How does user experience (UX) link to SEO?

For most of us, terms such as user experience (UX) and search engine optimisation (SEO) don’t mean much; we often hear them or read about them but as they are not integral to our day-to-day lives we don’t take the time out of our busy days to find out what they really mean. However, these terms are far more embedded into our daily life than we realise.

When was the last time you put a search term into Google and marvelled at the list of answers it gave you? More importantly the one that you were looking for, without even knowing precisely what it was you were looking for, popped up in the top five answers. Now let’s say that you click through to that site that you want only to find that it’s not loading quickly, or that once you’re in finding what you really need takes too much effort as you have to click through a number of pages to get to it?

Over 6.5 billion searches are made online every day, making the competition for appearing at the top of the search results tough. Your first success is getting people to your website and once you do the last you want is for them bounce away because their experience of navigating it is too slow or complicated. The ways in which search engines rank their results takes a number of things into account. Google is the largest search engine by far with over a market share of over 80%. It therefore dominates the way in which results are ranked and presented and one of the elements it takes into account is user experience.

Customer experience on your website is therefore a critical part of SEO. A fast-loading page shows search engines that your website traffic flows well and targeted click-throughs to pages on your site show that the website has been built well, taking into account how a user wants to travel through. The key to this is putting yourself into your clients’ shoes and keeping the following in mind when designing your website:

• What are they looking for?
• How quickly can they find it?
• Are your pages loading quickly or will they give up and go elsewhere?

Using jargon is a sure-fire way to lose potential customers. You know your business and it’s often all too easy to fall into the comfort of using jargon or acronyms with suppliers and partners. But when it comes to your customers you need to speak their language instead of yours. By doing this you not only broaden your appeal to customers, but you also keep them on your website, reducing the likelihood of them bouncing off to a rival site (and affecting your SEO rankings in the process).

Let us worry about UX and SEO

If UX and SEO are still a foreign language but you want to know more about their importance when it comes to your business, drop us a line on hello@makemelocal.com. At Make Me Local we have the skills and experience to help local businesses make the most of their website and find more local customers, so talk to us today about how we can do that for your business too.