Why Bother User Experience? Basic UX Principles for SEO Experts & Business Owners

Over the years, there has been a dramatic change in the expectations of people who purchase online; thus, impacting user experience principles followed by businesses drastically.

When the concept of the online market was in the beginning stage, no one knew what exactly to expect from these online merchants. However, today, customers are well-informed and trained as well in terms of accepting sellers.

With customers becoming smarter, search engines have improved their algorithms to display information on the basis of what users require. As a result, everything related to internet business has evolved to make experienced customer-centric.

Coming to your business, irrespective of what consumers are expecting, it’s important to adapt as per the trends so as to provide fantastic user experience to the target audience. Owing to this, combining the principle of user experience (UX) and strategies of search engine optimization (SEO) can provide better results.

So, let’s understand more about why, being a business owner or an SEO expert, you should be bothering about UX principles and the ways you can implement to learn how to set up a business website.

Basic User Experience Principles:

One of the primary problems here can be that UX analysis doesn’t come as a part of the skill set of SEO. However, UX is also much more than just concentrating on website visitors. So, if you wish to get the best out of what you have to offer, understanding these basic principles can give you a better start.

1- Analytics Data & Account:

Most of the times, when it comes to SEO, people leave analytics behind. And, that may bring you down affectedly. Whether it’s for better user experience or SEO ranking, having reliable and accurate data is something you must not miss upon.

You must understand that qualitative analytics data is an essential aspect of user experience. And then, you’d also require correct tools to meet the analytics requirements. If you don’t have a significant analytics system, you may receive data from all directions and sources. This isn’t going to help you but add more to your confusion.

Therefore, ensure that you have centralized data, integrated into only one system. Once done, it’s recommended to audit the website analytics to ensure that the data you’re acquiring can be used to achieve different goals. The audit can also help discover and fix several other issues, like self-referrals, 404 errors, events tracking, cross-domain, property settings, and much more.

2- Effective Analytics Metrics & Engagement:

Another one of the vital user experience principles is to track the engagement and analytics metrics. For this, you’d have to emphasize three essential parameters:

• Exit Rate
• Bounce Rate
• Time on Page

By providing adequate user experience, your goal should be to enhance these metrics to such an extent that they provide sufficient engagement level. With people spending less time on your website or bouncing back from your pages, all Google assesses is how visitors are leaving your site and finding better alternatives. That’s what Google is going to factor while deciding the rank of your site.

Therefore, as an SEO expert and business owner, your job is to understand the reason behind the high bounce rate along with other decreasing metrics and how you can improve it.

3- Qualitative & Effective Data:

While quantitative data, collected from analytics tools is essential, you must not overlook the worth of qualitative data at any cost. When talking about the latter, it’s necessary to understand how customers are engaging with your brand. Therefore, concentrating upon their feedback can help you to a great extent by reducing website errors, catering to pain points of potential customers, and increasing engagement – all of which is good for SEO.

To execute this step successfully, begin asking your customers their feedback on your products or services. For this, what you can do is come up with polls and surveys to let the potential customers answer transparently. With their response, you’ll be able to get an insight into their minds. In this way, figuring out what’s wrong and how to fix it will help you efficiently.

4- Consistency:

When talking about important user experience principles for SEO, it’s difficult to miss consistency. There are several reasons that make consistency important. To begin with, it decreases learning, meaning that your customers wouldn’t have to brainstorm upon every new representation of the products that you post if they’re already well-acknowledged with your brand.

With this process, you’ll be able to get a quick and faster response from your customers. When it comes to analytics data, consistency represents lower exit rates and bounce rates.

Best Practices for UX & SEO:

In reality, you don’t have to be an expert in UX designing to match the paces with such an experience that would complement the SEO efforts as well. However, before you dive into learning some best practices, you must keep in mind that not every technique may fulfill your goals and you may have to keep experimenting, depending upon your potential customers and the industry.

Having said that, let’s understand specific tips and best practices that may help you gain satisfactory results.

• Keyword Research:

For almost every business owner and SEO expert, the primary starting point would be keyword research. To tell you the fact, this activity impacts practically every aspect of your website, right from the content to the message you want to communicate with the audience.

When you begin with this activity, you’re going to get familiar with a completely different world that exists only for keywords. Hence, you’ll have to be very particular about how you conduct this research and the kind of keywords that you choose so that you can rank higher as well as provide a better experience to your visitors.

• Attracting More Clicks:

When you optimize your website, the ranking isn’t the only objective you should be following. However, one of the primary things is to get more clicks and visitors to your site. Having said that, the higher the rank you have, the more chances you get to obtain more clicks.

However, there are no compulsions and restrictions that you should follow to stand equally with your competitors when you can easily outpace them. It’s entirely possible to gain more clicks to the website in comparison with others who are ranking above you.

This can only be done by ensuring that your website catches the attention of people. It can be mainly through attractive language that would encourage them to click and visit your site. If you’re using bland language, it’s going to fetch you nothing but lousy click-through rate.

So, make sure your meta descriptions, title tags, URLs, breadcrumbs, and other similar elements have been curated well-enough.

• Keep It Going:

Once you’ve achieved the target of click-through rates, understand that your job isn’t done yet. There would be a lot more to do. One thing that you must always remember is that your visitors will always be in a hurry. They wouldn’t take a lot of time just to figure out what your brand is what you’re offering.

In fact, if they won’t find what they’re looking for on your landing page, they’ll leave quickly. This means you must make sure that you’ve done everything correctly. Your visitors found something worthwhile when clicking on your site. Hence, you’d have to maintain that worth.

Don’t let them lose their interest. If they do, you’re going to lose them. So, make sure you properly optimize the following elements on the site:

• Site ID
• Navigation
• Header Tags
• Content Optimization
• CTA

Wrapping Up:

Now that you’ve understood the user experience principles and how you can integrate SEO in it, now is the time to enhance your website by keeping the customer journey in mind. From the technology to your customers, everything is evolving; therefore, you must align your business with them to get more benefits.