I’m a product designer. I do UI and UX at Jobable. As the product guy in my startup, I’m involved in discussions on how to improve SEO, and every week I face the same dilemma:
Shall I ditch UX to improve my SEO?
Not necessarily.
Don’t get me wrong, SEO is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website.
User experience on the other hand is vital to keep users on the site and let them have a good time while using it.
You get it, both are paramount to a good product, that’s why I decided to take a deep dive into SEO, and find out why it is intrinsically related to UX.
Before I jump in — quick disclaimer:
- I’m a UX designer, not an SEO expert.
- You don’t have to follow the guidelines in the order listed.
And those are the resources I have used to educate myself:
- Google’s youtube channel
- Webmaster help channel
- SEO starter guide ,
- Google’s web-masters guidelines
- Search Console Help section.
If you don’t feel like diving into it, below are my takeaways:
Understand how search engines work
Firstly — if you have never heard the word SEO (I hope not!), here’s a quick (3:14) explanation on what SEO is from Matt Cutts, aka the guy mentioned in every SEO article.
Again, I am putting this article together to save your time! So, long story short:
As we speak, Google is using web crawlers to organize information from webpages and other publicly available content in the Search index.
Cool, thanks for sharing. I have no idea what that means.
So, what does it mean?
Google spiders visit every other corner of your website, “read” your content, go through your meta titles, descriptions, visit links, check your HTML, etc
That’s how Google ranks the most relevant and easy-to-navigate pages when you guys do a search query.
Good content is the key to success
Here is Google’s sound advice:
Create websites with original content that adds value for users. — Google
Two things:
Do not copy. That is it. Just don’t do it.
Google detects syndicated content, scraped or copied from other sites. And guess, Google doesn’t like it. Why? Because it doesn’t add value to the user.
Google is smart enough to figure out that if you syndicated content and considers you (or your website) don’t deserve to rank top. Your website will be sank at the bottom of page x.
You have to add relevant information linked to scraped content in order to have a chance to be ranked by Google.
Be useful before thinking about page rank!
Don’t stuff your pages with keywords
Think about users, pages stuffed with keywords are horrible to read.
You might fool Google spiders for a bit but you won’t fool humans.
Your site might appear at the top of Google’s search results at first but as soon as it notices that users bounce rapidly or don’t find what they came for, you’ll be down ranked.
Hey, now you start to understand the rules. Make users love you and Google will too.
Below are some more tips.
Guidelines for your content:
- Stay aligned with your site’s vision, focus your original editorial line, focus on your why.
- Relevant content will make users read it, share it, reuse it. (we could probably make a song with that).
- Make your audience richer— use research, quotes, and testimonials. Nobody likes to read fluffy stuff.
- Make sure you link your content to its original sources, let users take action.
- Qualitative content is unique and it adds value to the user.
- Entertain users with colours, images, emojis, gifs or memes — depending on your style and identity obviously, keep your content consistent.
Note: don’t over-use it otherwise you’ll have a chance to make it to the top of a bad web design reddit page .
Segment your content in a human way
“Keep a simple URL structure, use meta tags that google understands” — Google
Users will access your site from different points of entries after typing in various queries on Google; if they all land on the same page regardless, most of them will have a poor experience.
Segmentation of your content should be based on the different questions you’re answering, expertise and solutions you are providing. This will make people’s life easier for sure.
Guidelines for segmentation:
- While building your information architecture, think of all the questions you’re answering and how they all flow together from your user perspetive.
- Each section, subsection and page should answer a specific question, probably sort them on a different level of granularity.
- URL’s structure, titles and meta descriptions are important here, for SEO and UX, because it will make it easy for crawlers and users to understand what this page is about.
Links are your friends
“Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.” — Google
Google evaluates your site’s credibility by searching for links leading to it. Be careful though, there are a ton of link-building tools and services promising “easy backlinks building”.
There is no shortcut!
By the way, as you might guess, the amount of links to your site is not the most important factor.
Quality of the source is what matters.
Limited number of articles on very important sites will have more impact than hundreds on un-important sites (Sorry un-important sites owners 🤗).
A link from site A to site B is a vote for site B, it’s a sign that B is relevant. Of course, votes from “important” sites have more impact.
Google claims, at least Matt Cutts, that they have a process to distinguish natural (i.e. developed through the dynamic nature of the web) from the unnatural (i.e. paid, exchanged, etc.) links.
Guidelines for links:
- Quality content will lead to natural backlinks (go back to the content section in case you don’t remember).
- Don’t post links everywhere you can (i.e link scheming), it will hurt your ranking and your brand image.
- Be careful when linking your content to other websites. Dead links or links to low quality sites will hurt your ranking and your UX.
- Internal linking is important, if will help spiders (and users) navigate your site. If a robot gets lost on your site… a human will probably too.
- Review backlinks regularly, people with bad intentions (competitors) could submit your links on poor quality sites. Google doesn’t have to track it wasn’t you; not yet.
Site speed, HTML and browser compatibility
Here is probably how google evaluates how well your site is designed and how your user experience will be like while browsing it.
Site speed
It’s getting more and more important as numerous users are accessing sites via their phones and might have slow internet connections in some areas.
How many sites did you gave up on browsing because it was slow to load?
There are a couple good tools to get an idea whether you’re ticking that box. Here is the Google tool, and if you want to check further, there are more of it out there (google it!).
HTML structure & quality
Your attention to W3C rules are hints for google to evaluate how your site will be perceived by users. Paying extra attention to HTML (and CSS) is an insurance of well displayed sites on all devices. Here again, you can check how well your doing with a W3C validator like this one and CSS here.
Browser compatibility
Don’t be naive, having a perfect site on the latest version of Google Chrome is not enough. Every major browser is important, for SEO and users!
I haven’t found an easy way to test how well you’re doing on most used browsers as most tools providing that service aren’t free; ping me if you have one 🤜 🤛.
There’s still the old fashion way of testing on different devices and bowsers on your own.
Conclusion
I’ll keep it short. UX matters to Google, even more than I thought.
User centric products are the only way to win at SEO and UX, provide something that people need and the rest will follow.
Let me know what you think!
I am curious to know how you guys manage SEO vs UX conflicts in your organisations. Ideas and suggestions are more than welcome.
If you enjoyed the article, hit 👏 as many times as you want!
