User experience is the foundation of a site’s usability, and it’s an aspect of on-page SEO that many people overlook.
If your site lacks the positive user experience and ease of use that end users require to navigate your site, you will drive visitors to your competitors.
In this guide, you’ll learn what user experience (UX) entails, the types of experiences, the difference between UI and UX, and why SEO matters.
What is user experience (UX)?
UX is the way people interact with your website.
You’ll also find this term used for products, but we’re very focused on websites at the moment.
If you have a user-friendly UI design, it will be easier for users to navigate your site and find the information they want.
If you have a digital product, such as a SaaS solution, this interaction will also happen on your digital product.
The user experience raises two things:
- ideas.
- feelings.
In short, user experience can provide a positive experience with your website – or it can lead to frustration among users.
NBUsability is not UX design. It is a UX component that works with design to create the experience users desire.
What are the types of user experience?
User experience evaluation should look at the three types of user experience design to best understand the needs of the end user.
The three types of user experience include:
- InformationAn overlooked aspect of content strategy is information architecture. Time should be spent on how the information on the site is organized and presented. You must consider user flows and navigation for all forms of information you provide.
- interactionYour site has an interactive design style – or a specific way in which users interact with the site. Website components that fall under the UX interaction type include buttons, interfaces, and menus.
- Visual designLook and feel are important to the end user. You want your website to be cohesive between color, typography, and images. A user interface (UI) would fall under this type of UX, but it is important to note that UI is not interchangeable with UX.
What is the difference between UI and UX?
Speaking of UX and UI, it is important to have a solid understanding of the difference between the two to better understand the user experience.
user interface
User interface design is the visual elements of your site, including:
- buttons.
- Icons.
- screens.
The visual elements on your site are part of the user interface.
UI certainly overlaps with UX to some extent, but they are not the same.
Steve Krug also has a great book on usability called Don’t Make Me Think Revisited: A Commonsense Approach to Using the Web. It was first published in 2000, and today it is the best-selling book.
Steve’s vision from over 20 years ago (although we’re now in the third edition of the book) provides usability guidance that includes:
- desktop.
- Moving.
- Ease of use.
- Layouts.
- It’s all UX.
If there’s one thing this book will teach you about ease of use, it’s the focus on intuitive navigation. Frustrating website users is the exact opposite of a good user experience.
user experience
UX is about the user interface and how the user will:
- Interact with your site.
- feel during the interaction.
Think about Google for a moment.
A simple landing page that is visually appealing, yet spartan in nature, is the interface of the Internet. In terms of UX, Google is one of the best in the world, although it lacks an amazing user interface.
Indeed, the user interface should be practical and attractive, but the UX is what stands out the most.
Imagine that you tried to do a search on Google and it returned wrong results or it took a minute to run a query. In this case, even the nicest UI won’t make up for poor UX.
Peter Morville Honeycomb user experience is one of the prime examples of how we can go beyond ease of use and focus on user experience in new and exciting ways.
Honeycomb includes multiple points that all combine to maximize the user experience. These aspects are:
- can access.
- reasonable.
- desirable.
- can be found.
- usable.
- useful.
- Valuable.
When you focus on all of these elements, you will greatly improve your user experience.
Why is user experience important for SEO?
By this point, you understand that user experience is very important to your site visitors and audience.
A lot of time, analysis and refinement should go into UX design. However, there is another reason to redirect your attention to user experience: SEO.
Updated Google Page experience
When Google’s page experience update was fully rolled out, it had an impact on websites that provided poor user experience.
The page experience refresh is now slowly being rolled out to the desktop. It will be completed by the end of March 2022. Learn more about the update: https://t.co/FQvMx3Ymaf
– Google Search Center (googlesearchc) February 22, 2022
Multiple UX aspects are part of the ranking factors for the update, including:
- Intrusive ads.
- Basic web animation.
- HTTPS security.
You can run a Core Web Vitals report here and make corrections to meet these requirements. In addition, you should know if your site contains intrusive ads that annoy users, and if your site lacks HTTPS.
Page performance improves your SEO. Google research Shows that focusing on user experience can:
- Reduce website abandonment by up to 24%.
- Optimize web conversions.
- Increase average pageviews per session by up to 15%.
- Increase advertising revenue by 18% or more.
When you spend time improving your site’s user experience, you benefit from higher rankings, lower page abandonment, improved conversions, and more revenue.
In addition, many practices to improve user experience are also important components of on-page SEO on a site, such as:
- Proper use of the head.
- Add lists to your content.
- Take advantage of the pictures.
- Optimize images for faster load times.
- Fill content gaps with useful information.
- Reduce “content fluff”.
- using graphs.
- Usability testing across devices.
When you improve user experience, you create a positive experience for your users, while improving many on-page SEO foundations for your website.
Final comments
The customer experience must go beyond responsive web design.
Heck’s law It assumes that when more options are presented to users, it takes longer to come to a decision. You’ve likely seen this yourself when shopping online and finding hundreds of options.
When people come to your site, they’re looking for answers or knowledge — not confusion.
User research, usability testing, and user experience design rethinking can often help you get closer to meeting your design SEO requirements while keeping your visitors (or customers) happy.
More resources:
- Site search best practices for SEO and user experience
- Google’s algorithms and updates focus on user experience: a timeline
- How search engine algorithms work: everything you need to know
Featured image: NicoElNino/Shutterstock
