How important is user experience to improve SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not an uncommon word nowadays, especially for eCommerce merchants who have their own website. The reason is easy: SEO is very important in digital marketing. You might be tired of hearing these things, but are you really sure that you understand SEO?

SEO nowadays

As you might already know, SEO is an important thing to make your website more visible, which means that it is important to gain more traffic and get more prospective customers. 

In order to reach that goal, there are some elements you need to pay attention to in your website, and that includes your ranks. 

But, do you know that raising your ranking only by including keywords and backlinking is already dated? The algorithm used in search engines is evolving through the days and it is shifting its focus to human behavior and experience. 

Of course, the SEO tactics using keywords and metadata are still effective. However, because search engines are focusing more on human behavior, you need to give more focus on user experience and the site usability of your eCommerce website as much as you care about the other SEO tactics.

How UX become important in SEO

User Experience (UX) design is to create an essential and significant experience to users. Besides giving the customers what they want, it is also important to know their needs, values, abilities, and limitations.

At the time when UX is still not as important to SEO as nowadays, people focus more on having higher rank rather than on what users wish to find in a site. That is because they can get their site to the top just by adding keywords, contents, and backlinks to their website.

But today search engines are offering best search results based on the user behavior. 

In fact, Google knows the site that the user clicked on, how long the user stayed on that site, and what the user did next. With all of this information, they are trying to understand what the user wants. 

Pogo Sticking

One of the signals that Google can measure is pogo sticking: the action of visiting several different sites from the search result in order to find the satisfying result.

For example, you are searching a topic and click on the first result from the search engine. You take a look at the site, but you can’t find what you want, so you click back and move to another site. This is what Pogo sticking is. If a lot of users are doing this, that means that many people are not satisfied with that site, and as a result, Google will drop the site’s ranking.

Google is dropping that site because it gives bad user experience. Therefore, the higher rank the site is, the lower the bounce rate of the site and the site is providing what the user is searching for.

Do you now understand why improving UX is essential to SEO? Some of you may already be familiar with the above contents, but how to improve your UX so that your prospective customers do not bounce from your site? These are some SEO and UX strategies to make your website have a high quality SEO.

Mobile optimized website

Since the majority of your prospective customers are using their phones to do online shopping, you need to optimize your website so that it can be viewed from their smartphones.
Related article: How to make your eCommerce business mobile-friendly

Make your website load faster

According to the statistics, internet users usually are not willing to wait more than 4 seconds for a page to load. There are higher chances that your prospective customers will leave that page if it loads very long and move to another online shop in the search engine, and as a result, your site’s rank will drop if this happens frequently.

Easy and organized navigation

If you only focus on SEO, your site will have a complicated navigation as a result. You need to make a simple navigation so that your prospective consumer can easily navigate through your pages without getting lost.
Sometimes you need to put yourself in the consumer’s position. Won’t you leave the website when you get lost inside and get nothing from it? 

Use headings

Besides being a good way to put keywords in it to boost SEO, heading is usually the first thing that catches your prospective customers’ eyes when they open your page. They will stay if they find what they are searching for. Besides, headings is also what search-engine crawlers see in order to interpret the content of your website.

Of course there are more practices that can boost the UX beside those four. The most important thing is that anything that you do with your website should focus on your prospective customers’ experience.

• Do they care about the contents of your website?
• Can they get what they want?
• Can they easily get what they want?
• Can they access all the information that you provide?
• Are they satisfied with their experience on your website?

You now know that UX is just as important as the other SEO strategies. And fortunately, what improves UX mostly improves SEO, but the opposite is rare. If you are still unsure about the answer to the questions above, you might want to get back to your website. If you have some difficulties, Genkiware provides maintenance service if you are searching for any technical help with your eCommerce website.