TechsPlace | SEO is crucial for digital marketing. It improves website visibility and boosts user traffic, conversion rate, and ROI. SEO also helps your brand reach its target audience through Google.
On the other hand, user experience plays an essential part if you want better SEO results. It brings organic traffic which increases the scope of actions (read: purchases) on your website. User experience, in short, is all about how a person feels when interacting with your website.
So, in this blog, I will share how digital marketers can improve user experience to achieve better SEO results. Let’s get started.
1. Provide a Better Navigation To Your Website
Poor navigation stands in the way of seamless website browsing. Users won’t find the required information, which will cause frustration, instigating them to leave. It will negatively affect your SEO because there won’t be any visits to other website pages, leading to lesser visits and traffic.
So, how to improve website navigation? Here is how you can do it:
- Keep your website navigation consistent: Users should be able to find information with ease. Navigation should remain consistent from page to page because it forces people to reorient themselves every time.
- Divide categories: Define your categories clearly and visually to help your users navigate multiple sections easily. Also, ensure category headings are visually distinct from sub-category ones.
- Navigation elements should have clickable links: If you have multiple categories, put clickable links on all its heading elements. It applies to sub-categories too that people access from drop-down menus.
- Use accurate navigation titles: Provide a general idea of what users will find when clicking on navigational links. The text should be exact, so people know what they will find in it. Please don’t use any cryptic or misleading navigation titles as it will confuse and annoy people, leading to website abandonment.
- Every clickable image should have alt text: It is essential for images that direct users to other pages. Also, include the ALT attribute with detailed text to ensure users know what the link is about on the website.
- Ensure your search feature works: Users should receive relevant search results when using your website’s search functionality. It should show results even if there are misspellings. The search functionality should display related products if you don’t have the specific one the user wants from your website. Your search result should never be empty.
2. Give People An Option To Register With Their Social Network Credentials On Your Website
Try to make user interaction with your website as comfortable as possible. One way to do this is to allow them to register with their social network credentials.
The registration form can turn off many people. 86% of users feel bothered when a website asks them to register a new account. Many people find it a chore to remember account credentials for different websites or verify their emails every time they log in.
Also, users don’t like maintaining different accounts for various websites. So, give an option to people to bypass the registration process by letting them register with their social network.
3. Fix Broken Links
If a user visits your blog post or website page and gets a 404 error, that will create a terrible impression, especially if it was supposed to reveal essential information.
Broken links can create indexation issues, where Google and other search engines cannot reach the page via the link. Broken links happen when a page or post is deleted on the website but doesn’t redirect to existing links or new pages.
Whenever you change URLs, structures, or delete pages and posts, ensure that all existing links redirect to new pages. You can also eliminate the links. Tools like Broken links checker can help you discover any broken links.
4. Remove Excessive Pop-Ups
Pop-ups can be irritating, but that doesn’t mean we should eliminate them. They can be effective for email subscriptions or social shares as long as they are not getting overused or full of useless deals.
So, what’s the solution?
- Don’t place multiple pop-ups on a single page
- Pop-ups must be placed smartly. Don’t ask people for email signup if they have already registered
- Provide people with an easy option to close the pop-up
5. Place Your Ads in the Right Manner
Site monetization is fine if it doesn’t come at the expense of user experience. Ads can be placed properly without being an obstruction to your users.
- Test out different ways to place ads and decide which perform better
- Use sidebar section for ad placement
- Ads must be relevant to what people are searching for on your website.
6. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
54.4% of worldwide internet traffic was done through mobile phones in 2021. For a better user experience, your website has to be compatible with mobile. It will help your audience access your website with their mobiles and tablets without any hassle.
Google’s free mobile-friendly test will help you determine if your website is compatible with smartphones and tablets.
7. Check Your Website Speed
Slow websites are a common issue that affects user experience. People are likely to quit a website if it doesn’t load within 3-4 seconds. It can also lead to a loss in rankings, conversions, and traffic.
Google has declared that website speed is one factor that determines its rank. So, the speed of your website must be adequate.
Here are some of the best practices for improving website speed:
- Compress and resize images
- Minify and combine JavaScript and CSS files
- Implement Lazy Load
- Enable GZIP Compression
- Activate database and page caching
- Implement a content delivery network (CDN)
- Keep your database clean
- Reduce DNS Lookups
Wrapping Things Up
You now have a general idea of common issues that affect user experience and how to fix them. Fixing these issues will provide the best experience to your website visitors, which will boost your SEO in the long run.
User experience and SEO are interconnected. By focusing on one, you are automatically taking care of the other.
This article is contributed by guest author on techsplace.com.