makes your site usable to pretty much everyone.

Adding descriptive alt tags for images is a way to make your site more accessible as people who access your site from a screen reader will be able to understand what an image is about.

Screen reading devices display the alt text of images instead of the image and accurate and descriptive alt texts improve your site’s UX significantly.

Accessibility itself isn’t a ranking factor and doesn’t directly impact SEO, but accessibility has tons of elements that are directly related to SEO.

W3C which develops the standards and guidelines for web accessibility has listed all the elements that website owners need to analyse to ensure their sites are fully accessible.

These elements include page title, alt text, headings, font size and style, forms and labels, multimedia, site structure, and more:

Most of these elements have a direct impact on SEO such as page title, alt text, site structure, headings, formatting, form optimisation, and several others.

If you look closely, all of these elements are part of technical SEO which means if your site is technically sound and optimised properly, you won’t have any accessibility issues.

Making your site accessible will improve your site’s SEO performance. You can use Accessibility Checker which is a free tool to find out if your site is accessible and what needs to be done to fix issues:

Follow these guidelines to ensure your site is accessible and search-friendly at the same time:

• Audit your site through a free accessibility checker and follow instructions to fix issues
• Add descriptive alt texts for all the images
• Use contrasting colours to ensure smooth readability
• Text size should be reasonable
• Make your forms accessible by adding labels and errors on client-side
• Avoid animation and unnecessary CSS and JavaScript that might not work across all devices and end up ruining UX.

Conclusion

UX and SEO work together. It might sound complicated and linking user needs to SEO is quite challenging.

However, aligning UX with SEO works best in the long run. You have to fulfil user needs with a focus on search engine requirements and the SEO performance of your site.

This can be best done when you know your ideal customers, search engines, and changing search algorithms.

At Growth Minded Marketing, we follow a systematic approach to bridging UX with SEO services that lead to satisfied, loyal customers with higher search rankings.

SEO efforts bring organic traffic and users stick with your business as they get the best experience ever.

Book a call with a growth expert and see how we can help your business connect UX and SEO.