Creating SEO-Friendly Experiences: The Role of UX/UI Design — Serpstat Blog

While integrating UI and UX methods creates a beautiful and multifunctional platform, which users navigate flawlessly and intuitively, local, off-page, on-page, technical, and mobile SEO optimization ensures potential visitors will have access to your domain.

Debi Norton

Founder of BRAVO! Interactive Media

SEO influences UX by affecting website design, content & structure, as well as website speed & responsiveness Where UX affects SEO by influencing website engagement & user behavior signals, i.e., bounce rate&time on site. When they work in harmony, it’s bliss.

The Impact of UX/UI Design on SEO-Friendly Experiences

Balancing SEO and UX/UI website optimization is more fruitful than you think. Although Google algorithms are paradigm-changing for your domain’s ranking in SERPs, the frequency and complexity of their changes prove you wrong to rely on these standards only — hundreds of alterations annually. From this perspective, neglecting the connection between SEO and user experience would be a mistake, which you can level up by advancing web design and optimization.

What do you understand by an effective website design for SEO? It must be a platform with high-end navigation for potential visitors and beautiful yet precise-to-use graphic elements. Of course, site speed is also influential and guarantees great user feedback.

One of the magic tricks is to back up the user’s experience on the platform via click depth. What is the relationship between clicking depth to PageRank, then? No matter how many pages your domain includes, Google ranks each one of them — they are of equal importance. Suppose this parameter is too high (especially for pages you find important and worth visiting), meaning it takes numerous clicks from the homepage to the target one. In that case, you decrease Google’s crawling and indexing efficiency and the quality of SEO and user experience.

Why is UX/UI important for SEO and website rank? These factors straightforwardly influence not just the overall user satisfaction and site performance. In addition, the lack of a seamless and flawless browsing experience crushes down your potential ranking in SERPs. The negative SEO impact might be overwhelming if you fail to establish a healthy relationship between the distinguished phenomena.

SEO Enhancement Through UX/UI Design

With so many advanced UI design Google standards, it is clear that SEO and user experience are closely interconnected, where the latter is the core power plant of website optimization. Both create a lasting first impression, although one is focused on search engines, while the other one is on the audience’s perception. If you don’t keep enhancing the quality of high-potential website pages, for example, the CTR metric will suffer.

Meeting your audience’s search intents is impossible without a well-structured interface. Formatting your content and establishing high-value internal links and backlink profiles with mobile optimization are proven methods of boosting your conversions by reducing bounce rates. 

Whenever your performance results are disappointing, you should check how your web design copes with assigned challenges. Once issues are spotted, the redesign plan should become your focal-point development tactic. However, the complex and interconnected nature of the analyzed concepts also makes several enthusiasts wonder: does website redesign affect SEO too? Poorly organized changes to the original layout design can result in traffic losses and other negative consequences.

However, suppose you don’t go for SEO mistakes like using outdated XML sitemaps or failing to redirect URLs and adhere to better standards. In that case, you will enjoy numerous redesign website benefits — from higher security and greater conversions to improved brand perception, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. You can increase your site’s visibility and ranking by redesigning its content formats like infographics. 

With Serpstat SEO audit, specialists will optimize missing descriptions, duplicate content, and broken links.

Website UX/UI Analysis

Why should you consider website mockup design in the strategy? The answer is quite simple — this method delivers a high-fidelity showcase of your site’s appearance once it is finished. It is a realistic yet static model, which helps you define whether there are any issues to notice and pay attention to — the usability of fonts, text sizes, etc. Such practical website analysis not only gives you a taste of the final website version. It also lets you fight common mistakes in creating your domain.

For reliable, data-driven, and user-oriented website optimization, it is best to consider both qualitative and quantitative data:

• With measurable and numerical metrics like page dwell time and bounce rate, you can effectively cater to Google’s search engine ranking algorithms.
  

Using solutions like Serpstat comes in handy to improve your SEO strategy and eliminate its negative impact on the layout design for SEO and vice versa.

• Don’t solely focus on metrics such as Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction. Online on-site surveys and session recordings give you a deeper insight into user behavior and conduct further website usability testing with an improved understanding of what they don’t like about your domain.
  

Easy navigation is a result of a great fusion of visual and interactive designs, as well as how web-operation elements speak to the target audience through search engine optimization. 

If combining these paradigms leaves much to be desired, your domain won’t get the desired attention and hit the bottom of SERPs.

To analyze the site structure of your competitor to get more insights in navigation logic is possible with Serpstat’s Tree View report:

If you don’t make your site’s design compatible with both desktop and mobile devices, domains that don’t repeat the same mistake can simply outrank your platform in Bing’s, Google’s, and other SERPs. If your mobile version doesn’t show the same functionality, you will decrease the overall site’s accessibility and navigation.

Leveraging Aesthetic Design Elements

Tracking user behavior and adapting your site’s navigation route is associated with adding more refreshing SEO-designed elements to the platform and rebooting your domain’s productivity. In reality, making several alterations at a time without analyzing the whole picture won’t positively influence organic traffic. To truly improve user experience, your adaptations and innovations must be planned and executed consistently. For instance, it is recommended to eliminate needless content pagination and mish-mashing plenty of hues, fonts, and content elements while respecting every user’s right to control and privacy on your site.

Here are some more potential problems to get rid of to achieve SEO enhancement through UX/UI design:

• Aside from cliches like the slow loading of pages, specialists should also avoid so-called zig-zag forms and an excessive number of hard-to-exit and mandatory fields. The same relates to commonly irritating scroll hijacking.

• The abundance of error pages and similar problems on the domain has a huge negative impact as well. Too many clickable buttons or weird sizing can also be a problem.

Common SEO and UX Balancing Mistakes in Business

When it comes to widespread errors and miscalculations that lead to the disastrous impact of web design on SEO, people typically think of using so-called black hat link-building methods, targeting wrong keywords, using spam links, and failing to control and track your performance.

Rahul Marthak

Content Marketing Manager and SEO Expert;

Common mistakes businesses make include putting too much emphasis on SEO, neglecting the importance of a good user experience, or using SEO tactics that are seen as manipulative or spammy, which can lead to penalties from search engines (in extreme cases).

On the contrary, aside from ignoring user experience and social media, hidden usability mistakes like slow page loading, poor coding, and similar ones shouldn’t be underrated to estimate your domain’s health and improve its visibility and ranking.

Rushing toward the best SEO-designed websites doesn’t deliver the desired result at once. You should understand your goal and not compromise functionality for aesthetics and vice versa. As practice shows, these aspects are both vital for the survival of your domain in the chosen field and for increasing its rank from short-term and long-term perspectives.

Conclusion

When planning site architecture, you shouldn’t forget about how end users tend to react to UX/UI optimization results — it takes seconds to determine whether they will stay on the platform. There are several reasons why your platform might be abandoned, including poor loading speed, challenging navigation, the inappropriateness of the search query to the page’s content, and so on. 

Whenever this happens, SEO specialists and businesses miss out on a chance to attract more audiences to the domain. In turn, the fewer visitors you gain through your platform’s marketing funnel, the more disappointing conversation rates, lead generations, and other aspects to drive ROI are expected to be. To prevent this scenario and ensure your target audience can interact with your platform in the best way possible, preferring SEO enhancement through user experience design can bring high rankings and other benefits.