Every business owner wants to attract a great deal of traffic to their website, and SEO can make that happen. However, beyond generating traffic, a poor user experience (UX) won’t make anyone stay for long on your page.
UX is an important part of your online presence. One negative review can significantly impact your business.
Working on your UX stats includes optimizing all existing resources like UX designs, color themes, and other variables. SEO follows this list of resources as the ultimate trump card, making your customers find your page more engaging than your competitors’ website.
Google’s algorithms have evolved over the years to suit users’ tastes. The user/customer experience doesn’t lie, if more and more people find your page appealing, the algorithm will favor you.
In this post, we examine how to use SEO to optimize your users’ experience.
- Offer the Exact Solution Your Customers Need
Your prospects and customers search Google for certain needs and answers using a combination of words and earnest sentence choices.
It is your job to position yourself as that particular solution, tailored to the exact question which is personalized and most relevant to your customers.
Businesses that optimize UX are businesses that know how to place themselves in their prospect’s shoes. Just like you would do with a customer persona, you must be able to identify the possible needs of your customer and help them find the right answers.
When you write content, you must research which headings would help them find their needs on the search engine. For example, “how to fix error code Xfh345” is a more specific tagline than “payment issues error code”.
Help your customers find what they need easily, put yourself in their shoes through every step of the way. From content to pages, put customers first! Run through this four-step checklist in order to satisfy your customers top queries:
- Highlight: Highlight product features, benefits, stats and case studies that offer the most value to your customers.
- Provide Information: Avoid being too mysterious. Make detailed product comparisons, in-depth whitepapers, product guides, and testimonials.
- Decision: Provide easy-to-get pricing pages, reviews, buying guides, and deals.
- Pre-empt More Questions: Predict and deal with FAQs, supply support pages, and helpful guides, etc.
- Use Internal Links
People often think external links from authority websites are a better SEO hack. Even though those are very useful, internal links on your page can significantly improve UX as well.
On the first hand, they help you feature unpopular contents which didn’t make it to the face of your customers.
On the second hand, lots of internal links on your page make visitors stay on your page for longer periods. It also gives an impression that you are like a ‘library’ for every possible query they have.
Thirdly, with internal links to your page, you can map the customer journey and place relevant links which guide them through the sales funnel. This improves your chances of converting.
The good news is Google thinks of pages with more internal links as higher quality pages. Conclusively, ending every piece of content with a “you may also like” section is a powerful tool to improve UX.
Needless to say, you need to make them flow naturally within the contents on your page. Forcing them into content in an unnatural way doesn’t come off right and could potentially get you flagged by Google’s algorithm.
- Improve your Website Speed
It’s been over a decade and Google hasn’t changed its algorithm’s preference for sites with faster speed.
This is still one of the most important ranking factors for Google. First, check out your site’s speed on Pingdom or GTmetrix and see the outcome of its performance.
Your SEO team should know how to increase page speed. Experts say that for every 1-second delay in loading speed, visitors are reduced by at least 5%.
Thus, this is the first step to please your customers and enhance their experience.
Customers are more likely to have a better experience on your page if the site’s response rate is speedy. Other ways of improving your page speed include hosting on a dedicated server, reducing plug-ins, and compressing multimedia.
- Mobile-Friendliness
At least 90% of global internet users use a mobile device to navigate online.
This explains why Google’s algorithm favors mobile-friendliness as a ranking factor. As you improve site speed, you must simultaneously improve its layout on mobile phones.
Making your website mobile-friendly will directly improve UX.
A mobile-friendly webpage allows minimal scrolling (especially horizontal), loads faster, and avoids flash elements (most mobile browsers don’t support it natively).
Navigation issues or difficulty in seeing a part of a site’s information is far from being mobile-friendly.
- Call Tracking SEO
Generally, small and medium-sized businesses state that their best leads come from inbound calls, while more than 80% of customers state that an “immediate response” to their queries is a key part of their customer experience.
Customer call tracking allows your business to:
- Know where your best leads come from.
- Guide prospects and assess the customers’ journey.
- Understand your customers’ intentions and main concerns.
Integrating a cloud-based phone system that allows you to gather phone call data is a smart and often overlooked strategy to get crucial information that can benefit your SEO plan.
Among a host of benefits, cloud phones’ data analytics makes it possible to transcribe what’s been said over a call and sum it up in a call highlight.
Additionally, you can understand and assess your customer’s needs, behavior, patterns, the keywords they use, and valuable feedback that can be used for lead nurturing.
If you get your SEO right and implement call tracking correctly, your ROI would tremendously improve.
- Use Social Media and Specific Service Pages
Creating pages dedicated to specific services can tremendously improve your visibility.
Rather than having a page that clusters together a lot of services, why not decentralize your page and set up specific pages for specific services instead?
Truth is, you get to optimize your keywords when you focus on specific services than when you try to speak for all your services at once.
Social media pages can be the place to get the best interaction and feedback from your customers.
You can become aware of their pain points from conversations on social media platforms. Also, Google’s algorithm tends to favor pages with high-flowing engagement. A great and engaging social media page can be a plus for your SEO ranking.
Conclusion
The leading small and medium-sized businesses remain competitive not only by providing top-notch content, products and services, but also by providing the ultimate UX as well.
After getting other user-experience factors right (UX designs, color themes, customer service, etc), SEO can bring additional advantages to providing a more exclusive and engaging interface compared to your competitors.
