How User Experience Affects SEO: Understanding the Hidden Ranking Factor You Don't Want to Miss Out On

Why Is UX Design Important for SEO?

As already stated, UX and SEO are bound. Just indirectly. So, why does the experience you create on your website matter for rankings?

Search engine optimization aims for visibility. With it, your website can appear on top of SERPs. And this can encourage more people to visit your site. These goals can be accomplished through consistent effort. But what's next?

Yes, SEO brings people in. However, when visitors land on your page, it's the UX that defines how long they will stay. Experience issues will likely make your visitors disappointed with your site, and they will leave. This will decrease engagement and dwell time. Your bounce and churn rates will likely go up. And, together, these things will signal Google that your website doesn't satisfy your audience's needs.

Since visitor engagement and experience are among the primary aims of search engines, your sites will be seen as less relevant and valuable after these signals are received. This can lead to lowered positions in SERPs and significant harm to your past SEO efforts. That's why the SEO UX link is subtle, but incredibly important.

How UX Affects SEO: 6 Core Impact Factors

1. Speed

Loading speed is one of the central elements of UX. In the world of fast web and low attention spans, users expect pages to load almost instantly, and leave when they don't. Respectively, poor speed affects your bounce rate and other performance metrics. What's even more important, it's actually a direct ranking factor.

2. Mobile

A huge share of users have switched to mobile a while ago. So, when they click on your site in SERPs, they want it to be well-compatible with mobile. If it's not, it hinders UX and makes your visitors leave for other sites. Another important point in relation to the UX SEO link is that mobile-friendliness and responsive design are also direct ranking factors, like page speed. They've become like this since Google switched to mobile-first indexing.

3. Navigation

Good architecture and navigation define the convenience of use. That's why they matter for UX. The reason why they matter for SEO as well is that proper navigation can make visitors stay on your site longer, exploring different pages. This increases time per session and engagement.

4. Readability

People who land on your site typically want to interact with its content. However, if it's hard to read, their experience is ruined. And they will likely hop off. That's why readability elements, such as contrasting colors, clear typography, and others, matter both for user experience and SEO.

5. Design & Interactivity

The overall visual design of your pages performs multiple functions. It affects UX points like accessibility and readability. On top of that, it impacts branding and, thus, brand recognition. As for interactive elements and visuals, they impact engagement. And they can even help ensure sales.

6. Accessibility

Is web accessibility a real thing? The latest CDC reports say "yes." Over 70 million adults in the US have a disability. That's 1 in 4 people who need special web features. If you don't implement inclusive design, you're losing the traffic they could bring to you. And it affects your SEO.

UX Signals That Influence Search Rankings

In the previous section, we detailed the specific parts of the UX that impact your rankings. We've also briefly mentioned that each of these elements has an effect on certain on-page signals.

SEO and UX are connected by multiple metrics. These include:

Engagement

Speed, mobile-friendliness, and other elements we mentioned earlier shape the foundation of UX. And they all affect how engaged a person will be on your site. When all these elements are designed properly, people will be more likely to spend time on your site and visit multiple pages. And it can also encourage people to share your site with others. High engagement is a powerful driver of traffic, as this is a strong signal of your value and relevance.

Bounce Rate

A large portion of your visitors leave soon after landing? That's the bounce rate. And it's often caused by poor UX. It also matters a lot for search engines. The higher it gets, the more prominent the signal Google receives that your site is not useful or relevant to users. This potentially leads to a low ranking. And proper UX is the key to reducing frustration and bounce rate.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

The design and UX of your website contribute to the overall reputation and recognition of the brand. The better they are, the more likely people will be to click on your link in SERPs. Together with a low bounce rate, search engines interpret high CTR as an indicator of maximum relevancy, value, and usefulness.

Creating a Combined SEO UX Approach: 4 Tips for a User-Friendly Website That Ranks

1. Start With Audits

Before you can align SEO and user experience, you need to understand what your starting point is. To do this, you have to audit your current user experience and SEO.

Start with a technical SEO audit. Run a site crawl to detect major errors, such as:

• • Indexing issues
• • Duplicate content
• • Broken links
• • And others

Additionally, perform speed and mobile-friendliness tests, evaluate the site architecture, and check for other performance problems that might disappoint your visitors. A thorough audit will help you detect the right direction for improvement.

2. Design for User Intent

User intent is one of the search engines' central focuses for providing helpful results in SERPs. When your website meets it, Google interprets it as relevancy. Respectively, your rankings increase if you align your focus with the needs of your target audience. Besides, these days, meeting user intent is also crucial for appearing in AI-powered results, which is a new big trend in search. You can find the best AI Overviews tracking tools to gain valuable insights into AI search and learn how to optimize your site for it as well, and thus match the new needs of your TA.

To align your efforts with this demand, do the following:

• • Conduct research to identify your TA's goals.
• • Align different pages and content types to different types of intent.
• • Design UX and create SEO content in a way that your TA receives the right information and tools when they need it and accomplishes those goals.

Example: When designing for transactional intent, target respective keywords that include words like "buy," "for sale," and similar. In terms of UX, provide visitors with clickable buttons that contain a respective CTA, such as "Buy now." This will help you increase the likelihood of conversion.

3. Boost Engagement Metrics

What creates engagement? In short, it's when TA gets what it needs. On the web, it's often about the content.

When people search for information on the web, they want to receive direct and helpful answers. Focus on crafting high-value and user-focused copy to meet this need and optimize it for SEO. Also, build a strong content marketing strategy to get your copy noticed.

From the UX perspective, improve mobile responsiveness and loading speed to boost engagement. Also, give your visitors more options for interaction, such as comments, chatbots, and others.

4. Add Structured Data and Build Internal Links

Navigation is a critical element of user experience SEO. Firstly, it serves your visitors, making your site more intuitive and convenient for them. At the same time, it increases time on page, signalling your relevance to search engines. However, it's not only about the architecture. It's also about the logical structure of internal links on your site that you need to create to help users hop from one page to another easily.

Now, about structured data. Markup is a sequence of code. Hence, it doesn't directly improve on-site user experience. However, it helps search engines understand your pages better and provide richer SERP results. This can help users find what they need, and, at the same time, generate more clicks for you.