Usability and User Experience: Two Most Influential Factors Behind Search Engine Ranking of Websites

Search engine algorithms are continuously trying to adapt to the user sensitivities and wishes and this is why user experience (UX) makes such a key consideration for the SEO strategy.

To make your SEO strategy future-proof, you need to keep focusing on maintaining optimum usability and delivering the most sophisticated user experience. The SEO of a website now works hand in hand with the excellence in user experience, not without it. By simply delivering superb user experience a website actually enhances its search engine ranking potential.

Most Relevant SEO Principles Also Insist On UX

Some SEO principles that remain constant over the years also insist on quality user experience (UX). These search engine ranking principles that do not change with any new algorithm update also suggests boosting speed, performance and usability of a website. Let’s have a look at the key SEO aspects that always focus on making the user experience better.

• How content friendly the structure of the website is? Does the website structure give top priority to the contents?
• How by providing relevant backlinks you give users access to useful and informative contents?
• Is the user experience friendly and does the interests the user to stay for long?
• How fast your web pages load?
• How easy it is to navigate and find contents in your site?

Can Google Algorithm Penalise A Website For Bad UX?

Let us understand one thing very clearly. Every subsequent Google algorithm is basically unleashed to make the user experience better and to help websites conform to the latest UI and UX standards. Apart from the relevance and uniqueness of the published contents, what matters most is the seamless user experience focused on ease of use and easy accessibility.

In spite of providing high-quality contents, if a website fails to load properly across multiple sizes of screens or if it lacks usability across various devices, this may terribly undermine the search ranking of the website. Every new algorithm update is basically an effort to add more value to the relevance of the contents and user experience of the websites. This is precisely why following the last Google algorithm update it has become tougher for the websites to rank in the search engine results.

The Pivotal Role Of Voice Interfaces

Voice search and voice interfaces are making things even more complicated. Apple’s voice interface has been launched back in 2011 and since then these voice-enabled digital assistants are on the rise and now almost every technology giant has its own voice assistant. From Siri to Amazon, Alexa to Microsoft, Alexa to Google Assistant, the voice interfaces came a full circle reinventing the user experience and user interactions across mobile and web interfaces. There is a clear indication that the dominance of voice interfaces will continue to redefine our web and mobile experience.

Now that the web search literally needs a simple voice command, finding web contents has become easier than ever before. Thanks to the ease of voice-enabled search contents can be searched and found more contextually and as per the relevance. Thanks to voice search, the so-called keywords have also undergone a radical change. Google now understands search terms and keywords more semantically by utilising the semantic engine.

So, while integrating voice search websites can enhance the user experience to a great extent, the voice search will also add a new dimension to the search-friendliness of their contents. In all considerations, voice search coupled up with the latest algorithm update can make websites more UX optimised and search engine friendly.

The Combined Power Of SEO And UX

From the above discussion, it has been more or less established that User Experience (UX) is now a crucial part of the SEO practices. With the latest Google search algorithm, the role of UX has become most important than ever before. Now, developers and the content marketers of websites basically have to work in unison to deliver the combined power of contents and great user experience to ensure search ranking advantages.

Let us explain below some of the most crucial aspects for websites to achieve higher search ranks.

Headings

The purpose of headings whether in print media or in web contents is basically to grab the attention of the audience to a topic. Headings explain the core concept of content in brief. This is the reason why headings also help search engine crawlers to find content for listing.

Now, headings are of different types. Apart from the main heading (<h1>), you have secondary headings for different sections of the content. All these headings are placed above different sections and by that, they create a logical hierarchy as per the relevance or importance. When creating pagination it is important to use the main heading for the page-link so that search engine crawlers can find the content based on the primary or basic heading.

Simple Navigation And Clean Site Structure

Well, the ease of access to contents is primarily ensured by a simple structure and easy navigation menus of a website. There are hundreds of websites that lack this simple aspect and resultantly suffer from poor user engagement. To ensure easy navigation and clean site structure consider the following aspects.

A vast majority of users don’t enter a website through the homepage. They find content as per relevance and get into your website precisely for accessing that content. But upon entering your website they should be able to access and find other pages and contents. This requires an easy menu option, pagination and content listing as per different metrics like “Most recent”, “Most relevant”, “Recent posts”, etc. Lastly, the navigation should follow the design convention to help users understand them intuitively without wasting time in confusion.

In this respect, it is important to remember that based on the structure a website gets listed by Google along with the site links. This decision is mainly taken as per the simplicity and user-friendliness of the website structure.

User Signals

Search engine ranking is also influenced to a great extent by the user signals. When your site or business listing gets frequent traction, it easily influences Google to list your website in the search rank for relevant search terms or queries. For instance, if you have some already published posts on the Google My Business platform and if it gets frequent clicks or user footfall, your chances to get listed becomes automatically higher.

Apart from this, some other user signals that a website can only build over a period of time also matters a lot for search engine ranking. For example, the engagement metrics such as the session duration, frequency of visits, the bounce rate etc. can influence the impression you create with your website. All these parameters and metrics show the user interest in your website.

Website Loading Speed

The loading speed of websites and the web pages has been a key ranking factor for quite some time. As most visitors now access websites on their mobile devices, the loading speed on mobile screens is a crucial consideration for Google search ranking. To help to determine this Google has unleashed a new PageSpeed Insights tool through which you not only can determine the loading speed and mobile responsiveness of your website but you can also get most relevant insights about improving the loading speed.

Mobile User Experience

A vast majority of websites are now accessed through mobile devices and so, the user experience of mobile users is taken more seriously by Google than their desktop counterparts. A website must be mobile-optimised or responsively designed to take on any screen size without causing a visual or functional issue.

Starting from the Google search engine update released in 2015, the mobile responsiveness and mobile optimisation became serious considerations for search ranking. According to many SEO experts, Google even can consider your mobile website to be the main website for ranking consideration, in case you opt for two different websites for mobile and desktop instead of choosing the single responsive one.

Clear The Design Clutter

The final consideration for a great design that serves up to the SEO consideration is the clutter-free design. A website layout that uses a lot of white or negative space and does away with the visual distractions can automatically help users in respect of ease of accessing contents and overall usability. Naturally, Google gives priority to websites for search ranking that offers a clean and clutter-free design.

Conclusion

The usability and user experience are no longer remained to be secluded considerations for search engine rankings but they are now key aspects to influence the search engine ranking of a website.