10 Ways SEO and Website UX Are Related

Before I became a Technical SEO, I worked as a web developer/designer. Because I was an advocate of user-friendly websites, my first SEO success came before I knew what SEO was.

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In the late-2000s, I recoded an outdated HTML tables-based website with the more modern CSS code. This made the website much faster to download. I tidied the website's navigation and made title tags more user-friendly, appropriate to the content on the pages.

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Within a day of launch, organic traffic to the website doubled. I was delighted a better UX resulted in more traffic. Traffic isn't everything, and another great thing about user-friendly websites is they generate more revenue and other conversions (such as newsletter signups on the website I mentioned).

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What is SEO?

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) uses methods to increase organic (i.e. not paid) traffic from search engines such as Google and Bing, taking quantity and quality of traffic into account.

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What is Website UX?

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User experience (UX) can consider the whole experience a visitor has with a company. Online, everything from seeing a brand in search results, browsing their website, making a purchase, and the experience after a purchase impacts the UX.

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How Are SEO & UX Linked?

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SEO and usability are often closely linked. Even more good news if you're a fan of user-friendly websites: Google is adding more and more usability-related signals to its search algorithms. SEO vs UX where both are at odds is an outdated perspective.

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Forgetting the fact Google's aim is to make lots of money, the primary aim of their search engine is to show searchers websites that satisfy searchers' intent. If websites Google ranks provide a poor user experience for whatever reason, searchers will not be satisfied with Google's search engine and may use a competitor instead.

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I'm already using 'UX' and 'usability' interchangeably, but there is a difference. E.g. a 'usable' website could be functional but still improve its user experience.

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Factors Related to UX and SEO

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Website Navigation

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How often have you visited a website you're sure sells something you want, but you can't find the item? Perhaps not often given search engine results often link directly to the page you're looking for, but I certainly find many websites frustrating to navigate.

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I've seen important categories missing from main menus, main menus hidden amongst a clutter of other links and obscure naming conventions I struggle to understand.

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Whenever a website visitor can't see how to immediately achieve the task they want to, it puts a doubt in their mind that could see them leave for a competitor. I'm a big fan of Steve Krug's web usability book, "Don’t Make Me Think."

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How does that relate to SEO? Search engines visit websites with their search bots e.g. Googlebot and Bingbot. Search bots find new pages by crawling (following links on existing pages).

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A main menu generally lists a website’s most important pages. If a website specialises in bedroom furniture, you'd expect the main menu to include beds, wardrobes and bedside tables. This seems obvious for user experience, but it's important for search bots too.

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Search bots see the relationship between pages in website navigation. Bed product pages linked from a bed category page shows relevance to search algorithms. Bed product pages linked from a page about candy floss would be confusing for a person and a search engine (unless they were candy floss beds, which sounds like something I'd like to try...).

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The number of times a page is linked throughout a website should be a good indication of how important that page is.

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From a technical SEO perspective, the main menus on some websites are coded in a way that can hide them from search bots, usually due to JavaScript code. Googlebot can crawl and parse JavaScript, but not always. From a UX-perspective, this relates to accessibility. Can users of all devices use that main menu?

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Generally, user-friendly navigation is search engine-friendly navigation. Your most important content should be easy to find.

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URL Structure

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Which of the below URLs is best for a furniture website's SEO?

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A: example.com/5toq345

B: example.com/bedroom/wardrobes

C: example.com/furniture/bedroom-furniture/bedroom-furniture-wardrobes

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From a user perspective:

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A: Doesn't tell us anything about what's on the page. Could that be a product code?

B: I'm pretty sure I'll find wardrobes on that page.

C: Uh, what now? Furniture, bedroom furniture, bedroom again...there's also a risk of long URLs being truncated.

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From an SEO-perspective, URL B tells a search engine everything it needs to know. Search engine algorithms are clever enough to know what a furniture website is, so that word isn't needed in the URL, and neither is the other repetition.

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Short and descriptive URLs are easy to read and understand for website visitors and search bots.

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Written Content

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For years, many online content writers stuffed webpages with keywords to gain search engine rankings. It often worked, until Google started giving out penalties for such content.

