• SEO Audit
• Technical SEO

Introduction to UX & SEO

User Experience(UX) as the name suggests, simply means how a user interacts with and experiences your website. For example, how the product/service page looks, how its elements influence the user, how it makes them feel, and how they interact with it. On the other hand SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is a set of operations curated to enhance the aspect and positioning of a website in organic search results. Since organic search is the most notable way for people to explore and approach online content, a good SEO service is crucial to increase your online visibility & credibility. 

User Experience and SEO are interrelated to one another. Consider how SEO and UX work together. SEO focuses on search engines and UX focuses on your website visitors. Both share the same goal to provide the best user experience. And It is really important for better SEO results since it is one of the major factors for ranking. When a website is user-friendly; it has a good structure and layout, can easily be understood, and users can find solutions for their problems; it gives credibility to the website thus helping the website rank higher on search engines.

In this article, we are going to understand the link between UX Audit and SEO, how UX Audit is essential in your SEO strategy, and factors you need to consider while doing a UX Audit. Let’s Begin!

What is UX Audit?

A UX Audit, also known as Usability Audit, is a process of an assessment of your website to pinpoint areas highlighting the problems that are causing headaches to the user and solutions to minimize them. UX audit is very handy as it also detects problems that determine why users are ending and leaving their journey of search from your website. 

For you to get a better picture, here is an example that will help you gain a better understanding of UX Audit. Let’s say there is an ecommerce website, say Amazon. A user’s journey starts by searching for what he needs from the site, Let’s say jeans. He then is shown all kinds of jeans on the site. There are hundreds of jeans to choose from. Users usually tend to sort and filter to get the optimum results. Sometimes, sites don’t have a sort and filter option that makes users unhappy. It leads them to exit your site and find what they want from somewhere else. In addition to this, at times the links to checkout are broken which makes it harder for them to purchase products. Slow server, lack of content and images, all this makes it difficult for users to explore and understand the website and buy what they desire. Therefore having a UX Audit is really important.

The UX Audit not only provides detailed information about the user experience but also gives out strategies to carry out better SEO results. These strategies include content on the website that is engaging for users, keywords that will attract more visitors, identifying better linking opportunities, etc.

Why is UX Audit important for the SEO of a website? 

Now that we have understood what UX Audit is, it is time to understand the bridge between UX Audit & SEO and how UX is an important factor in SEO audit.

Helps users to navigate what they want:

Your website navigation structure has a huge impact on conversion, sales and bounce rate and is one of the vital factors when it comes to UX and therefore your search engine ranking. It is very important to create clear, hierarchical website navigation which helps users to find what they are looking for immediately. They should not have to think about what their next step is. If your website’s navigation is complex or confusing, it puts off people from your website. To avert this from happening, simple navigation is necessary.

Decreases the bounce rate and pogo-sticking rate:

A bounce occurs when a user comes to your website on a specific page and leaves from that very same page without taking any further actions. Pogo sticking takes place when a user performs a search, clicks on a result, and rapidly clicks back to the search result page. Both of these types of behavior are a direct result of immediate dissatisfaction in the search result. The reasons can include low-quality content, poor navigation, and slow loading time of the website. This ultimately affects your SEO and traffic. UX Audit helps out here. It curates strategies to overcome such problems so that a higher number of users stay on your website longer and complete their actions. 

User Experience(UX) is a critical component of ranking factors in SEO:

With changing algorithms, Google recognizes real human behavior when determining which websites should top search rankings which means UX has become much more relevant to SEO rankings. As we all know, Google keeps changing its algorithm for a better user experience. Thus it is important to get a UX Audit since it will provide proper strategies and key factors to keep up with algorithms. When you have a high-quality UX on your website, you’re more likely to amplify your website’s ranking in search results. SEO tactics get traffic to your webpage, but UX is what keeps that traffic on it. UX allows you to keep a user engaged, which increases their stay time on your page. This tells Google that your page is credible and relevant to your audience and improves ranking eventually.

Improves Conversion Rate: 

The UX audit is the first and most important step in improving conversion or redesigning the website. With the usability audit, you will be able to find front-end errors, find money-leaking places, and improve your site’s basic metrics. With UX Audit, you have gathered information on what users expect from your website, helping you build strategies and plans which will increase the conversion rate and generate more revenue. 

How to conduct a UX audit of your website?

After understanding why UX Audit is so important for SEO and bringing traffic to your website, let us learn how you can conduct a UX Audit of your website. 

Check for mobile-friendly websites:

About 50 percent of users who are online are browsing from their mobile phones. So you require a mobile-friendly website, or you’re estranging over half of your visitors. It is really important for you to check if your website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly. Mobile-friendliness includes elements, such as your responsive web design, simple navigation, text, and images. All of these should look neat on a mobile device for a better user experience. 

You can check the mobile-friendliness of your website using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

Website loader speed:

Another aspect that influences SEO and UX is your website loading speed. Most users hate to wait for slow-loading pages and want to access information as quickly and as efficiently as possible. If your website takes too long to load, you might start losing visitors to your site. Your site speed impacts your SEO ranking, as well. Google wants to display sites that load quickly. so fast-loading sites tend to rank higher on the search result pages. In addition to this, a good site speed provides a good UX. 

Google has come up with a free tool to check page speed. PageSpeed Insights, use this to improve your page load time.

Check for popups and ads:

Sudden pop-ups and ads harm your site’s UX on desktop and mobile devices. Repetitive popups that appear abruptly just when a user visits your website force them to leave your site. Plus, the situation aggravates when the popups are not optimized for mobile devices. An alternative solution to this can be an exit popup and an entry popup which make things more subtle. If there are more, it is better to eliminate them since it annoys the users. The same goes for ads as well. Too many ads extensively affect the site’s UX, plus it harms the trustworthiness of a website. Other than this, Google has also stated officially that pages with intrusive interstitials will be penalized.

Inspect broken links:

It is important to conduct a link analysis of your entire website and find out which links lead to 404 errors and other broken links. These broken links lost you some credibility. These links must be removed or replaced with working links because they not only harm the UX but also hampers the crawling of your website. When users come up with an error code 404, they believe in your competitors for solutions. It’s best practice to regularly do a link audit to remove, update, or redirect broken links.

Conclusion

Well, now that everything is spoken about what is UX, UX Audit and how it all impacts the SEO, the last question that pops in our head is where do we find UX Audit Services that not only is affordable but also deals with every aspect of the problem, constructs strategies and plans accordingly and deliver optimum results. Indian Marketers have the experience and knowledge needed to carry out your website’s SEO and help you cater to your problems efficiently. We have the expertise and the patience to understand what is needed to be carried out and curate a plan of action that not only tackles all the hurdles to your website but also helps you act as a ladder that helps you climb up the search engine ranking and reach beyond your expectations.