The Impact of User Experience on SEO: Why It Matters
User experience is related to the organic way by which users in general find a website on a search engine (in particular, if it’s the first destination) and the essentiality for a webpage or website is rated. The relationship between the two is the quality of organic rating for a website is reliant on the quality of the user experience. The better the user experience, the stronger the positive feedback in the organic search, providing greater credibility and a higher search rating, thus requiring a stronger SEO. Web 2.0 has shifted user behaviour in that searchers are more web savvy and are looking for more dynamic content from the Internet.
User experience (UX) is a person’s emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction and product ownership. Additionally, it includes a person’s perceptions of system aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency.
Definition of User Experience
User experience is a growing trend in web marketing and SEO service because search engines are taking into account data like bounce rate and time spent on the website, which are now measures of user experience. When Google’s own algorithm changes, such as Panda updates, put increasing onus on delivering a pleasurable and positive experience to the site visitor. Maybe let’s link it to something more specific here. This is because Panda updates have shifted the emphasis on content quality when it comes to specifying what is a “quality site”. This means that there is an automated process to determine a quality site from a non-quality site, and this is thought to be largely measured by user experience. However, content is something that changes, and there will be sites that are constantly changing with a lot of updates, and a site may have good content but content that is hard to find. This means that sites trying to get higher rankings in search engines need to have an effective go at tracking and measuring the user experience on their site.
User experience (UE or UX) is a measure of an individual’s fulfillment and attitudes when working with your online interface or webpage. It encompasses traditional human-computer interaction (HCI) design and extends it by addressing all aspects of a product or service as perceived by users. Because user experience is a subjective feeling, it is hard to measure. Users will determine the usability, desirability, and satisfaction, also influenced by brand, design, usability, and function of the product.
Importance of User Experience in SEO
If we consider SEO based on search engines, user experience (UX) is most likely not the first thing that comes to mind. It is more often considered in terms of the visitors to a site and how appealing it is. However, search engines depend on the ability to provide the best result for any given search. If the information is not easily accessible or the visitor immediately determines that the site isn’t what they are looking for and clicks back, this is considered a poor result. It might not be an immediate effect on the site’s ranking. However, over time, if enough visitors do this, it will begin to have a negative impact on the site’s SEO. It’s my belief that search engines are already factoring this into their ranks as much as possible, and this will continue to increase. This can be considered a precursor to the idea of user experience becoming more directly linked to SEO.
Factors Affecting User Experience
Page loading speed has long been a factor in rankings and overall user satisfaction. While users have a greater tolerance for load times than they did in the early 2000s, studies have shown that page abandonment rates still increase with higher load times. In 2009, KISSmetrics produced an infographic on the effects of page load times. This information is now outdated; however, the points raised are still important, some of which are: how 47% of consumers expect a page to load in two seconds or less, and 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load (Kissmetrics, 2009). It’s reasonable to assume that these percentages are higher today. In 2010, Google announced that site speed would be a new signal used in their search ranking algorithms. This can be taken as a pretty strong indication that page loading speed does have a significant effect on rankings. This is also an example of Google making an algorithm change that directly tells site owners to improve the experience for their users, rather than making changes in an indirect attempt to force sites to improve by punishing those that do not.
Website design and layout affect user experience in several ways. “A well-organized, clean site, with content that is easy to read and understand, will encourage users to stay longer on a page” (W3C, 2008). This, in turn, will provide search engines with more data about that page, which can help improve rankings. Additionally, search engines have the ability to determine if a website is easy to use and well organized, and user-friendly sites fare better in the rankings. Placement of ads can also have a negative effect on user satisfaction and page rankings.
Website Design and Layout
In contrast, a website with a complex layout can cause confusion in finding desired information. Users might also miss some information due to the complex layout as it is difficult to understand and remember where certain information was presented. This can lead to user dissatisfaction and could make them look for an alternate source of information. In terms of SEO, well-organized content is easily understandable for search engines, which can help in better indexing of the website. This can improve the search engine visibility of the website.
