What Is User Experience? How Design Matters To SEO

As search engine giants continue to update its algorithm, SEO aka Search Engine Optimization has certainly changed over the years and continues to evolve so. Today, Google uses hundreds of metrics into consideration while providing search results for its users pointing out the experts at the finest SEO services in Dubai. 

While keywords and backlinks still play an important role, some matters are more significant in today’s SEO world. Search engines do examine web design and user analytics to determine how relevant your webpage is to a specific search query. Your user metrics are heavily influenced by UX.

What is User Experience?

It all begins with a user-friendly experience of a website. User Experience starts with how the visitors are perceiving and engaging with your website. An effective UX design will help to engage the users and help them to find what they are searching for within a short time. 

You won't certainly want to spend time on a complicated website. Right? So, the smooth user experience offered by a website will leave a good impression on both users and Google, which will reflect on your ranking. When you focus on providing a good UI/UX design, you can literally witness an improvement in SERP and keyword rankings. 
 

Types of User Experience

Here, we explain the major three types of UX design according to the professionals at Intersmart Solutions, the top web development company in Dubai.

• Information 

• Interaction

• Visual Design 

• Information Design 

Such designs focus on how information is structured together and presented to the audience. Information architect creates flows and navigation systems for a better understanding and smooth user experience. 

• Interaction design

This type of design focuses on how a visitor engages with your website. Components like grids, buttons and menus come under interactive design.
 

• Visual Design

Visual designs are a treat to watch. The perfect collision of aesthetics and brand identity. Images, colour, typography. Finding the perfect balance between all these elements lies in the perfection of a visual design. Providing the user with a seamless experience will be the goal of the UX visual designer. 

Why User Experience is Crucial to SEO 

By now, you probably understand UX is quite essential to your site’s future.  But one of the main reasons why user experience matters to SEO is due to Google page experience updates, reveals the SEO experts Dubai.

After the March 2022 Google Page Experience update was rolled out, websites which had a poor user experience took a hit. Google’s page experience for desktop updates showed that websites with poor page experience scores did suffer some major ranking issues.

User Engagement Metrics That Affect SEO

Now, let’s take a look at the few metrics that have a great impact on SEO.
 

1. Bounce Rate

2. Page Dwell Time

These metrics will let the search engine know if your website is engaging or not.
 

1. Bounce Rate 

In simple terms, bounce rate is the percentage of users who are leaving your website after visiting one page. A high bounce rate indicates that a visitor finds your website uninteresting and did not find what they are looking for. 

Even though many factors affect the bounce rate, common issues also include slow speed, irrelevant content and confusing and non-interesting UX designs.

1. Page Dwell Time 

Page dwell time can be described as the time taken by a user to spend on your page/website. Google does believes that prolonged user engagement on your website is a positive aspect. Alternatively, if people only stay a brief period on your site, Google also determines that the page was not informative or relevant to the search query. 

People do engage with content if it matches their search intent. They will spend more time on your website when you focus on offering relevant content related to their search query. So, engaging users will enhance your metrics, which in turn improves your overall rankings.

UX Design Factors to Improve SEO
 

Now that we have an understanding of some of the primary metrics that take on a toll on SEO, let us look at how we can improve those metrics by focusing on certain UX factors. They are 

1. Mobile Responsiveness

2. Page Speed

3. Headers

4. URL Structures

5. Streamlined Menus

Mobile Responsiveness

50 % of website traffic is generated from mobile responsiveness. Websites that aren’t mobile responsive are certainly losing all those organic traffic. So, tailoring your site content and structure for mobile devices will have its benefits. 

Page Speed

Everybody hates a slow-loading website. It’s a likely scenario that users will leave your website if it continues to take time more than 3 seconds.  It will also negatively add towards the bounce rate of your website.

Sometimes, certain things are out of your control. You can't do anything much about a user’s slow internet connection. However, you can make sure that your website is optimized for mobile speed so that it doesn't take a longer time to load.

URL Structures

URL structure is extremely important for a good user experience.

https://serviices/search/details/?p6872466324561454354&language=hi&domain=origin=sales

This is an example of the URL structure that will make you frustrated as hell. Just like users, search engines also use keywords in URLs to crawl and understand what the page is about.  If there aren’t any keywords, it will hurt your SEO.

You can try to implement URL structures that both users and search engines can easily understand For example, the link below shows an effective URL structure.

https://www.intersmart.ae/web-development/ecommerce

Headers 

People absolutely hate being confused about where to navigate to find the content they are looking for. If the User interface isn't audience-friendly, it will backfire on your SEO strategies. 

Streamlined Menus

Undoubtedly, menus are the key components of a website and serve the function of guiding visitors to help with what they are looking for. However, jampacking the whole website into a menu will defeat the purpose. Using categories and subcategories will have a much more effective result.