UX stands for User Experience. It’s all about giving visitors to your website a smooth, pleasant experience as they browse and consume your site content. Good UX keeps visitors on your site. Poor UX has the opposite effect.
SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the way you convince Google and other search engines that your site is high-quality and offers helpful content for users. Good SEO means it’s more likely you’ll be on page one of search results, instead of banished to second or third pages. You know, the pages nobody looks at.
Even though they are separate things, both UX and SEO share a common goal–to help users get the information they need as they browse the internet. But does UX impact where you show up in search results? It can.
Sorry, No UX SEO Shortcuts
As a general rule, the better your UX, the better your SEO.
Another way to think about it: make your UX as good as possible while making it easy for Google to understand your website. That will usually help you rank better.
Google does specifically call out ranking factors that are closely related to UX.
- EEAT – this stands for experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Google assesses every website for these four criteria.
- Page experience – when a visitor lands on your site, how enjoyable is their user experience? Google cares and critiques a variety of factors to score your site.
- Core web vitals – these are things like how fast your site loads and how responsive it is once users start exploring it. Google uses a number of factors to determine this, but it is just one piece of the puzzle.
- Site security and privacy – site visitors want to know their data is safe, especially for ecommerce sites. Google puts a huge emphasis on HTTPS.
- User experience interruptions – annoying popups and dialogue boxes that obscure content create a poor user experience. Google thinks so, too.
It would be great if you could just go into your website’s backend and tweak a few technical settings to show Google your intention is to provide a good user experience. Unfortunately, all of these items require real work to improve.
How do you get the results Google wants? By actually providing a good user experience. That requires a solid mix of both UX and SEO strategies.
6 UX SEO Ranking Factors That Matter To Google
People-First Content
We’ve all searched for something online only to end up on a website with awkward content that is stuffed with obvious keywords, doesn’t provide any real value, and makes little sense to even be on the website in the first place.
This type of content feels icky and that’s because it is. It’s the kind of content generated solely to capture the attention of search engines. This type of content cares nothing about actually providing valuable information to a user. All it cares about is appearing in search results high enough to get a user to click on a link.
Google’s position today is that this kind of low-quality content should not be rewarded. Instead, Google looks for “people-first content” which is exactly what it sounds like. It is helpful and reliable content that is targeted to people and not search engines.
Google lays out in detail how to assess your content to see how people-first it is. You should focus on three things.
- Content – Is your content original with fresh information, research, or analysis? Does it provide a comprehensive discussion of the topic? Are fresh insights offered rather than a rehash of someone else’s content? Is there value and originality?
- Quality – How does your content stack up to similar content? Are headlines crafted to accurately represent the content? Is the content free of grammatical and stylistic errors? Where else is the content available online?
- Expertise – Does the content convey trustworthiness? What is the author’s experience with the subject? Are sources well documented, credible, and easily verifiable? Does the content make sense in the context of the overall website?
Google also offers several other questions you should ask generally to ensure a people-first approach.
- Do you already have an established audience who would seek you out directly, even if you didn’t show up in a search result?
- Does the content demonstrate your first-hand expertise and knowledge of the topic?
- What is your site’s primary focus? Does the content fit within that?
- Will a reader actually be helped by consuming your content?
- Will a reader feel good after reading your content, rather than believing it was a waste of time?
This doesn’t mean that Google has a foolproof algorithm that consistently delivers the most valuable, people-first content on page one of search results. There are a lot of examples out there where the top organic listings on a SERP feel wildly out of place.
But Google is still Google, and you have to play by their rules to get the results you want. And people-first content is a great strategy to follow anyway. It helps the user out. If you’re putting content out on the web, you want to be in the business of providing helpful, quality content.
All this doesn’t mean that SEO doesn’t have its place with people-first content. It does, and Google’s own SEO Starter Guide is a good thing to review. But the days of creating search-engine first content are thankfully over.
Site Architecture and Navigation
Good site architecture gives search engines a roadmap to understand your site’s content and how it connects together. When a search engine examines your published site (called “crawling”), you want it to be as easy to understand as possible.