Website design and layout play a prominent role in improving or degrading user experience. A website with good design and a simple layout is very easy to understand and use. Using a simple layout helps users find desired information more quickly and also helps in better understanding of the presented information. Content should be organized in a manner that users do not feel like they are reading a novel. Proper headings, subheadings, and usage of bullet and number lists can help users understand the information in a more summarized and effective manner.
Page Loading Speed
With the advent of the internet, the speed of a web page has been seen as a crucial factor in determining user experience. This idea has been supported by many industry leaders such as Jakob Nielsen, who has been quoted as saying “0.1 seconds is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.” Although Nielsen’s statement may be a little extreme, it does show just how much impact the load speed of a web page can have on user experience. Fast load times have been linked to higher satisfaction of a user’s experience, where higher satisfaction usually leads to an increase in conversion rate or some other form of successful user interaction. It has also been suggested that load times directly affect a user’s perception of a brand; users are more likely to associate any negative experience with the brand itself, rather than the quality of their internet connection or device. This can lead to long-term avoidance of a web site, which in turn can have a major impact on the website’s success. An example of this can be seen when Firefox reduced average load times by 2.2 seconds; as a result they saw a 15.4% increase in downloads, which translates to roughly 60 million more downloads annually. On the other hand, slower load times often lead to increased bounce rates and a general dissatisfaction with the user experience. Akamai’s 2006 study Why Web Performance Matters found that 75% of users would not return to websites that took longer than 4 seconds to load. This shows that slower loading web pages can discourage any potential future interactions with the brand, and can be just as detrimental as a fast load time is beneficial.
Mobile Responsiveness
This is measured not to give positive or negative weighting to a particular web designer but to provide useful guidelines to improve mobile user experience. It is said to be more complex than desktop due to the limitations in handling, storage, CPU and input. High latency and low bandwidth is also an issue especially in emerging markets or in rural areas. The first and best option is to maintain the same site and URL where the content will remain the same but the site will be optimized for mobile devices. If this is not possible, a mobile site is acceptable as it is considered a good alternative, although this is not recommended because it requires more resources to maintain and is considered to be more prone to errors. The last and least preferable way is to have different content on a different URL, an example of this is when a page has an option for ‘mobile view’ which will take the user to a separate page with knowledge it is different from the standard. The issues arise around times when the mobile bot can’t access the page due to robots.txt restrictions or a no index tag causing the content to not be indexed at all. Google considers a dynamic serving setup where content changes on the same URL user-agent detection is used to serve different HTML on the same URL. This is a configuration where the server takes a user’s request and the user agent will tell the server to present a different page that will still maintain the same URL. This is less prone to errors as there is no redirection between pages and serves the same HTML with CSS changing the format. The configuration has to be correct to the user agent detection as servers will often serve content with a Vary HTTP header user agent and Googlebot, but Googlebot crawls from an IP address that shows the U.S. thus detecting a US user agent serving the wrong content. This can then be tested in Webmaster tools with the fetch as Google feature which will fetch as the mobile bot. This is useful to see the site from a mobile perspective. The three common mistakes here are serving faulty redirects to mobile users, smartphone only 404 errors, and smartphone only unplayable videos which are all due to transcoding issues. Transcoding is not recommended as it results in a slow and error-prone search experience. Mobile is also an area where schema markup is currently underused. It is easier for sites to be displayed using rich snippets and Google+ information if the site has a mobile site listed as a separate entity in Webmaster tools. Lastly, a mobile app is only worth consideration if you can offer significantly better content than in a mobile site or if you can provide a highly interactive feature, games, or products.