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How was that kind of content as a user experience? Generally, awful.

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The likes of Google and Apple invest millions in helping machines figure out how us humans communicate. Thankfully these days, Google aims to rank content that reads naturally. This is particularly important for voice search results. Justin Briggs has an excellent post (that gets technical) on writing for natural language processing (NLP). He says "Writing for NLP requires clear, structured writing and an understanding of word relationships."

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Write for your audience and you can't go far wrong when it comes to both SEO and UX.

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The way text is presented is important too. Readers prefer content that includes descriptive headings that visually stand out from the rest of the content. Hierarchical HTML heading markup (e.g. h1, h2, h3 etc. tags) can help sight impaired visitors find the content they're searching for.

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SEO-wise, Google uses headings to understand the content on a page, including down to paragraph level.

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Fonts should be large enough and clear enough to read for most visitors, a recommendation from Google despite it not mattering to their search bots. It’s easy for algorithms to evaluate text by the size and contrast against the background.

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Speed

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UX-wise, slow websites are frustrating for visitors, and fast websites convert better.

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From an SEO-perspective, search bots can crawl faster websites quicker and more often, keeping their indexes up to date. Slow websites cost Google, Bing et al more money to crawl. Crawl budget (the number of pages Google crawls on a website per day) can become an issue on larger websites.

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Most modern websites include a lot of bloat - code that isn’t necessary. When choosing website templates, themes, page builders or plugins, I recommend searching for 'lightweight' versions. Most of these have too much bloat for my liking, which is why I hand-code my personal websites.

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Searcher Intent

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From a UX perspective, the purpose of a webpage should be obvious. E.g. is it providing information or trying to sell something? If it's both, one main purpose should be clear, with a distinction provided for supplementary content. Supplementary content of a webpage selling economic showers could be content that helps the website visitor choose a shower, for example.

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From an SEO perspective, searcher intent can often be implied from the search keyword e.g.:

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Navigational keywords - searchers want to navigate to a specific website or webpage:

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• LoveUX contact
• BBC
• Amazon orders

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Informational keywords - searchers require information about someone or something:

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• Directions to Newcastle-under-Lyme
• Hayao Miyazaki
• How to take great photos

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Commercial investigation keywords - investigations in advance of a purchase/transaction:

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• WordPress vs Magento
• Best travel cameras
• Marvel films
• Argos reviews

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Transactional keywords - searchers want to make a purchase:

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• Buy shoes online
• Amazon discount voucher
• Netflix subscription

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Google has slightly changed its definitions on types of user intent, but it’s still an important factor in their Quality Raters' Guidelines (PDF file), a document used to evaluate webpages by Google’s Quality Rater employees. As Marie Haynes says on understanding user intent:

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Optimising for user intent comes down to two things:

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1) Figuring out what users who come to your pages are wanting to find.

2) Making your content the best option for those users.

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Google aims to rank webpages that best match the intent of the searcher. If a searcher clicks to your website from Google but quickly bounces back to search results to click to a competitor's website, it suggests your website didn't match the searcher's intent.

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Satisfying searcher intent provides a great user experience.

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Trust

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What makes you trust an unfamiliar website/brand? If you're considering buying a product, it could be reviews, returns policies, a secure connection (illustrated by a padlock in the browser address bar) and more. If you're looking for health information, it could be citing trusted sources (such as the NHS in the UK), qualified authors and more.

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Even giving an e-mail address for free information or a newsletter requires an element of trust. Why should someone trust you or your company with their e-mail address? Does this look like a company or person that can be trusted? Is there proof of their credentials on the website e.g. via an about or biography page?

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SEO-wise, Google's Quality Raters' Guidelines talk a lot about Expertise, Authority and Trust (E-A-T). Google consider these factors especially important for what they call YMYL (your money or your life) content e.g. medical and finance related. Google even confirmed E-A-T is part of their search ranking algorithms.

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Progressive Enhancement

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I'm a firm believer that websites should work on a wide range of devices, from a basic screen reader (so sight impaired people aren't excluded, for example) or low-powered mobile device to the latest iPhone or PC, as well as on slow or fast Internet connections.

