Nowadays SEO metrics play a very important role in website promotion, namely: bounce rate, number of page visits, time on site. Google recognizes user behavior and shows the highest-ranking sites with the first links. In turn, UX design has become an integral part of SEO, as it goes a long way in maintaining engagement and thus ranking. Below, we’ll look at five productive uses of UX design and usability variables to support your site’s SEO performance.
Use UX Design for SEO Layouts
There are countless cases where layout design and content formatting can disrupt SEO. The simple reason is that, for example, having the right size headlines and the right amount of text can hinder SEO.
Optimize Your Site Load Speed
GTmetrix is one of the most powerful yet often overlooked tools for technical UX purposes. GTmetrix is useful for any SEO toolkit as it provides important technical information about a site’s performance, namely loading speed. This allows UX designers to pull off a lot of useful ideas: Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and optimize caching, images, and redirects. Site speed is an important ranking signal, as Google’s main mission is to provide users with the best possible experience. In addition to GTmetrix, other tools worth looking into to test and improve the speed and performance of your site are Google PageSpeed Insights and Web.Dev. The recommendations that these tools offer can range from simple image compression to changing how the server interacts with requests.
Ensure Mobile Responsiveness
Since more than 50% of all traffic is currently directed through mobile search, unresponsive sites can compromise more than half of your visitors. By now, most experienced UX designers prioritize mobile design in all projects they participate in. You can test the mobility of a site using Google’s mobile testing tool.
Simplify Site Navigation
Complex navigation structures, although more SEO friendly, can disrupt the user experience, thus indulging them to leave the site. An often simplified navigation with fewer pages is SEO friendly. Having one very meaningful and user-friendly page can be a powerful SEO resource for many different search terms.