What is user experience (UX) and how does it affect SEO?

User experience (nowadays, UX) refers to how the user feels when browsing a website: what he interprets as important, what actions he understands he can do, and what kind of decisions he ends up making. There are many things that affect that experience, and there are elements of web design or web programming, but also more intangible things such as brand trust.

The paths of SEO and user experience have sometimes been divergent or parallel, but the trend is that they go together. In the end, Google wants that when you search for something on its search engine, and it offers you a series of results, the one you choose satisfies the demand you had. So in 99% of cases from now on, when we are going to make a decision to benefit SEO, let's think about what the user wants, and usually it will also be what Google values ​​the most. Despite all the imperfections that Google still has, and although you will sometimes see that your websites interact in the SERPs with pages that try to alter the algorithm and trick Google, sooner or later we will get past them. In short: if a user's experience on the web is adequate, they will find the information they are looking for, navigate through its sections, etc. And the search engine will understand that it has landed on a website with quality content closely related to its search. That's more SEO points. On the contrary, a bad user experience will bring you a low conversion rate in the short term, and a drop in the SERPs in the medium term.

How to improve the user experience on a website

There are a series of basic actions that you must consider, as they have a direct impact on the user experience on your website. These are:

1. Load speed

Loading speed is the main reason for abandoning a web page, especially on mobile devices. You can know the loading speed of your website through the Google Speed ​​Test, placing your URL. Be careful, the speed is different for each URL of your website: home page, service, blog post, etc. Any page that is relevant at the positioning level must load as quickly as possible.

2. Quality content

This is something fundamental, since the user will always prefer well-conceived, written and presented content, and Google will reward it. Poor quality content will also give Google negative signals: pogo sticking, bouncing, or very low conversions. If you consult any Black Hat SEO website you will see that it can also be positioned from automatic websites, with meaningless texts from translation strings and others, but this is not the type of SEO that we do or recommend, due to its danger in the medium term, and because if Google and the rest of the search engines are fine-tuning in the sense of better detecting the quality and naturalness of the content, this type of practice should be penalized more.

3. Responsive website

Google values ​​that you have the web adapted for mobile devices. And not only that, but in many cases Google will only track the mobile version of your website. There are several ways to make a responsive website: have several versions of the website (one for mobile and one for PC), or the most recommended option, the responsive fluid. With this system, the elements are adapted and redistributed for each type of screen and device. The logic that Google follows in this section is similar to the previous ones: a version of your website that is well adapted to mobiles will offer a better user experience, and that will be rewarded by the user, and therefore, by the search engine. You can check if your website is properly adapted to mobile according to Google standards through this link, or in the section of Search Console dedicated to mobile usability.

4. Usability-oriented web design

Once the definition of web design is known, it is important that in addition to proposing an aesthetically beautiful website, above all it is easy to use, so that a user without a high level of technology or knowledge of the subject can navigate intuitively through our site. Today a web design that does not take into account the UX is doomed to failure.

Advantages of having a good user experience

• Reduce the bounce rate: if we make it easy for the user to find what we offer, and this is related to what they have searched for, they will stay on our website and browse it. Consequently, our bounce rate will be reduced.
• CTR improvement. The Click Thought Rate is the percentage of clicks that a result receives, in relation to the occasions that it has been viewed. If a user clicks on my page and ends up finding what he wants, he will no longer return to the results page. Points for Google.
• Increased conversions: This is usually a consequence of all of the above. If it turns out that the user finds the information they are looking for on our website, and we also make it easy for them to interact with the calls to action that we propose, that will lead to an increase in the conversion rate, whatever our objective may be: to carry out a purchase, submit a form, visit a specific page, etc.
• Improved SEO positioning: the virtuous circle that is generated ends up making Google know that our website is valuable to users, and as a consequence it will have better positioning in the medium term. If, in addition to structuring clear information, we also do it for Google's spiders, this will make it easier for Google to label my information well and my content will be indexed more and positioned in better positions.

Conclusions about UX and SEO

The thesis defended by this article is that, if you put the user's usability at the center of what the design and architecture of the web should be, this will facilitate the understanding of our content by the user, and an intuitive navigation for find what you are looking for. If we combine this with quality content, our website will be rewarded by the user and also by Google, since its algorithms and spiders are also in the trend of prioritizing the user experience.