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UX-wise, websites that rely on modern JavaScript frameworks to render the page in the browser do not perform well across a wide range of devices.

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SEO-wise, they're more difficult to index for Google and impossible to index properly for many other search engines.

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Progressive enhancement is where a website (or any software) will work on the lowest common denominator of web browser/device, with enhancements made for more capable devices. From a UX-perspective, think of it as the lowest common denominator of browser and/or device your customers use. Also be aware that this lowest common denominator may not show at all in website traffic data (not that analytics data is close to accurate, but that’s a whole other article). How many people is your website excluding by not providing easy access to its basic content and functionality?

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Although I still have issues with them that would take a whole other blog post, modern JavaScript frameworks can work well with SEO - through server-side rendering of a webpage, for example (with server-side rendering, a webpage is rendered on the server and displayed in the web browser as HTML, rather than the browser and the visitor's device doing the work to parse and render the JavaScript).

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To see how much of your website is rendered in the browser (if any), disable JavaScript in your web browser. This can be done in browser settings or with the Web Developer Chrome browser extension.

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Core Web Vitals and Mobile-Friendliness

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I was both pleased and disappointed when Google introduced Core Web Vitals - a subset of Web Vitals and an initiative "to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering a great user experience on the web." Pleased because I'm an advocate of user-friendly websites. Disappointed because it doesn't go far enough; like Google's Mobile Friendly Test, it's a small set of measurable metrics. And also because when Google announced Core Web Vitals would become a ranking factor, many SEOs and web developers scrambled to make these metrics perfect at the expense of more pressing concerns.

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Core Web Vitals are only a few of many more metrics Google uses to rank webpages. I'm not saying Core Web Vitals aren't important - they happen to be UX metrics Google can measure, and more metrics will be introduced over time. There is much more to mobile UX than shown in the Mobile Friendly Test and Core Web Vitals for usability and speed (though Largest Contentful Paint is a good metric that's perhaps not specific enough).

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Whatever I think, these measurements and metrics are another example of how UX and SEO is closely linked.

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Anchor/Link Text

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Throughout this post, I've used descriptive link text to describe the information available at that link. This helps users and search engines understand what to expect. From either perspective, link text like "click here" is less useful, though the context a link appears in is another UX and SEO factor.

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Backlinks and Linking to External Websites

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In the earlier days of the World Wide Web, linking to another website was generally an endorsement of that website. Related websites linked to each other, friends linked to friends, articles linked to sources etc. This provided a good user experience - it helped people find more content they were interested in.

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Google's popularity was built on this fact, and backlinks became a huge ranking factor. They still are, but Google has come a long way since, with over 200 ranking factors regularly cited in their search engine algorithms. I would guess there are many more.

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Google soon realised not all backlinks were an endorsement, and user experience came to the fore again. Spam backlinks led to Google penalties (and today are generally ignored by Google), the topic relevance of a linking page is now considered important, and sentiment can be considered (e.g. a negative review linking to a website is not an endorsement).

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I believe the links I've included in this article all add to the user experience by adding value for any reader who wants more information.

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Linking to related/trusted websites and sources is also considered a ranking factor by many SEOs. It's also why many websites and content writers include an obligatory Wikipedia link in every article they write.

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Summary AKA TL;DR

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I could list more ways SEO and UX are closely linked, but the above is a good start. This was the case long before my late-2000s realisation and many prominent SEOs have said as much for years e.g. SEO is satisfaction.

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Is a website's UX important for SEO? Yes! A website's navigation and structure, backlinks, its content, speed, other usability aspects and more are all important considerations for both UX and SEO. Not forgetting it doesn't look good to search engine algorithms if someone clicks to your website and quickly bounces back to search results to click to a competitor instead.

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While other technical SEO issues can have a big negative impact on search rankings, many technical SEO and general SEO best practices also provide a good user experience, and a website that concentrates on providing a good user experience goes some way to providing search engines with a website that's easy to crawl, understand and index.

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Search engine friendly UX is often just good UX. Think UX first, and you have the beginnings of good SEO. Vice-versa, a good technical setup often results in good user experience.

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