Holistic SEO - Why usability & UX matter, too
Imagine yourself back in 2012 when SEO was “simple”. Do some link building, optimize your product descriptions with a certain keyword, add tags here and there and so on. Do everything to please the search engine! Well today, the world looks a bit different. Of course, most of the things mentioned are still important, but the focus shifted away from optimizing for the search engine towards optimizing for the user. Because by offering relevant information to the user, the search engine will rank you better.
Why is it more and more important to optimize your website for your users? Actually it’s self-explanatory that you have to offer relevant content to your customers. You won’t be of use if you don’t fulfill your customers’ needs and thus Google won’t rank you high if users get off your page too quickly as they do not find what they are looking for. So which role do usability and user experience play here?
First of all, we need to make a distinction between the purpose of SEO and usability. SEO takes place before your user enters your site as he searches for a service like yours. Thus, SEO brings people to your website. When the user gets on your website, it’s the content as well as the usability that makes him stay or not. So, good usability might lead to the user buying your product. Basically, we have 2 different steps here:
SEO brings the traffic
Usability might lead to the conversion
It’s just important to balance both and not let SEO hinder your usability and the other way round. Jakob Nielsen wrote an awesome article on SEO and usability if you want to know more on that topic.
With that said, we can look into the role of usability and user experience for a website’s relevance. I will only state a few examples as this article should only shed light on the fact that there is more to SEO than the term “search engine optimization” says. We already realized that by optimizing for the user we also optimize for the search engine. In the following, I’ll be talking about the users’ perspective which can also be the search engine’s perspective.
One thing that should be given at any point in time is a clear information architecture. There are a few more aspects referring to this. Landing on a website, you have to be able to find the information you’re looking for. How do you do that? You look at the homepage and the menu. Either you directly find what you are looking for or you have to take a closer look at the menu buttons to see further categories.
Another aspect is if you’ll land on a subpage, maybe a blog article, it should be visible from either the page itself or the URL where you are actually located. Either you’ll see something like zuroconsult.com/blog/holistic-seo or you’ll see zuroconsult.com/pageID=123? not telling you anything about your actual position. There could also be breadcrumbs on the page itself, so that the user can get back to the first blog page, the homepage or wherever he wants to go. As you maybe know from your own experience with new sites, stable URLS who speak the users/your language are always very useful.
Moreover, speaking the users’ language goes further than only transferring technical terms into understandable words. Depending on your target audience, you should use appropriate language. If you are handling expert users, it will not be hindering to use specific terms possibly not known by an average user. The opposite case, having average users as target audience but using technical terms would hinder a good user experience. Anyway, you should really know your users and design your service for them, because being everybody’s darling will kill conversions as I’ve already explained in another article.
Besides the first impressions of your site’s structure and information, it is also important to keep it up to date. If you have a blog, then frequent new content is indispensable and if you offer any kind of other service, new recommendations, best cases or just news around your company indicate that your site is alive and active. Nothing worse than finding a seemingly interesting blog with a nice article and noticing it’s 2 years old.
These are only a few examples that are equally important for search engines and your users. However, if you would like to know more on this topic, let me know, and if you’re familiar with this topic, let me know your experiences!