Why is User Experience More Important than Ever Before for SEO?

Updated February 13th, 2024

How Important Is User Experience in SEO for 2023-24

Since Google began in the late 1990s, its main priority was to have a search engine with the best user experience imaginable. To achieve this, Google has frequently made changes to its algorithm so that the user finds what they are looking for. 

Since day one, user experience has been a vital part of SEO. In the early days of the search engine, there were plenty of websites ranked highly which experienced a lot of traffic. However, if the site received lots of views and the user was not satisfied with the site, the bounce-back rate was very high. As the search engine’s algorithm improved over the years, these sites suffered and Google managed to direct its users to better results. Nowadays, user experience is one of the most important parts of SEO. 

If visitors to your website don’t enjoy their experience it will have a high bounce back rate. You can expect the site’s ranking to decrease if changes are not made. The main reason for SEO is so that the user can easily find what they are looking for, and when they do find a site, it most runs smoothly. 

What is Google’s Algorithm Update this year all about?

Google releasing another update during 2021, aimed at user experience. The new update will add UX (user experience) as a ranking factor which will help determine the sites overall ranking. Ranking factors are what the search engine uses to evaluate each site. 

To prepare for the update, it is crucial that you look at how you can improve your customer’s overall user experience. Think about it, you don’t want to click on a site that seems to take forever for the page to load, nor do you want to visit a site that is full of pop-up advertisements either. Consider looking at your competitor’s websites to see how they might be doing things differently. If you provide your users with a good experience, not only will they stay on your site longer and visit more pages, your Google ranking might improve. 

What are the Main Factors that can Influence the User’s Overall Experience?

These are critical factors to consider when trying to improve your sites UX: 

• Quality content: Providing the user with the content they are searching for is very important. For example, if you have a website about Premier League football but the site publishes lots of content on a different subject, the user is not going to be happy. 
• Page load time: If your page takes longer than 3 seconds to fully load you can expect 53% of visitors of them to leave the site. Avoid using large or multiple images, multimedia, long pages, or anything else that will cause your page to open slowly. Check to see there are no coding errors. Consider changing your web hosting provider. 
• Mobile-friendliness: Every successful site has a mobile-friendly website. Google is fully aware of how many of its users use mobile devices nowadays, so it is critical that your site looks good on one of these devices. 
• Navigation: Visitors to your website should easily be able to navigate themselves around your site. It should not take long for them to find what they are looking for when they land on your page.

These are just some of the factors that Google feels are important. If you are struggling to provide your website’s visitors with a good user experience, consider hiring a professional SEO or web design company. A reputable company will be able to improve your site’s overall user experience, and they will be able to help you with link building strategies for SEO.

Make sure the Site is quick to Navigate

Page loading time is important as discussed earlier, however, you should not underestimate the importance of how a user navigates through different pages on the site. To make sure they can do this, here are a few things to keep an eye on:

• Does the content on each page look good? Even if your site provides incredible content, if it doesn’t look good what’s the point? 
• Does the site’s current layout distract the website’s content? 
• Paragraph headers are vital: A lot of internet users want to scan through content, so providing effective paragraph headers is important. 

Although you might feel your site works perfectly fine, consider asking your site’s visitors for feedback. Encouraging your visitors to engage with you can prove beneficial. Visitors interacting with your site can help your ranking, plus, they could provide you with crucial information that can help you improve your site’s user experience. 

Consider asking them what they think about the content on your site, did they feel they could navigate through the different pages on the site easily, what changes they would like to see on your site, etc. Some sites use feedback widgets while others use email campaigns to see what their visitors really think of their website.