User Experience is the Yellow Brick Road
You can easily find articles on the web lauding UX as the “New SEO” but many fail to give actionable steps to improve your site!
The team at lemonskate can tell you EXACTLY why user experience (UX) is the Yellow Brick Road of SEO. We’re also going to tell you about all the factors that go into UX to make it really hum. Finally, we will give you actionable steps to improve the UX of your website – TODAY!
Manipulating the First Search Engine Algorithms
Over the years search engines such as Google, have worked extremely hard to reduce the impact of factors that marketers, developers and webmasters can manipulate. We can see this time and time again with the improvements (aka spam updates) to search engine algorithms done even in the past few months.
Just like with other aspects of life, when people find cracks in a system, they will exploit them for gain. Same thing happens with websites and search engines.
A brief history lesson…
When Google was first conceived, the idea was to rank sites as if they were scholarly articles. Think back to when you wrote papers for school and how your teacher forced you to cite your sources. Google attempted to rank sites the same way.
The more citations, or links which are the online version of citations, a site received, the more likely it was that the site was a topical authority on the topic. Or more simply the site provided the information a user was looking for.
This makes sense, but people quickly found ways to manipulate the system.
Marketers solely focused on getting links to their site. People would (and still do) set up link farms that would, at a cost, simply compile links to a site. So for a couple hundred bucks you could vault your site to #1 in search results for whatever queries you wanted.
Google and other search engines have since created algorithms to hone in on these tactics and apply counter measures, however people keep finding ways to manipulate their link profile. Specifically, private blog networks (PBNs) still remain a thorn in the side of search engine engineers.
Content is King for SEO (Except When It’s Not)
Today, you will not struggle to find dozens – even hundreds of blogs telling you how content is king when it comes to SEO… and to an extent, we agree that content is vital. But at the same time, search engines are hard at work trying to programmatically separate “good” content from “bad”.
And guess what? Once again marketers found holes in the way content is ranked. They spun content, which is the process of using once piece of content many times while substituting out synonyms or slight variations for words and phrases. By doing this, one piece of content becomes many.
Marketers effectively used this tactic and were rewarded because search engines would reward sites with more new and fresh content. Again this became another factor that could be manipulated but is less effective today.
Why is UX Important to Google (and ALL Other Search Engines)?
Given that many sites out there deserve links and write great content, how can search engines properly rank pages while minimizing spam from factors that can be manipulated?
They rely on user experience.
User experience or UX is a combination of many factors, some of which a marketer or webmaster can impact but others they cannot manipulate them all. You can have the greatest content in the world but if your site is ugly or people can’t get to the content, they are going to have a bad user experience and leave your site.
Nearly all techniques that SEO consultants that are worth their salt utilize today, is to build in good UX. Proper page titles, site structure, navigation and great content play a major role.
So how do you improve the experience a user has on your site?
Some Quick Ways to Improve Your Site’s UX
Improve your navigation: Users need to be able to find what they need within 3 clicks of the mouse. Make sure your most important pages are in the main navigation or at least a sub-menu.
Mobile friendly: If your site isn’t mobile friendly, you are way behind technology. Users expect your site to act similarly across all the devices. If your site doesn’t resize based on a user’s screen size its going to provide a poor experience.
Speed: Your site needs to fast as well. Users expect a speedy site and will leave if it takes too long to load. Google offers a great tool called PageSpeed Insights that offers suggestions to improve your site. SEO Amp can help get your site up to speed as well.
Content: Write content for your audience. But unless you are writing a scholarly article that needs to use big, complicated scientific or legal words, keep the language simple. Provide the information users are looking but write at a level they can easily digest. The average adult can read at a 9th grade level but most people enjoy reading below their reading level. So writing your content to a 7th grade level will keep most of your readers happy. You can also run your content through a Flesch-Kincaid tool (there are several available by searching online) to find out the reading level of your content.
Think your site isn’t providing the best user experience? Contact the SEO consultants at lemonskate and we will get your site on the fast track to rock star status!