In the early days of search engine optimization, rankings were the only thing that mattered. SEO professionals’ main tasks involved placing the keyword for several dozen times on the same page, and oddly enough, this practice produced outstanding results. One of the best examples of how powerful keywords were, ‘back in the day’ are hilarious ‘Google bombs’, especially the one that tied President George W. Bush with ‘miserable failure’ keyword.
Search engine optimization have come a long way since then. SEO professionals have become real marketers, because frequent algorithm updates annihilated spam and black hat SEO and made internet a better place. Today’s SEO practices mostly rely on good-quality content and web design, whose purpose is to produce top notch UX.
Importance of UX for SEO
Although today’s SEO professionals don’t need to be full-fledged UX experts, they should at least understand the main UX principles. In today’s age, everything is focused on the user, and therefore UX is a very important parameter for web design in general and especially for SEO.
Search engines use advanced data mining operations to analyze web users’ behavior and determine their wants and needs. Latest algorithm changes, turned UX in one of the most crucial parameters for page ranking. SEO experts understand the importance of good UX, and they go far beyond search engine requirements, in order to improve their website and make it easier to use and understand.
How SEO Specialists can Improve Website’s UX?
SEO professionals can influence many different parts of website’s UX. They should focus on several different groups of parameters, including:
Keywords
Choosing the right keywords is the most essential task for every SEO professional. Right keywords attract the right people, who will appreciate the information your website has to offer. Keyword research is a complicated subject, and we will only focus on two keyword features, which have the most influence on website’s UX.
- Searcher’s language – Websites need to be adapted to prevalent language and slang its visitors use.
- Searcher’s intent – Before choosing the keywords, SEO professionals need to determine visitors’ intent. This will help them to create a unique long tail keywords, which fully reflect visitors’ needs
SEO professionals should try to build links on other websites, using link prospecting tools and add keywords to outbound links’ anchor text.
Motivate them to click!
Although we don’t use ‘Google bombs’ and other black hat SEO techniques, we still need to attract more visitors and make them click on our website’s link. In order to attract potential visitors’ attention, we need to furbish these page elements.
- Title tags – These clickable links in search results need to sound enticing to your targeted audience. Title tags are usually no longer than 70 characters, so you need to use them wisely and make them relevant to visitors’ top searches.
- URLs – Many webmasters don’t customize page’s URL. This leaves them with a blunt string of letters and numbers. Adding a few keywords to your URL makes it look more attractive and relevant.
- Meta descriptions – Although meta descriptions are not as important as they used to be, these 150 character long excerpts enable webmasters to expand and reinforce their title tag and provide valuable information to Search Result’s viewers.
Make them to Stick Around!
After you attracted you visitors, you need to keep them on your page as long as possible. Most visitors are in a hurry and they don’t want to spend ages in search. That is why you need to ensure them that your page offers all the right answers. You can do this by customizing these website segments:
- Headers – Your content needs to be well structured and segmented, with appropriate headers on top of each paragraph. These should contain keywords, so visitors can easily find the paragraph or sentence that gives them the desired information;
- Navigation – Visitors should always know where they are and where can they go from there. Navigation should offer them the full list of categories they can choose and it should follow them throughout their website quest.
- Content optimization – Each post or page should have its primary goal and all content on that page should direct the visitor towards this goal’s completion. This means that pages and posts should be structured around one idea that addresses visitors’ interests and prime concerns.
- Calls to action – Each call to action should list all the benefits visitors will get, when they click on the link.
- Image optimization – In order to make your page load faster, you should compress images, without decreasing their quality;
Even when you solve all UX issues, there is always a place for new improvements. You should conduct A/B testing for each UX change and determine its influence on website’s performance. This will help you to pick only the best practices, which will improve your website’s traffic and make it popular among your target audience.