As an SEO Agency UK we are well aware of many of the common misconceptions that SEO is purely about link building and keywords. We also know that this way of thinking could not be further from the truth! Yes, keywords and links are really important parts of search engine optimisation, but user experience is also key as well – and is becoming more important if you want to rank well on the SERPs.
Google is constantly tweaking its algorithms, and the focus for them is more and more about providing searchers with a great user experience. In fact, in a bid to separate poor user-friendly websites from great ones, they have made numerous tweaks to their algorithms and various changes to the SERPs as well.
But what does this mean for us as a search engine marketing company uk?
Well, there are many things to think about when it comes to user experience (ux) but when it comes to SEO it mostly boils down to these three things:
#1 A site that is easy to read and navigate
If your website is hard to navigate, with the essential information tucked away or hidden behind lots of buttons and scrolling then people will get frustrated. This means they will leave your site quickly, and your bounce rate will go sky high – which is never good. Google really doesn’t like websites that have a high bounce rate.
Your web content also needs to be easy to read and it should be published correctly as well, as this will affect how Google crawls your site and also indexes it. So, web development is really important from an SEO point of view, as it can influence both your website visibility and its rankings.
There are lots of factors we have to take into account when it comes to UX, but the main ones are Background, Font Size, Font Colour, Font Style, Formatting, Language and Writing Style.
#2 Mobile Friendliness
In July this year, Statista published a chart which showed that just over 52% of website traffic came from mobile users. This statistic should show you just how important it is to make sure the mobile version of your website is top class, otherwise it could have a negative impact on your search engine rankings and traffic.
When we are looking to optimise mobile experience we test your website on various different devices to make sure that it all works. There are many things that we look at when we do this, but the main ones are:
- Does the screen size need to be readjusted?
- Is the page easy to navigate on a mobile device?
- Are the images displayed correctly?
Another important part of mobile friendliness is speed and load time. Research has shown that 35% of users will leave a mobile site if it does not load within three seconds. So, making sure it is optimised will definitely improve your SERP rankings.
Which bring us nicely on to
#3 Page Speed
As we have mentioned above, page speed is critical when it comes to SERP rankings. Page speed is the amount of time it takes to load a specific webpage. Here are a few of the things we take into account when we are looking at what is causing low page speeds:
- Are all of the images compressed? If they are not, they could slow your page load time down as they can take up over 50% of your page
- Are you using compressing codes such as CSS, HTML and JavaScript?
- Is your browser caching?
- Do you have a large amount of external plugins on the page?
So there you have it – the three reasons why user experience is so crucial to SEO. Knowling the relationship between UX and SEO and making sure you work hard at it, will create a successful experience not only for users but for search engines as well.
If you would like to find out more about the website optimisation services in Manchester we offer, please get in touch.
