How Does User Experience Impact SEO?

User experience and SEO, in some ways, are inextricably linked, but maybe not in the ways you think. Improving the user experience in concrete ways does not always directly lead to higher rankings in Google or other search engines. Sometimes it’s increasing conversion rate, on-site stickiness or customer retention with an indirect impact on brand visibility and recognition. 

 In this article, we’ll walk through some of the common ways user experience and SEO intersect, and what it means for you as the business owner. 

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A Misconception About Site Speed

Site speed and improving it is something that was a massive focus for many businesses for a long time, that getting a “perfect score” on PageSpeed Insights was the end all and be all. The expected outcome of this was massively higher rankings in Google. 

That’s just not the case. Site speed is a part of the ranking algorithm, yes. It does take into account discrete user experience metrics, yes. But it is simply not that important in the ranking algorithm, really only used as a tiebreaker if Google is trying to determine which set of results to display if some potential results are near-identical in other authority-measuring metrics, like number of backlinks or amount of content produced, or probably a hundred other metrics. It’s a 1%-er, rather than something that is a driving force behind organic rankings.  

Having a fast website, though, can drastically improve your website conversion. An old study from 2012 by Walmart showed up to a 2% improvement in conversion rate — 2 percentage points — for every second improvement. And that’s 2012. The market has only matured and customers expectations along with it. 

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

Optimising your funnel does tend to lead to increases in site speed and then can absolutely have a follow-on effect, either positive or negative, for SEO. My favourite example is if you have a website and decide to run a test where you replace all the words on your product page with a video, and find it increases your conversion rate by +5%…only later to realise that it negatively impacted your organic traffic by -20%. 

So generally do note that while most of the time Conversion Rate Optimisation and fine-tuning your funnel will have positive impacts on both user experience and SEO, test those assumptions every once in a while. It’s not always going to be the case. 

On-Site User Experience

For our purposes, I’m going to translate “user experience” as “getting the information to the person when they need it in the way that makes the most sense for them to digest.” In that, user experience and SEO are nearly the same thing, but again, not necessarily directly tied into an increase in rankings, though it absolutely can. Let’s consider a few  different arenas: 

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Content

In our AI-saturated ecosystem, having content that is unique and clearly answers client questions at the correct time is key, so mapping and understanding your customer journey on the website does become a part of the content publication process. 

Do you customers have common product questions? Make sure they’re answered on the product pages. 

Do they always request specs? Make sure those are there as well.  

What information do you have about your supply chain, your carbon footprint or living wage details? 

Impact to SEO comes not just in the subject or topic focus of the content you write, but where on your website you place it — the concepts in the site structure it’s directly supporting. The same Q&A published in a generic FAQ page on your website may have a very different impact than when it’s published on the most immediately relevant product page or company detail page. 

The uniqueness of your content is also a virtue: I’d suggest nearly ignoring Google when it comes to finding answers to common topics. Write the articles for your audience, and so use your audience to craft the content: speak to your sales and support teams before going to Google, because Google is essentially a sea of confirmation bias. If you go first to Google, how likely are you to write something that doesn’t fit into the parameters of what’s already been published on the topic? Google is actively looking for what they call “information gain”, basically new information about a topic. Publish new information rather than regurgitating the same old “Top 10” listicle. 

Page & Site Hierarchy

If your page visually makes sense, if it’s easy to tell, for example, the main topic of any given page and the related topics or actions on the page, that should also be translated to the code. 

Sometimes we miss the code-level side of things: the way your headings flow down the page in the largest to smallest font size should be directly reflected in the H1-H6 heading tags, for example. 

But if you aren’t even at a point where you could show a page to a stranger and they could tell you what they should do on the page and what it’s all about, get there first. As a machine, Google is quite harsh with any ambiguity. It’s not a penalty, per se, but if they’re confused about what to rank your site for, it’s not going to get much visibility at all for any of the potential topics it could rank about – this is not a time to throw the kitchen sink at a page. 

This is true for your overall site structure, too. The easier it is for Google to make it’s way through your site by clear product lines or related concepts, the better, so a nested URL structure is clearer than a flat one. 

If you’ve already built a flat structure, unless you’re really struggling, it may not be worth migrating to a more nested structure as your first port of call. Sometimes with Google it’s about the devil they know, so try other tactics first before going through the messy rigamarole that is migrating your site structure.

Schema

Schema is a way to speak to Google in it’s own language about the expertise of your company, and your subject matter experts within it. This is why, when you create author bylines or company about pages, you’ll want to support that with the related schema markup. This gives Google a map to validate the fact that these people and this company is real — it gives them signposts on the Internet to validate any say, yes, okay, this person is an expert about x,y, and z. User experience and people can do that quite simply with the author byline and social links, Google and other search engines need a bit more help, because they’re seeing so much more of the Internet on a daily basis than we are — they need shortcuts. People don’t, not in the same way. 

Accessibility

Accessibility can be a big part of user experience and a strong support to SEO. The essential requirement of marking up the actions and media of your website for text to speech, voice services and other assistive technology gives search engines more context for your website at a code level. Assuming it’s all accurate, this can really only be a good thing for your visibility in search engines, because, again, you’re speaking their native language, rather than asking them to translate. 

Design

We don’t see this one as often anymore, so I won’t touch too heavily on it — but how distracting are ads, especially when they’re pop-ups? Don’t do that. Not only is it disruptive to the user’s experience, but at least in part because of that, it’s also something you will get dinged for in search rankings. 

These are some of the main ways in which user experience and SEO are intertwined, so if you have an SEO agency or team member asking about your target market, ideal customer and wanting to understand the customer journey, consider it a good sign and look to facilitate their understanding. It’ll more than likely lead to good things for your website and brand visibility in Google. 

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