11 UX Principles To Apply To Your SEO

One thing that is the most important when it comes to SEO is the user experience. Everything you do on your website, do to help your customers and to make their online experience as positive as it can get. With the right UX strategies, you can improve your SEO practices significantly. As a result, your customers will be happier than ever and your business will be more successful than ever before. Before you start thinking of the concrete UX strategies and principles to use, you should first make sure that you understand what UX is.

What is UX?

UX is actually what a person experiences from the second he or she visits your website. While navigating through your web pages, people might think a lot of things about you, your brand, and your products. Most of these thoughts will be caused and directly affected by your website design. People could think that your website is confusing, frustrating, and full of irrelevant and distracting information. On the other hand, they might think that the website is easy to navigate, understandable, and inviting if the website is well designed. 

Even though user experience and usability often overlap, they are not the same. Usability refers to how people find it easy to interact with the website and get to the things they want to find. User experience, on the other hand, refers to how your website is designed to help shape the user’s experience on the website. While UX refers to technical stuff, user experience relies more on subjective feelings. The UX is important for retaining people on your website and SEO is important for drawing traffic to the website in the first place. 

Put the user first

The first UX strategy you should use is to put your users first always. The users are the reason why your business exists in the first place. Without them, there is no need for anything else in your company. That is why you should put the user in the focus on the website as well.

What you should do is to study your typical user. What are the needs that your typical user has to satisfy? Knowing this will help you create better products, but it’ll also improve your SEO practices.

Consistency is key 

A good UX strategy is to make your website consistent. Inconsistency is never good. We don’t like it in people generally, but we don’t like it in businesses especially. Inconsistency means that people don’t know what to expect and that there can be a lot of unpredictability.

This all creates a bad user experience. A good user experience flows in a way and it seems natural to the user. For instance, having a clear idea of what you want from your website will help you create one that will meet the expectations of your users.

Use proper headings 

The search engine needs to understand what the purpose of your website is. The headings are there to make this happen. Not only do search engines get the idea of what your site is about, but the visitors can also learn a lot about your content. 

Proper headings help create a hierarchy and organize the thoughts. The headings need to be accurate and they need to be well-organized. You are allowed to use as many as you need, but don't use them for stylistic reasons only. That'll keep your content high in quality and well-written.

Build trust with URLs

The thing with new customers is that you need to work hard to earn their trust. That isn't such a surprise as people find it hard to share their details or money with a business they haven't already met. However, there are ways to build this trust through SEO.

Testimonials are the best when it comes to building trust. When it comes to search engines though, the URL is the way to go. You should ensure to use search-friendly URLs since they will make it easier for the customers to click through the pages and get to know your business much better.

Improve site navigation 

Website navigation is one of the things that affect the user experience the most. If your current navigation menu is complex and confusing, make sure to change that as soon as possible. Be clear, but use descriptions to further help the users.

If you're afraid you're going to fail to make navigation as good as it needs to be, worry not! Going local will make it easier for you to connect with the people around you and you could build stronger connections in the business as well as improve your local SEO.

Show immediate value

The next UX strategy to implement into your SEO practices is showing immediate value. Your users want to reach the information they need as quickly as they can. To make that happen, your website should be created with the headline and meta description in mind.

The first thing here is to create some appealing titles. Besides having an attention-grabbing title, you should make sure that the title is accurate. It should be informative and easy to read as well. It should also be optimized for mobile since your audience will reach you from these devices as well. 

Be informative with your meta description

Since your users want the information they need as soon as possible, you should help them find their answers within seconds. Having the right navigational structure is the key here, but that isn’t the only necessary thing. You’ll also have to make sure that all relevant and accurate pieces of information are displayed on each page. 

When it comes to meta descriptions, there are a couple of things you should do. Firstly, you should use the 160 characters you have. Then, you should include a CTA which will help the customers find their way around the website. Finally and most importantly, you should focus on value.

Provide diversity 

Not all people are the same. Not all of your customers are the same either. That means that not everyone will be drawn to the same things on your website. For that very reason, offering diversity is another UX tactic that will be more than useful in SEO practices. 

If you want to keep things as simple as possible, you can just try and take up more of the search result pages. This truly is an easy option, but that doesn’t mean that the results will be bad. On the contrary, having different content ranking will largely improve the user experience and your status, especially when it comes to SEO.

Use SEO-friendly layouts 

Even though it doesn't seem highly likely, the truth is that aesthetics can sometimes get in the way of SEO. Even though you want your content to look well, you should be more concerned about how the content will be ranked on the search engine. Specifically, how you format your content and the layout design you use could disrupt SEO.

The UX principles could help you find and use the right layouts. For example, the content should be easy to digest. Even though technical things such as word count, you shouldn’t rely on them solely. The quality of content will be even more important than these technical things. You should also ensure to use images and videos whenever possible. Using the elements that can link to related content will draw attention to the website and rank high as well. 

Don’t forget about the scarcity 

Even though you need to think about a lot of practical issues during your SEO practices, you shouldn’t forget that your main goal is to reach people. You’ll need to think about what people want as well. For instance, if the opportunities aren’t as available as some others, people will believe they are more valuable. 

This phenomenon is mostly seen during Black Friday or Boxing Day in Australia. You can tell that people are buying because there is a limited number of products and not because they really need the products. This is exactly why scarcity is a good move in the SEO game. You can always highlight the limited stock, show the sale ending soon, or show another person viewing the same product.

Ensure mobile responsiveness 

Finally, you should, by now, know that mobile responsive design is a must-have. Both user experience and SEO rely heavily on this factor. Many users are now accessing websites on their mobile phones and tablets. Since this is a practice which gets more and more popular, you should start working on this as soon as possible. 

You want your website to be ranked high and you want to be perceived as accessible by your users. By not having a website responsive to mobile devices, you risk losing a lot of users. The fewer people visit your website, the lower the website will rank on the search engine. 

Conclusion 

Even though they seem very similar, UX and SEO have a lot of differences. However, their similarities are just enough for you to make the most of both and have your business booming. Make sure to try some of these out and see how it works for your business.



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