SEO and User Experience

Balancing SEO and user experience is imperative. You can’t have one without the other. You’re not going to see success with search engine optimization if people who get to your website bounce back to Google and choose a competitor. If that happens enough, the pattern and frequency send a signal to the search engines that maybe your site isn’t as helpful as they thought.

Think about user experience, not just set it and forget it. Fix some things and then move on but continuing to nurture and improve that user experience. Pay attention to your bounce rates. Pay attention to attribution modeling, and understand where users are coming from and what type of content they’re looking for when they get to your website.

I think user experience is critical. One excellent example of user experience is looking at conversion optimization with a framework such Neil Patel’s, which is called, "The Anatomy of a High Converting Landing Page." That landing page was very simple. It had a strong headline, three or four bullet points and an excellent call to action button right next to a video. Below that were testimonials, trust logos and other signals that users look for to decide whether or not they’re going to stay or leave. You have two seconds to get that user’s attention and for them to know what they should be doing.

If the user has to think when they get to a web page about what they should do next; if they have to use your navigation to find something that they’re looking for like a contact link, if they have to think about what to do next, then your user experience failed.

So look at those focal points. Look at the data about what they’re doing on your web page, and experiment and test to see if perhaps they like a blue button better than an orange button.

Running those tests and experiments can improve user experience and add long-term SEO benefits because users will stay on your web page and will be happy with what they see.

There are a lot of people providing SEO consulting, but is that person right for your business? Someone might have experience with SEO but have little experience consulting for an organization like yours. Consider all these issues when hiring an SEO consultant.