Navigation and User-Friendliness
One of the most important aspects of traffic retention and user conversion is a website’s navigation and user-friendliness. Navigation is the website feature that consists of a list of links that are displayed on every page of a website. The majority of the visitors, currently on your website, guide themselves through the site by clicking on links that appear on various pages. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for visitors to find what they are looking for and not get lost. Additive to a website’s navigational appeal is its user-friendliness. This is how easily the user can operate the functions of the site and navigate around. User friendliness is achieved by ensuring that the navigation tools are self-explanatory and accessible. These features may seem minor, but they are critical in satisfying your users and keeping them on your site. This is crucial because the longer the visitor stays on your site, the more likely they are to conduct business or return at a later date. A satisfied user is more likely to become a loyal user and therefore these factors will also increase customer retention.
User Experience and SEO Rankings
The user experience (UX) has a great impact on the site’s SEO ranking. One of the most important indicators is the site’s engagement level. When users stay longer on a site, this is used as a signal that the site is useful, whereas a fast bounce is registered as a signal the site is irrelevant to the user’s query. A “bounce” refers to a visitor clicking on a search engine result and quickly returning from the site. An increased dwell time and lower bounce rate can improve the site’s ranking and may result in more traffic. Dwell time is the length of time a user spends looking at a webpage after they’ve clicked a link on a SERP page, and before returning back to the search results. Dwell time focuses on the time between clicking on a search result and return to SERPs, whereas bounce rate focuses on the act of returning to SERPs. Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, has stated in a tweet that “when it comes to dwell time, I wouldn’t worry about it, because I am not aware of anything that tracks that.” This may suggest that Google is making use of dwell time to track an interaction rate but has not publicly confirmed it. Evidently, Google does track bounce rates and uses it as a signal to show the quality of a website. Gary Illyes has also hinted in a tweet that “short clicks” (clicks that quickly lead back to the search results) are used as a signal to measure the quality of a page. While Illyes hasn’t confirmed the specific use of the bounce rate, he and his colleagues have confused the two terms in the past. Whether or not Google makes use of dwell time at a later date, it will likely become another important factor in search engine rankings of the future.
Bounce Rate and Dwell Time
When a user clicks on a search result and almost immediately leaves your site, Google’s algorithm takes note of the “bounce” and may bump your site down in the search results. This is because a “bounce” is a signal to the search engine that the result did not give the user what they were looking for. High bounce rates tend to correlate with lower search engine rankings. Dwell time is the duration between clicking a search result and returning to the search page. If a user returns to the search results quickly after clicking a search result, it is also a signal to search engines that the user did not find what they were looking for. This can negatively impact the relevance and perceived value of a web page. It has been debated whether or not bounce rate and dwell time are direct ranking factors in search engine algorithms. However, it is clear that these metrics have an effect on SEO. User experience is what gives these metrics context, and the impact of user experience on bounce rate and dwell time is very clear.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Despite page views and CTR being closely related to draw better conclusions, an increase in CTR can also vary the quantity of visitors. This is primarily due to the increase in the number of users who rarely look beyond the second page of search engine results. A top position can record a 50% or more CTR, whereas a lower position may lead to less than a 20% CTR. Statistics show a 35-45% visitor increment for the positions which increase from the second search engine results page to the first position on the same page. This is a direct result of the impact of user experience of a particular website placed on a search engine.
The organic results directly affect the CTR compared to PPC ads, as the placement of the website plays a crucial role in CTR. Websites on top of the search engine tend to record a higher CTR compared to the ones with similar rankings placed below it. At times, websites ranking lower on search engines may record higher CTR than the ones placed directly above it due to the data provided in Meta tags. This, in turn, can affect the search engine rankings of a particular website. CTR is calculated usually in the form of a ratio of users who have clicked the link to the users who viewed the page. An increase in the site’s CTR rate increases the ratio of visitors, which indirectly affects the rankings of a website on a search engine. Any change in the website’s ranking position leads to a 5-10% increase or decrease in CTR. A position increase or decrease in CTR can lead to a double-fold percentage change in visitor ratio.
