3 Important SEO User Experience Factors
It’s always been Google’s mission to provide searchers with the best possible results. That is their way to keep people using their search engine, which allows the company to deliver more advertising.
In the past, it was mainly the content relevancy of a web page and the number of authoritative links that determined how high a page would rank on search results.
With the arrival of RankBrain and the ever-changing algorithms, Google has also considered user experience (UX) an important SEO factor. UX is essential not only because you want users to stick around and explore your website further but also to increase the number of people finding your site in the Google searches.
In this article, we reveal the three important SEO user experience factors.
Page Layout
It’s clear that Google values the user experience. On their blog, they have received complaints from users who were not happy with the experience of browsing certain sites. These sites have an excessive number of ads on their ‘above-the-fold’ area, making it difficult for users to find the content they are searching for. As a result, Google started penalizing these sites by not ranking them highly on search results.
If you are placing ads on your site, speak with your web designer to discuss how you should redesign ‘above-the-fold’ areas of your web pages, with a focus on content visibility. You can use free browser tools available to check how your website would look under different screen resolutions.
In addition, the structure also plays a big part in a web page layout so consider the following elements in your web design:
- Images and Videos
- Text font style, size, and spacing
- Paragraph headers
- Use bullet points to highlight essential points
- Visible CTAs and links
Website Navigation
Another important SEO user experience factor is website navigation. A page should be intuitive enough to allow for a seamless navigation to and from other pages on your website.
Some helpful techniques when planning or restructuring your website navigation:
- Use descriptive labels or menus
- Avoid or limit drop-down menus
- Restrict the number of menu items to seven
- Carefully plan the order of your website
- Consider the layout of your site’s navigation on mobile devices
Time Spent on Site
One important takeaway from a study by SEMRush: the more time your user spends exploring your website, the higher the customer engagement rate. Higher customer engagement indicates good user experience. From an SEO perspective, higher average time spent on web pages signifies lower bounce rates, a good SEO KPI.
Use the following suggestions to improve the time spent on the website:
- Provide additional content and link to it
- Develop comprehensive content that answers multiple queries
- Highlight related content