How User Experience (UX) Design Affects Your SEO

Updated 05/26/2022

Search engine optimization (SEO) has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. When SEO first became popular, webmasters learned they could make their websites rank well by placing target keywords on their websites as many times as possible – a practice known as “keyword stuffing.”

This method distorted Google’s search rankings, as spammy websites were able to easily outrank relevant websites. Web users quickly became annoyed by this practice, and search engines were forced to react.

In response to this problem, Google introduced several updates which substantially altered their algorithm, changing the way in which websites were ranked. Today, Google uses hundreds of factors in its ranking algorithm, helping to ensure the best search results for its users.

While targeting keywords and acquiring backlinks are still important, today, they are only a small piece of the puzzle. Search engines now consider such factors as your web design and user metrics to determine how relevant your webpage is to a particular search query. UX plays a large part in determining your user metrics.

What is User Experience (UX)?

User experience is all about creating a user-centric web experience. User experience optimizes how users interact with your website while also looking out for possible “pain points.” 

“Pain points” are places where the user might be confused by the interface.

Good UX design helps to engage your users, allowing them to easily locate what they are looking for. This positively influences various user engagement metrics that Google uses to rank websites. When you focus on creating good UX design, you’ll often see improvements in your search rankings, through a “trickle-down” effect. 

In essence, if you can make the user happy, you’ll rank higher on Google.

Why is UI/UX Important for SEO?

UX oftentimes directly impacts the content quality that searchers experience on a website. Google’s algorithm and other search engines pick up on UX elements, sometimes tying them to ranking factors. 

In these cases, the site architecture and usability of a site can make or break technical SEO. Sites with a strong UI/UX that caters to searchers’ needs is more likely to perform well in SERPs. 

User Engagement Metrics That Matter for SEO

There are a few very important metrics to improve SEO. Here are our top metrics:

1. Bounce rate
2. Page dwell time

The following metrics tell Google how well your webpage engages your audience, indicating how relevant your webpage is to a given search query.

1. Bounce Rate

Your website’s ‘bounce rate’ is the percentage of users who leave your website after viewing only one page – usually your homepage or a landing page. A high bounce rate can mean that your users did not find what they were looking for. Rather, they lost interest after only the first page and left.

There are many reasons you may be experiencing a high bounce rate, but some of the most common ones are poor web design, confusing UX design, irrelevant content, and slow page speed.

Having a high bounce rate can be a problem, since your bounce rate is such a weighted factor in Google’s search ranking algorithm.

2. Page Dwell Time

Another metric that Google considers is the amount of time users spend on a certain page, known as ‘dwell time.’ 

If users spend a long amount of time on your website, Google considers this a positive indication. Alternatively, if users spend only a short amount of time on your site, Google decides the page wasn’t useful or relevant to the search query. 

When you focus on providing useful, relevant content, your users become engaged, spending more time on your website. Engaging users improves your metrics, which boosts your overall search rank.

UX Design Factors That Improve SEO

Now that we’ve covered some of the primary user metrics that can affect SEO rankings, let’s look at how we can improve those metrics through a focus on improved UX design.

Here are UX design aspects that affect SEO:

1. CPage speed
2. Mobile-responsiveness
3. URL structures
4. Headers
5. Streamlined menus

By addressing these 5 UX design elements, companies can make steps to boost SEO performance. 

1. Page Speed / Load Time

There are few things more annoying than waiting for a slow website. As each second passes, it becomes increasingly likely that your audience will leave before they even access your page. If your audience exits the site before the page load, it still counts negatively toward your bounce rate.

While there are many factors that could negatively affect page load speed, only some of them are within your control. For instance, there’s not much you can do about a user’s slow internet connection. You, however, can ensure your website is optimized so that it loads in the shortest amount of time possible. You should minify file sizes, optimize photos, and combine various CSS/JavaScript files to ensure that your website is making the fewest server (HTTP) requests possible.

All of these factors contribute to your page speed. 

Below, we’ve provided a snapshot of our website’s speed test results from GTMetrics:

Artiiseo still needs to optimize its images. Optimizing images saves time since the server doesn’t have to return full-size images, and the browser doesn’t have to scale the images to the correct sizes quickly. Nevertheless, our page speed is considerably fast, given that the website is fully loaded in 1.9 seconds. 

To improve website speed, make sure your site’s cache settings have been optimized properly, script files have been minified (made cleaner and simplified), and defer loading major script files (ex. JavaScript) until they are needed. All of these factors allow your website to load more quickly, allowing you to keep your audience engaged.

2. Mobile Friendliness

Mobile-responsive design has become a mandatory staple of modern web development, since more than 50% of all web traffic is now driven by mobile search. Websites that aren’t mobile-responsive are losing over 50% of their audience from the start. If your website isn’t responsive, you’ll see your user-engagement metrics “crash and burn.”