The concept of CTR has always been an integral part in any ad strategy, which is primarily carried out to win over a larger number of customers by increasing the reachability and visibility of the website. A recent addition in Google’s Webmaster tool has now allowed webmasters to play with CTR more effectively to drive in more traffic.
Social Signals and User Engagement
There’s an underlying tone to all of this, and that’s the generation of quality content. Traditional SEO was all about getting any content to the top of the search results. The quality of the content had no bearing on the rank itself, it was simply back then the act of manipulation. Generate a page of any topic, get a heap of keywords into meta tags and alt descriptions, buy a few backlinks and change the color of anchor text and there it was. That inferior page would hit #1 spot in a matter of months. With changes in search engine technology, there are no longer short-term fixes, and there’s a push towards a rankings system that reflects the popularity of a page using the inherent wisdom of the internet denizens, but this is trying to mirror real-world democracy and an informed decision can only be made if there the content available is well explained and understood at large.
While the search engines have not directly stated that social signals are a factor in their algorithms, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that they are. Brands that are active in social networks have a look about them in the search results, and with more brands joining the fray in the social media world, this will only become more apparent. A good user engagement strategy often goes hand in hand with good social strategies. Getting your content into the social space is a good way to get it noticed, and increase the chance that someone else will blog about it. Getting your content noticed often results in people talking about it, and the feedback has a correlation to the amount of shares and likes that your content will accrue. These social network users are another target audience, and there are communities that spring up around all kinds of topics, businesses, and industries. Getting involved with customers or simply spreading the brand in these social circles can create long-term communities of loyal fans, and the brand visibility in these spaces can greatly increase the propensity of an article or website link being shared, forever immortalizing the content into the annals of search.
Improving User Experience for Better SEO
Improving website navigation and accessibility is crucial for retaining traffic. A site with poor structure and disorganized content can lead to higher bounce rates and fewer page views. Providing visitors with the ability to quickly and easily find the content they are looking for is likely to lead to increased user satisfaction. This in turn can increase the amount of time visitors spend on the site. The more time spent by users on a site generally indicates that they are more engaged with the content, which is ultimately what everyone wants. User engagement is a sure way to signal quality to search engines. A well-structured site will also allow search engine crawlers to better understand the content on the site and could result in improved search engine rankings.
The world is quickly moving towards mobile and many people are accessing the internet through mobile phones. Mobile is a huge part of people’s lives and its influence will only continue to increase. It is important to make sure that people accessing the site through mobile have a good experience. In fact, mobile friendliness is now a ranking factor for Google. This means that sites optimized for mobile will appear more prominently in Google search results. An easy way to make a website mobile friendly is to use a responsive web design that will adapt the site to different screen sizes. This will also allow for ease in managing the site as there will be only one site to maintain with the same URL.
First and foremost, increasing the website speed has been known to increase user satisfaction. Studies show that users often leave webpages that take more than a few seconds to load. If a website is too slow, users tend to perceive it as being less credible. Page speed is also important to user experience, slower pages can lead to higher bounce rates. As previously mentioned, high bounce rates tells search engines that users did not find the site to be relevant to their search. This will negatively affect rankings in the long run. There are many ways to increase web speed such as optimizing images, using a caching system, and reducing the number of plugins.
Optimizing Website Speed and Performance
When looking at performance, it is essential to understand the difference between speed and load time. Speed is the page generation time. Load time is the full duration of loading a webpage. Page speed can be measured by page load time or page size. Load times should be reviewed for the overall website and also individual pages. For pages that involve query and content generation processes, such as a forum or blog, a slow load time may be inevitable. In this case, the query or content generation process should not slow down the user’s access to other parts of the website. It is important to understand when content or processes are affecting user experience. In these cases, a ‘waiting’ message or indication of process should be displayed to manage user expectation. An accepted load time varies between websites and industries and may need to be decided in consultation with business stakeholders. For example, a retail website may require fast load times to maintain customer interest and repeat visits. A personal or special interest website may value design and information over speed.
