Tips on Boosting Your User Experience for SEO

Today, especially with the demand for high-quality content being at its highest, offering a good user experience can really boost your search engine rankings. Luckily, there are a few simple tips that will help you amplify your user engagement rate as well as your SEO performance.

How does user experience matter?

Before we get to those tips, we need to first understand why user experience matters. Search engine crawlers take stats such as time on site, page views per user, page speed, design elements and more into considerations when ranking websites. This is how they can measure user experience and engagement of a website or a page.

By understanding how these metrics are tracked, we can quickly understand what users are looking for in order to have a truly positive user experience. In return, we can optimize our pages to better suit those needs, ensuring a pleasant (and valuable) time for the users. You can even work with the best SEO company to make the right changes happen even faster.

Getting Started with User Experience

There are, as we discussed earlier, some simple tips that you can apply right away. Some of the things you can do to improve user experience are:

• Serve Content That Answers Questions

  Users are generally looking for an answer when they go to search engines. In order for them to find your site valuable, you need to make sure that the content you serve answers the questions.

  To do this, you need to understand the kind of information users are looking for, both consciously and unconsciously. If you were to search for tips on how to design a personal blog, for example, you would want to know what constitutes a good design for blogs and how to achieve them.

  You also don’t need to serve all of the information at once. Break them down into several specific articles or sections so that users can navigate through them as they see fit.

• Speed Is King!

  Content is everything, but not serving them quickly enough will greatly hurt the value of your site and its SEO performance. Pay close attention to page speed and keep your site as lean as possible. By serving content quickly and efficiently, you can maintain your users’ attention and keep them happy longer.

• Best User Experience Everywhere

  It is also worth noting that users now use multiple devices and browsers to access your site. Ensuring cross-device and cross-browser compatibility is critically important. Make sure your site appears ‘correct’ on different browsers, including mobile browsers.

  The same can be said for performance, navigation and other parts of the user experience. Everything needs to be consistent and easy to understand. Let users move from page to page quickly and be sure to provide easy navigation to other parts of your site.

• Eliminate Annoying Features

  Some features are annoying by nature. A pop-up or modal window reminding user to subscribe or an interstitial page that offers access to mobile apps may seem like great ideas at first, but they are often seen as nuisances. In fact, Google is penalizing sites with intrusive popups and interstitial landing pages.
  If you’re annoyed by these elements when you visit other websites, chances are your users will too when they see them on yours. Simply remove them and you will find keeping users happy much easier to do.