More and more people are becoming primarily mobile users. You’ll want to accommodate this evolving preference by tailoring your site content for mobile devices.

You can check your own mobile responsiveness, using the Google Mobile Responsiveness Test.

3. Create a User-Friendly URL Structure

Your URL structure is an extremely important aspect of a good user experience. It helps to orient your users about where they are on your website. If you’ve seen URLs like the one below, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

https:// chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/product/9780771057717-item.html?s_campaign=Google_BookSearch_organic

Can you guess what this URL is about?

Books? But which ones? 

This is an example of a URL structure that both frustrates your users and confuses search engines. Like humans, search engines use keywords in the URL to understand what a page is about and subsequently index it. When these keywords are missing, it can be a massive blow to your SEO rankings.

Rather, implement URL structures that both users and search engines can decipher. For example, the link below shows an effective URL structure:

https:// clutch.co/app-developers/resources/how-to-build-loyalty-programs

You can easily understand this URL is about creating better loyalty programs for app developers. 

4. Headers / Menus

Have you ever been on a website where the menu design was so confusing that you literally didn’t know what to do?

A confusing interface frustrates users who simply want to access your website without having to navigate a complex menu and header layout. The user will then exit your website without reaching the content they were looking for.

5. Streamline Your Menus

Menus are the main element of any website’s header and serve the primary function of guiding your users to the appropriate webpage. Good UX design includes streamlining your menu design.

Design your menu so it isn’t too complex. Make sure your audience can find what they’re looking for but don’t cram every page into the menu. Rather, use categories and subcategories to ensure that your users can locate what they’re looking for in the most efficient way.

As in the case of most websites, you only need to list the most important pages. Provide a drop-down menu for multiple pages in one category. An example of this simple design would be the ‘services’ or ‘locations’ drop-down menus in the image below:

Menus can quickly become cluttered with too many different menu items. Synthesize your menu and create categories to streamline your web design. If the menu bar is overcrowded, it’s difficult for your audience to find what they’re looking for and creates a poor user experience.

UX Affects SEO: 15 Terms to Know

1. Core Web Vitals: standardized metrics meant to help developers create websites that cater to UX. The three core web vitals are Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).
2. Digital marketing: processes and strategies that support the online promotion of a business or individual. Online marketing can take place on websites, social media, email, and more.
3. Ranking factors: aspects that influence how well a website or piece of content ranks when subjected to a platform’s algorithm — Google has over 200 SEO ranking factors.
4. Usability: how easy a product is to use, which positively impacts UX. Strong SEO practices often yield high usability and good UX.
5. Conversion rate: a popular metric used to evaluate sales and digital marketing strategies — the number of conversions (purchases, sign-ups, etc.) divided by the total number of users
6. Site speed: a website’s average loading time (ideally, this should be within three seconds for both SEO and UX).
7. SERPs: acronym for search engine results pages, an integral aspect to SEO best practices 
8. Google Analytics: an online tool that helps users measure traffic and engagement on their websites, often used to diagnose opportunities for improvement and successes for both UX and SEO.
9. Google’s algorithm: a complicated system of ranking factors Google uses to present searchers with the most relevant and helpful information for their queries. 
10. Keyword research: the SEO practices of targeting key terms and phrases in SERPs to earn traffic to your website and respond to common searches
11. Organic traffic: traffic that comes to your website naturally, without a PPC ad or other paid asset encouraging clicks
12. Readability: how easy it is for an audience to read a piece of content, often an indicator of quality content
13. Site navigation: the process of users clicking through a website (good UX facilitates a natural flow of information that’s interrelated and easy to find) 
14. Pop-ups: a form of online advertisement that’s infamous for hindering a strong UX
15. Content marketing: online marketing process that requires sharing different types of content (social media, blogs, etc.) across digital channels, an essential to modern high-quality SEO approaches

Make Your UX Design Improve Your SEO

User experience (UX) design should be an integral part of any SEO strategy. It directly affects your SEO rankings through the various user-engagement metrics that Google employs in its search algorithms. User experience design starts by understanding how users perceive and interact with your website. You should consider factors like page speed, menu design, mobile responsiveness, and URL structure. If you are unsure how to begin, hire an experienced user design agency to help with the process.

By implementing an effective UX design, you’ll see improved user-engagement metrics, which will influence your search rankings, brand credibility, and audience retention.

Looking to improve UX for SEO purposes? Hire a top-tier UI/UX agency on Clutch. 

About the Author

Leighton Burley is the founder of ARTIISEO, a digital marketing agency in Winnipeg, Canada. With over 10 years of experience in digital marketing, Leighton has worked with some of the top agencies in North America and possesses a deep knowledge of the industry. He also writes extensively about marketing, entrepreneurial lifestyle, and business in general.