User-friendliness should be a hugely important part of your website’s overall design. From the layout to fonts, colour schemes and page load times, there are a lot of aspects to consider when creating your new website, blog, Shopify, or other eCommerce storefront. User-friendliness also needs to be at the centre of all of your online marketing efforts, including your email marketing strategy.
When writing content for your website you wouldn’t (or rather shouldn’t) write content with search engines in mind. Your mantra should be “write for the user”. In a similar way, you should approach web design for the perspective of the user. Remember if you write great content or build a user-friendly site, your search engine rankings and traffic will follow.
This is something a lot of business owners do not realise, and this is where they go wrong. User-friendliness does not work against SEO; it works with it.
User-friendliness means visitors should quickly and easily find what they are looking for, colour schemes are contrasting and visually appealing, with good use of white space. As a huge percentage of time online is through mobile devices, the user-friendly website design should also take mobile and smartphone use into account with site structure, composition and page load times.
This feeds into improving overall page load times, if your website or pages on it take too long to load consumers are likely to get annoyed and visit a competitor. Use SEO tools to compress web pages and images to decrease load times and resizing for different devices, screen types, and sizes. You should also think about using a different web host to lower page load speeds as well.
A good example of web design utilises contrasting colours, loads quickly on all devices, comprises simply navigable menu structures with text span which can be quickly rearranged on mobile devices when zoomed in and out of.
How to bring SEO and UX together effectively
Now that you know the importance of user experience, let’s take a look at how to get the user experience right, and consequently, positively influence SEO.
- Bring your SEO and UX strategies together – There is only one place to begin, and this is with making certain that both of your strategies are integrated. They should not be working on their own. They need to be brought together. After all, generating more leads and conversions is one of the main website objectives you will have, and both UX and SEO are vital in this regard.
- Make navigation easy and simple – When it comes to user experience, navigation is pivotal. Your homepage needs to have easy and clear navigation. Users should be able to get to where they need to be without even having to think about it. We recommend indexing your pages through the incorporation of a sitemap on your site.
- Invest in responsive website design – It’s 2020; there really is no excuse for not having a responsive web design. This means that your website will adapt to the size of the screen that it is being viewed on. If you have a website that is not responsive, mobile users will not spend time on your site, meaning your bounce rate levels are going to be incredibly high.
- Concentrate on designs that fit SEO principles – Finally, make sure your content resonates with both search engines and visitors. You should also provide focused descriptions and product names, as well as maximizing H1 and H2 titles, optimising menu functionalities and names, and creating a clear navigation path.
So there you have it: everything you need to know about how SEO and user experience (UX) are a match made in heaven. If you want to climb up the search engine result pages (and let’s face it; why wouldn’t you?), you need to master UX. Use the tips provided above to get started.