Understanding the Symbiotic Relationship Between UX and SEO
It’s fall. You’re looking for the perfect apple crisp recipe. You hop onto Google and bam – the first thing you see is a 5-star recipe with over a thousand reviews. You’re sold – you click the link, only to be regaled with 10,000 words on the author’s every opinion on each apple variety in existence and her entire backstory. You don’t feel like scrolling so you just click out. The food blogger just lost a potential subscriber, and you’re not going back to that website again.
What is the point of being first on the search engine result page if you’re turning off users?
Today we’ll walk you through the relationship your website experience has on your search engine rankings (and vice versa) and how to make sure the two work in harmony.
How Are SEO and UX Related?
When companies first began to prioritize search engine rankings and website experiences, the two concepts seemed as related as marinara sauce and ketchup. Fundamentally, similar. But hardly ever needed together. Yet in today’s digital ecosystem they’re almost intertwined, impacting each other, for better or for worse.
Boiled down to the nuts and bolts, both SEO and UX have the same set of goals – to delight the user through satisfying their intent. Best outlined in the HEART Framework, created by former Google UX engineer Kerry Rodden, that delight is broken down and measured by five key metrics:
- Happiness
- Engagement
- Adoption
- Retention
- Task Success
SEO isn’t just link building and plugging in keywords. As search engine algorithms have evolved to better align with user expectations and intentions, the data being scraped and analyzed from each website has evolved as well, including components of user experience. SEO and UX are two halves of the same pie.
Think about it: Your perfect candidate types “sales careers” into their search bar, they know what they want to find, but not where to look. Google matches them with recommendations based on what it’s determined the intent to be, and how likely each site is to meet their needs. They scroll past Indeed and Glassdoor until they see your highly-ranked company. SEO delivered them to your site – now it’s UX’s turn.
They still have an intent (to find a job) and you still have a goal (to get them to apply). They starts to learn about your company, explores your culture, and finally decide to check out the job board. You have them! Until the job board doesn’t load properly. Or the search function doesn’t work as it should. They click out.
Your SEO is only as good as your user experience, and vice versa. Either can get you so far, but you need both for a finely tuned funnel.
How to Keep Both Sides of the Pie Happy
Though it may be daunting to think about an SEO or user experience overhaul – it’s not as complicated as it seems.
Content Should be Easily Digestible. Make content easy to read and understand. It’s true that copy and word count is important for SEO, however text-heavy pages filled with redundant information or that feel like reading a technical guide should be avoided. Easy to absorb blocks of copy, organized with headers and imagery, can help with usability while still retaining SEO. As an added bonus: Take advantage of bullet and number lists, as these help promote featured snippets in Google.
Don’t shy away from headers. A general SEO rule of thumb is to include a Header 1 on each page that defines your highest priority keywords and the intent of the page. But your use of headers shouldn’t stop there: organize secondary content with Header 2 and 3 tags to help improve the structure of your website.
Diversify (and optimize) content. Since the onset of the pandemic, visual media is not only engaging for users, but these elements can be optimized for SEO. A good practice is to include a relevant image or video within each block of content (typically defined by Header 2 tags).
Build a Data-Driven Website. Search data is more available than ever, and it’s a powerful tool for informing the design of your website. Instead of thinking of keywords as terms that need to be plugged in as many times as possible, think of them as guideposts for the structure of your website.
Keep Up With the Trends. And I mean “trends” very broadly. At this point, we all know users don’t like to wait around for a site to load, and that a majority of traffic comes in from mobile. These are trends that aren’t changing anytime soon, and load time and mobile responsiveness are factors in Google’s ranking algorithm.
In summary…
Optimizing your website for search engines and human users aren’t two separate things – they’re two parts of the greater journey. Each has the goal of making users happy.
Providing relevant, valuable content is one of the most important things you can do for both.
Beyond that, making sure the website is human (i.e. not written for a bot and organized in a way that makes sense) and keeping up with modern trends (mobile-responsive, optimized for load times, content diverse) are solid steps to unifying the user experience from search to conversion.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jody Ordioni is the author of “The Talent Brand.” In her role as Founder and Chief Brand Officer of Brandemix, she leads the firm in creating brand-aligned talent communications that connect employees to cultures, companies, and business goals. She engages with HR professionals and corporate teams on how to build and promote talent brands, and implement best-practice talent acquisition and engagement strategies across all media and platforms. She has been named a "recruitment thought leader to follow" and her mission is to integrate marketing, human resources, internal communications, and social media to foster a seamless brand experience through the employee lifecycle.
