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UX Design and SEO: How these Two Website Elements can Work together to your Advantage

Over time, the expectations for websites have evolved. These expectations set the standards for how to craft the user experience that a site has to offer. 

With search engines’ desire to provide the most relevant and most satisfactory results to searches, some ranking factors are taken into consideration. One of the most important nowadays is user experience (and various site elements that contribute to it.). It can, therefore, be inferred that UX is a vital aspect of search engine optimization.

With this in mind, you must then make sure to design your UX strategically. By being able to provide commendable UX, you are further boosting your site’s SEO.

The following are ways on how you can maximize how UX design can be used to effectively improve this area of your SEO initiatives:

Addressing Information Architecture in your Site

One of the most important aspects of UX design is how your information is laid out. It is important to keep in mind that your site should have a user-friendly information architecture to ensure that your users would be able to accomplish their goals with your site. The objective is to ensure that there you will be able to provide a general site layout that is simple and intuitive, allowing the users to maximize the use of your site for their purpose. 

Mobile Navigation
Apple’s Desktop and Mobile View

Fixing Website Navigation

Another UX design element to consider is your site’s navigation. While it’s fairly a simple notion to have a navigation scheme that enables users to smoothly go to different areas of your site, not all sites can achieve that. You should work on coming up with a working navigation scheme that aims to provide the easiest way to get around your site.

It is best to structure your site’s navigation scheme into a hierarchy. 

The first level of your hierarchy is your main navigation which contains the most general pages of your site. Your main navigation should contain your business’ primary offerings, as well as other key pages that your site should contain such as the About Us page.

Your second-level navigation is your utility navigation which is also important pages of your site, but probably not as vital as those that would be placed on the main navigation. This can include Contact us page, and other secondary pages of your site.

You can also adopt multi-level, or mega navigation wherein your menu can lead to sub-menus. This is very useful for allowing your users to dig deeper in your site straight from your navigation bars. This is also a choice of navigation for businesses that have a lot of products or services that can be lumped into various categories. However, the challenge for this one is to ensure that your menu bars will function correctly as there are some sites whose menu bars collapse even before you reach the desired page.

Again, the idea is to ensure that you will be able to provide your users with the ability to quickly and smoothly get around your site. The challenge is crafting a user-focused navigation scheme that would be able to achieve that.

Work on Improving your Website Speed

Google Site Speed

The next area that affects user experience is the speed of your website. It is vital for your site to be able to load quickly, or you can risk huge losses. 

If your site fails to load within 3 seconds, your bounce rates would surely go over the roof. But not only should your page render quickly, but you should also be able to allow your users to transition to other pages smoothly. 

To be able to achieve this, your site should first ensure that your site is running on high-performing infrastructure. Your servers or the hosting service you availed should be able to support your site and the number of users that would visit it, ensuring fast loading for all.

Another step is to ensure that your site is light, free from heavy media files that can cause a strain on your site. It is a good idea to have various media files, but these should be kept at a minimum size, and only when necessary.

UX Design Should Be Conversion-Friendly

UX Design and Conversions
Flat design modern vector illustration concept of the website traffic conversion growth, webpage search engine optimization, web site analyzing and content development. Isolated on stylish color background

To ensure that your site’s UX design will bring about returns, you should craft it with conversion in mind. This entails making use of powerful calls-to-action, as well as other conversion-centric strategies.

But also make sure that even if you put a great deal of effort into encouraging conversion, you don’t get over the board and sound like you’re hard-selling throughout your site. Your site should be, more than anything, user-focused. It’s all about working out your site to be able to provide the best user experience. While doing that, you can integrate supporting strategies that can push conversion forward.

Taking Advantage of Mobility and Responsiveness

Finally, you should also focus on the importance of mobility and responsiveness – two aspects that are brought about by the proliferation of smartphones and the consequential increase of searches and site usage from handheld devices.

Your site should also be able to provide the same level of quality experience for mobile users as compared to traditional ways of websites. With that in mind, it is best to design your site to be responsive when it is accessed from mobile devices. Aside from being an element of user experience, mobile responsiveness is a key ranking factor in itself, especially that search engines are looking more into mobile websites now. 

It is best to adopt a responsive web design, one that allows your site to adjust itself with whatever device without the need to come up with multiple versions of your site.

Boost UX for Improved SEO

Starting with user experience one of the best ways to optimize your website in 2019 an undeniably crucial ranking factor, it is just right to work on improving it. There are many aspects involved, and some of the most important have been listed above. At least work on these five areas, and you will be on the right track in ensuring that your site will have better chances of getting a better spot in search results.

John Vuong

John Vuong is the sole owner of Local SEO Search Inc,. John’s mission is to help local business owners improve their online influence so they can dominate their industry. With his business acumen and innate understanding of the local business landscape, John writes blogs that delve on how to customize SEO campaigns based on client needs.

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