Website speed is an important aspect of UX. “47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less” (Kissmetrics). Speed impacts first impressions and the user will associate a slow website with a negative experience. Increase in load time from 8 to 2 seconds increases bounce rates by 50% (Google). If a user immediately leaves a website, this increases the website’s bounce rate and tells search engines that the website is not relevant to the query. High bounce rates have a negative impact on search engine rankings. Load time also affects the search engine spider as they have limited resources and may give up on the website before it has finished indexing. This means some pages may not appear in search engine results. By improving server response time, search engines are more likely to index new pages or updated content faster. Fast also means efficient. A faster website is more likely to get crawl more, resulting in more pages getting indexed.
Enhancing Mobile Experience
Mobile search is progressively more influential in SEO, mainly due to the ever-growing advance of mobile technology which is current. This is shown with research by eMarketer stating that mobile search spend is estimated to surpass desktop search spend in 2015. As a result of this, Google now awards websites that are mobile-friendly with better rankings on mobile search results. This comes hand in hand with Google’s announcement of a new label that signifies if a website is mobile-friendly, which is shown next to the site’s URL on the search results. This demonstrates Google’s firm stance on the encouragement of mobile friendliness and pushing website owners to cater to the large demographic of mobile users. Changes in Google’s algorithms aside, providing a good experience for mobile users is still important. Taking into account that mobile users are looking for quick information on-the-go, providing relevant content above the fold and easy accessibility to further content improves the chances of the user staying on the page. In doing this, the user’s dwell time is increased and the chances of them returning to the website on a desktop browser are raised. This ultimately decreases the bounce rate and increases the page’s organic search traffic, which are both indirectly factors of higher search rankings in Google.
Improving Website Navigation and Structure
Search engines use both the website structure and its navigation system to determine the relevance of a page to a given keyword search. Therefore, it is important to have the main pages on your website no more than 3 levels deep from the homepage. This will provide a clear structure of what the most important pages are, and distribute the link weight evenly across the site. Consider using the nofollow tag on links that you do not wish to be indexed, this will save the link juice for the important pages.
A proper navigation system should help the visitor, not confuse them. Remember the goal is to make it easier for them to find what they are looking for in the most efficient manner possible. This can be achieved through having a clean navigation system with a clear hierarchy of the most important pages or categories at the top, and less important pages/categories at the bottom. Dropdown menus are also a useful way to conserve space on your site whilst having a clear navigation system.
Navigation is important as it is a way for website visitors to move around your site. This is useful so that they can find and view content on your site. Search engines also use the navigation system to determine the relevance of a page to a given keyword search. Therefore, an important key to better on-page SEO is to have an efficient, easy-to-use and clear navigation system that will allow users to move around your site easily.
Creating Engaging and Relevant Content
Part of the reason content is so important for SEO is that it’s the end point of the search. People search because they need to fulfill a task or answer a question, and they do this by clicking on content. While webmasters often think about how to get users to their site, their ultimate goal is delivering the right content to the right user; this is what will satisfy both the user and the search engine. Search engines have always competed in this process, and it’s the only time they really compete with each other. The site with the best content not only ranks better, it provides a better search experience. This is where search is no longer about pulling the best result to the top, it’s about predicting the right result based on the user, and at the search engines have become predictive the need for great content becomes highly emphasized.
Content has played a significant role in SEO since its inception. The search engine’s goal has always been to connect users with the best content for their search queries, and the site owners who can create that content have reaped the benefits. While Google’s algorithm for evaluating content quality has evolved over the years, it’s clear that content and SEO have a symbiotic relationship. Great content attracts natural links, social signals, and it serves as a resource for other webmasters who can learn to cite the site. On the other hand, great content can only reach its intended audience if the site owner is aggressive in exposing that content to the right people. So while all the traditional SEO tactics to attract site visitors are still in play, the search engines can now grasp a website owner’s pursuit of great content through on-site engagement, thereby providing further reward for the effort.