But what’s even more important is how users get around your site. Your UX design should provide a clear, easy-to-follow path that guides users as they look for the information they need.
This includes things like how you organize your menus. You want them to be intuitive and helpful without a lot of unnecessary hierarchy. The same holds true for page layout. You want the content laid out logically, with clear headings and CTAs. Skip copy-heavy pages and instead opt for good design that follows proven UX principles.
If you’re not sure how well you’ve built your site’s navigation and layout, there are lots of great UX and usability testing tools out there that can help you figure that out. Run a few tests and identify where user pain points are. Once you know this, you can make meaningful site improvements.
Engagement Rate
This rate measures how long site visitors stick around once they land on your site. Engagement rate is inversely related to bounce rate. The higher one, the lower the other. Both use “engaged session” as the measurement.
An engaged session, according to Google, requires two things. A visitor to your site must:
- Spend longer than 10 seconds there, and
- Complete a key event or view at least two pages/screens. This could be reading content, filling out a form, or clicking a CTA.
When a user completes an engaged session, it counts towards your overall engagement rate. If a user leaves your site without completing an engaged session, it goes into the bounce rate calculation. The higher your engagement rate, the higher the quality of your site and the more valuable Google will find it.
You can see your engagement rate by adding that function to your reports on your Google Analytics 4 dashboard. If you find your score is lower than you’d like you can use tools like Crazy Egg to identify areas of site improvement that will lead to better engagement.
Page Speed
Websites that seemingly take forever to load kill the user experience. We’ve all tried visiting a site only to abandon ship when we have to wait too long to get the full picture.
Slow page loading speeds are also a known ranking factor for Google. It is part of Google’s Core Web Vitals, along with interactivity and visual stability. Google considers anything faster than 2.5 seconds to be a good user experience.
You must have a site that meets or exceeds this threshold to remain competitive in search results. The great news is there are many tools that will help you identify page loading speeds and pinpoint areas to optimize it.
Some of the most common tools are Pingdom, Google PageSpeed Insights, and GTmetrix. They are all free and give you results about page speed and other insights to help boost overall site performance.
Once you understand the elements that are slowing down your site, you can get to work fixing them. The goal should be a website landing page that loads with lightning speed.
That said, I’d only put enough effort into your page speed to make sure it’s “good enough.” I’ve never seen a website drastically impact its search rankings just but reducing the site speed by 20%. If a typical user can’t notice the increase in speed, I wouldn’t expect Google to change your rankings either.
Mobile First Design
Nearly 60 percent of website traffic today comes from people on mobile devices. If you don’t make sure your website looks equally as good on a smartphone as it does on a desktop, you risk alienating a majority of prospective site visitors.
The industry has know about responsive website designs for awhile.
But these days, we need to go even further.
If I was designing a website from the ground up, I’d focus on designing the mobile version first. Then I’d develop the desktop version from there.
Google famously moved their index to mobile-first a few years back, they’ve already gone all-in on mobile. And you should too with your UX.
The stronger your mobile UX, the better your UX will be for SEO.
Website Copy
Every word that appears on your site should be concise, easy to understand, and helpful. This includes headlines, page elements, and blog content.
Visitors to your site, whether reading a blog post, scrolling through your home page, or navigating your menu, should be able to quickly find the information they need. Good copy should also be relevant to your target audience.
When you’re evaluating your site’s copy, there are several key points to consider.
- Headlines – most readers never move beyond a headline, so you have to get the headline right. This could be the title of a blog post or the banner across your landing page. There’s a lot that goes into writing the perfect headline.
- Relevant and valuable content – the words on your site should reflect what your site is about, related to your expertise, and provide value to a reader. This is where the people-first idea comes in. Don’t write for search engines. Write for your readers.
- Zero grammatical or structural errors – typos scream low-value content. It shows that you just don’t care enough about your readers to proofread before publishing. If you’re not a grammar expert, find someone who is or use a tool like Hemingway Editor to double-check your copy before it goes live.
Good copy keeps people on your site longer, which helps your engagement rate. Higher engagement rates help Google find the value in your site.
